EP021: Creating Preeminence with Sachin Patel

Welcome to the Perfect Practice podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel, is a functional medicine success coach, international speaker, and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hi, and welcome to a very exciting episode of Perfect Practice. Today we're going to be talking about a topic that's very relevant to your practice in helping you build, grow and scale. You know, I've worked with hundreds of practitioners and one of the complaints that I get from practitioners is, is why isn't my marketing working for me? Why are people questioning my pricing? Why are people not ready and excited to get started on care? Why do I have to keep selling people on the fact that I can help them and I can serve them? And the reason this happens is because you do not have enough preeminence. This term preeminence was taught to me by the one and only Jay Abraham. J. Abraham has an amazing body of work. You should definitely check out his website, jabraham.com and he basically gives all of his best information away for free. And that's actually part of creating preeminence. So preeminence is basically, in a nutshell, if I were to describe it, it's basically creating and positioning yourself in the mind of the consumer so that they want to do business with you because they, they know that you are the one. They know that you are the absolute best person for them to work with. And they know this because you've shown them this. So there's a variety of ways that we as functional medicine practitioners, or really any practitioner in any industry or in any business can create preeminence. Now, specifically, I'm gonna be sharing with you how I create preeminence and sharing my stories, but this could be relevant to you regardless of what type of practitioner you are. Now, just quickly going back to Jay Abraham. I have a great story with him and he's a big fan of functional medicine and a huge fan of what we do here at the Living Proof Institute. You know, I belong to Genius Network and, you know, Jay was looking for podcast guests to hang out with and interview. And so I had the ability to interview with him and he got so excited about what we do, we didn't even end up recording the podcast. Instead, he provided me with about a two hour consultation. Now, if you know Jay and if you ever had the privilege of working with him, you know how much he charges. He charges $10,000 an hour. So what I'm gonna tell you today comes from the knowledge that I gained from him that free $20,000 consultation, if you will. So take notes. This is gonna be game changing stuff for your practice and really for your life because it takes away all of the hardships that are, you know, unfortunately faced by functional medicine practitioners. So, you know, I met Jay in person earlier this year and I met him at a conference that Michael Fishman puts on called the Consumer Health Summit. And it was a great conference. Michael Fishman does a great job in a beautiful place that we all get to go to and hang out with some really prominent, influential people in the healthcare space. And I'm so honored. I've been there twice and I'll be going a third time now. Jay Abraham was there and he was scoping the place out and him and I were hanging out, which was kind of cool. And you know, it was an awesome, awesome weekend. But here's the cool thing. I want to share the story and I want to honor Jay here. On my way home from that event, I actually was in the car, I was getting ready to sign up for an account and I had my credit card out and in the heat of everything, I ended up losing my wallet. So for whatever reason, I still don't know how I ended up losing my favorite wallet. It's a carbon fiber wallet. You don't find those too often. And if you've never seen a carbon fiber wallet, you got to check them out. My particular wallet was from Tumi and it's the most expensive wallet I've ever bought, certainly not the most expensive wallet on the planet. But to me it was. And so I lose my wallet right before I'm going to get on a plane. And here's the kicker. I had committed to doing a webinar. So my plan was to get to the airport and get on the other side of security and do a kick ass webinar for the Human Longevity Project as a bonus for them. So I get to the airport and I'm moving to the next terminal. Cause I ended up in the wrong terminal and I realized I lost my wallet. And so I've got my webinar to do and I'm freaking out internally. I'M kind of freaking out, but I always know there's a lesson in things. So I'm not totally freaking out. And I'm about to sit down and do my webinar. Cause I was fully committed to it. And here comes Jay Abraham and his wife Christy, and they see me, and they're super excited to see me. And I'm like, jay, I don't know how to tell you this, but I've got a webinar in two seconds, and I just lost my wallet. So immediately, his wife pulls out her wallet, and she pulls out, must have been 500 to $1,000. She just pulled out a whole bunch of hundreds from it. And she's like, here, we want to make sure that you get home. So without even flinching, you know, his wife Christy was able to do that for me, and I returned most of the money. I said, I'll take $50, because I didn't want to negate the gesture. And, you know, she was so kind. They were both so kind to help me out. And then Jay Abraham, of all people, is, you know, going around the Phoenix airport asking security if they've seen my wallet. And while I'm on the presentation, Jay comes and hands me a note and says, hey, you know, listen, I'm sorry. We looked everywhere, but we weren't able to locate your wallet. So I just wanted to honor Jay for a moment and his wife for their amazing generosity and, you know, for providing me with a little bit of fundage so I could have something to eat on my way home. Thankfully, I didn't lose my passport. The wallet was unfortunately never recovered, but it has since been replaced. So, Jay, this is in honor of you and your generosity. And so we're going to be talking about creating preeminence. And like I said, this is huge for your practice because it's gonna help you in attracting the right people into your practice who are absolutely ready to do business with you. Now, there's different ways to create preeminence, and, you know, there's different levels of preeminence. And I'm gonna start with the easiest things that you can do, and then I'm gonna go into the more complex things that you can do. But none of this is really that complex. So I'm gonna show you how to I do this, and hopefully you find this valuable. And if you do, then please leave me a review. Please share this podcast with other people, because I'm sure your fellow practitioners can benefit from it. So let's go through the different ways that you can create preeminence and I'll dive a little bit deeper into each of them. So first is Facebook posts, then our Facebook lives, then Facebook groups, having a great website, an autoresponder, a webinar, podcasts and interviews that you do, writing a book, hosting live events, testimonials from your clients, referrals from clients, discovery calls that you do. A consultation is where preeminence kind of manifests itself. And then of course, your new patient consultations that you do are kind of linked in there and then the follow up. So there's preeminence and there's also post eminence that you need. So. So when it comes to Facebook posts, you know, I recommend posting, if not daily, at a minimum three times a week. I encourage you to share your life because people want to deeply connect with you. And a way to deeply connect with other people is to share your life. You know, people don't just want better blood work. They don't just want to have more energy. They want somebody to role model and model after, so you're their role model. When you're a patient, share your life, share your adventures, share your travel, share your family, if you're open to do so. You know, some people are like, oh, I don't wanna share my family. Well, don't expect to get the results that I get. You know, I put my family out there because I want people to know that I'm a family man, that I'm a husband, that I'm an entrepreneur, that I'm a philanthropist, that I travel and I go to cool places all over the world, learning new things from some of the top people in the world. I want people to know that. So I share my life and, and unabashedly I share some of the things that I do and people I hang out with and the fun that I have. Also with Facebook, have fun with it. It doesn't have to be so serious, it doesn't have to be so marketing, and it doesn't have to be so structured. Have fun. You know, if you're not having fun posting on Facebook, then you're doing it completely wrong. Also, remember your audience. You know, as functional medicine practitioners, we generally tend to forget who our audience is. We're typically trying to out smart or impress our colleagues and our friends. You know, your audience isn't Jeffrey Bland. It's the person who lives next to you who has no idea what you do for a living and how you can help them and their family members. So remember, your audience Keep it to a fifth grade level, keep it engaging, keep it fun, but most importantly, keep it authentic. You should be authentic to who you are. Part of creating preeminence is that people should, you know, what you see is what you get, right? So when people see you online, that's gotta be you, not somebody completely different. Because if they see you in person and they're expecting to see your online personality, then it's not gonna work. So you've gotta be your authentic self. Now, also on Facebook, I highly encourage, if your scope allows you to, to share testimonials. This is a great way for people to promote your work and to highlight the amazing things that you do for other human beings on this planet. So, so make sure you're sharing testimonials. It could be very simple. It could be a screen capture of an email you got. You know, a really easy way to get great testimonials from your clients is to actually ask them how their first appointment was or ask them specifically what they liked about their first appointment. And boom, you've got a testimonial right off the bat. So we take screenshots. I use an app called Snagit. You can use an app called Skitch. And when I get an email testimonial, if you will, I block out, I blur out people's names so that you can't tell who it is. And that way I don't need permission from people either. The other thing with Facebook is you want to be very consistent. So consistency carves canyons, as I say, and it's important for you to be consistent. And, you know, I tell my family, if you don't hear from me on Facebook for two weeks, call the cops. You know, something is not right. So consistency is king. Now here's the thing. You, are you using Facebook or is Facebook using you? Some people are like, so afraid to use Facebook. Well, you know, be responsible, use it responsibly. It's not about, you know, social media as a tool and you should be using it. It should not be using you. Another thing with Facebook is challenge people. You know, challenge people to do a three day fast or a five day fast, or, you know, challenge people to cut out gluten or to cut out dairy or maybe eat less meat. Whatever is relevant to your audience, whatever is authentic to you and relevant to your message. Challenging people gets them to take action, and it gets them to make small, minor commitments. And these commitments can hopefully provide them with some sort of benefit, which then they attribute and associate to you. Another Thing with Facebook which increases engagement is to ask questions. You know, ask questions about what topics people want. Ask questions about. You know, hey, I'm creating content about XYZ topic. Would you be interested? You know, get people to engage and source your fan base, source your Facebook friends for ideas. You know, if you put an idea out there and ask people, hey, would you be interested in this? And nobody responds, then the idea probably sucks. But if you get awesome response to it, then guess what? It's something you should double down on. That's a very, very important thing for you. Another thing is I recommend that you stir the pot a little bit. If you're kind of maintaining the status quo, that's not very exciting. People aren't gonna get too thrilled about that, and it's gonna be hard to differentiate your audience. So I encourage you to stir the pot. Stir the pot and polarize your audience. You know, draw a line in the sand, you know, you know, have a stance. You know, let people know what you stand for and what you stand against. This is very, very important. If you're able to do this, then you're gonna start segmenting your audience. And guess what? The people that don't like your true, authentic, genuine self will never do business with you anyway. So screw them. It doesn't really matter. You know, a couple examples that I can give you. You know, we recently did a post about autism, and I stirred the pot a little bit, and I said, did you know that 60% of children who have autism have a genetic predisposition that can be measured and supported to reverse their symptoms? You know, most people don't believe that autism is the way we define it, at least, is something that we can address, and we can help children live an optimized life. Now, there are people on the autism spectrum that are very, very gifted and very, very talented. And, you know, I'm working on a project right now to help these children with these labels, unlock these gifts. But it's important to understand that there's a lot that can be done for these children, and there are certain factors that predispose them to, you know, this diagnosis and, you know, where they fit on the spectrum. So I asked this question, and I asked and I told people a story. You know, I had the privilege of sitting down for two hours with one of the world's leading geneticists, and we had a deep conversation about how he was helping people, quote, unquote, reverse their autism and, you know, restore them to a much better quality of life. And I asked people if they'd be interested in me interviewing him. We got 357 reactions or likes, 749 comments of people saying yes and 347 shares, all because I was willing to ask a question. Now, if I stated a fact and I didn't ask a question, I wouldn't get that level of engagement. Now the thing with Facebook is that the more engagement you get, the better if you can get people to respond with more than one word. So instead of having people say yes or me, have them say yes please, or have them say, you know, I am in. So two or three words, sentences are going to be much more powerful for the Facebook algorithm than having somebody just say yes or me. Very simple tip, but can have a profound impact in the reach of of your posts. Now, another way to create preeminence is Facebook Lives. I typically do a Facebook Live at least three times a week at a minimum. You want to do one to three Facebook lives per week. Consistency is huge. So think of Facebook Live like a sitcom. Remember Friends? And people would sit down and they would, you know, they would drop everything they were doing at 9:30 on a Thursday. This was before TiVo and before we could record things and before Netflix. You know, people knew that at 9:30 this is where everyone was gonna be at because that show was consistently on like all shows at the exact same time. So consistency is very huge. And you know, in your Facebook Live, share your adventures. Like right now, for example, I'm doing a five day fasting mimicking diet. So I've been sharing all five days. So far, I'm on day three and we've had increasing engagement and people are excited to see my journey and they're following along. And guess what? We've got people excited to do their own five day fast. You know, when you're doing your Facebook lives, ask questions to engage your audience. A simple question you can ask people right off the bat is, where are you from? Hey, welcome. Thanks for joining me today. I'd like to start off by knowing where everyone is from. And you can start acknowledging people as they're typing in. Hey, Susan from Illinois. Hey, Mark from India. Hey, Stephen from Colorado. You can shout people out so they feel like they're part of this conversation. And they're much more likely to stay tuned for the entire message. Instead of logging in for a couple seconds and tuning out, you can also announce your Facebook lives in advance. So if you're gonna do an interview with somebody or if you're gonna be talking about your fasting, mimicking diet, you can tell people, hey, I'll be live tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning. So that way when they see it, they can, and they're interested, they can pop in as they see fit. You know, with Facebook Live, don't overthink it. You know, just have fun with it. Again, have fun with this, guys. It's not about, you know, being overly structured and overly perfect. Here's a little tip for you with Facebook Live is that you can put it. So you can put it on only me, which means that only you will see the Facebook Live. So that way, if you're concerned about a technology glitch, or if you're concerned about, you know, something going haywire, or if you're concerned that you're gonna suck, then the first few you can do on private, then you can release them and unlock them from private to public if you feel like you did a decent job. Or you could rerecord them. But get used to the idea of doing the Facebook Live, do it in private first so that you're used to the technology and making sure everything works and your Internet's working properly, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever excuse you're trying to, you know, make up for yourself, do it in private. Now here's the other thing. With Facebook Live, you could repurpose your content. So I can take that same video that I recorded. I can transcribe it, I can embed it on my website. I can download the video from Facebook and upload it to my YouTube channel. I can put it on my website. There's so many things that you can do with this content. You can take that content as well. And if you hire, you know, somebody to help you with graphic work or media work, you can actually take that same video and have somebody extract some of your pearls and turn those into memes. Historically, what I found is when I do Facebook lives that I do with my wife, I generally tend to get more engagement. You know, my wife is of course super beautiful and, you know, I'm sure your spouses are as well, but she's, you know, very, very compelling and she's not on with me very often. And she will draw in the female audience side of my followers as well. So, you know, do some stuff with your spouse. Recently, her and I did a video at Tony Robbins. We are at Tony Robbins, and we shared our big takeaways from day one at Tony Robbins as a couple. And we had huge engagement and huge, you know, responses to that. And people really valued the fact that we were sharing that Information. Even though we were on kind of a vacation, people really valued the fact that we were opening up and sharing what our big takeaways were. So if you've got a spouse or a significant other, bring them in. Facebook generally tends to be. The world in general tends to be more responsive to women. So, you know, I love bringing my wife on. She's not too fond of the camera, and she'll tell you the same thing. And she's trying to work through that herself, ironically. But when she gets on camera, I usually get twice as many views. So, you know, people love to see couples working together, and it just gives you more power as well. So that was, you know, a great video that we did together. And I think that, you know, if you're sharing authentically and you're showing people all the work that you're doing on yourself, it just makes you more compelling as a human being. And people want to do business with you because they know, hey, you're not just one dimensional. You've got multiple dimensions. And you work as hard on yourself as you do on anything else. I mean, if you're not working on personal development, then I highly encourage that you spend some extra time, energy, and focus on doing that. And if you've never been to Tony Robbins, unleash the power within. It's a great place to start. From a personal development standpoint. I took a lot of golden nuggets, which I shared in a previous episode, away from his presentation and his amazing live workshop. Now, another way that you can go deep with your patients and build preeminence is Facebook groups. So if you want to go deeper with your audience and talk about more specific topics that maybe you don't want to share publicly, but you're more likely to share in a group where people are more engaged, then you can do that. Facebook groups are absolutely free. One of the policies for Facebook is you can't charge for the group itself, and there's certainly ways to work around that. We don't charge for our Facebook group. We've got about 5,000 followers in our Facebook community, and this is where people can post questions, we can answer questions, we can talk about specific topics. I do a Facebook Live in the group every week, and this is where I go a little bit deeper so that, you know, people are further along their journey in potentially doing business with us, or they're, you know, they're more familiar with the terminology, and so I can dive a little bit deeper into specific health topics. Now, in your Facebook groups, you want to create A culture with your tribe. You want to add value and you want to make sure that you're also giving people a chance to buy. You never want to, you know, train your audience that they're always going to get free stuff. You want to train your audience that you're going to deliver tremendous amounts of value, but occasionally you're going to make an offer that can help them, that can take them to the next level because you've invested in that next level. So I make, you know, I make affiliate offers in my Facebook group for products that I use, you know, like an aura ring, for example, or my fasting mimicking diet program, which is put on by Prolon. We'll make offers for Berkey filters. I mean, stuff that we actually use, stuff that we've actually invested in. People are happy to buy the stuff that you've invested in. So you can share that as part of your affiliate promotions. And then you can also make offers for people to connect with you. You know, when I do my Facebook lives and people ask me specific question, I have no shame in saying, hey, why don't you set up an appointment with somebody from our team so that we can dive deeper into that? You know, it's your obligation to make sure that people get the help that they need and not shy away from actually servicing them and helping them. And guess what? The right people, because you've built up this preeminence and because you've done the work, they're gonna be happy to do business with you because you've positioned yourself as an authority. And then in your Facebook groups, you wanna ask specific questions when people join the the group. So there's three questions that we have that help us screen people when they join our Facebook group, and we only accept people who actually answer those questions. So you might want to write this down, but here are the three questions that we ask Facebook group members. So this was something that you would change in the settings section of the group. So anytime somebody joins the group, they would be prompted with these three questions. So question number one is welcome to the Living Proof Institute community. We've built one of the largest communities for health seekers in and want to keep it clean and spam free. Do you promise to read the PIN post before posting? So we've got a pin post that has all the rules so that they know the rules of engagement. Question number two, we aim to create and share content that is relevant to you. What health topic are you most interested in? So here I'm screening people and I'm Asking them what topics they're interested in so that I could create content that's user generated, super huge. And they're going to think you're reading their mind, but you're not, you're reading their answers. And question number three, what free tips or I'm sorry, want free tips for better health? Question mark? If so, just leave us your email below with no other characters and we'll send them over. So guess what we do? We enter people into our autoresponder. They're asking, we're prompting them and asking them if they'd like free tips. And they're entering their, they're providing us with their email address. And now we're building our list. So this person is agreeing to play by the rules. They're telling us exactly what they want, content for what particular topic. And then we're gonna send them over and make sure that they're joined into one of our programs or online autoresponders so that we can go even deeper with these individuals. Now, another way to create preeminence is to have a world class stunning website. Your website is probably one of the first places people are gonna go online and, and find you and learn more about the work that you do. And so you want to make sure it's visually stunning, that it's good on mobile and it functions optimally on mobile. And it's not clunky, it's not slow. You know, you want to test the speed of your website and this is something that you should have your website developer do. The people that we use are from Big Boost Marketing. You know, connect with my buddy Uli. He'll do a fantastic job. Him and his team will do an amazing job building you a world class functional medicine website. And if you work with myself, then we give you full permission to deploy the technology that we've put together on our website. Now every website should have an opt in and this opt in should be for useful information that people are gonna get. Nobody wants a newsletter. So in case you're wondering, it's 2018. Nobody wants a newsletter anymore. What they want is valuable information that's pertinent to the challenges that they're facing. You should have an opt in on virtually every page on your website. And so people should be able to, you know, migrate from your website into your email list. Owning that list is very critical. Your list is like a bank account. It's like an, it's, it's a digital asset that has tremendous amounts of value. So you want to make sure that you're building that list over time. Not just a Facebook following, not just groups, not just hits on your websites, but you wanna make sure that you're building that list from your website. Your website should be easy to navigate and search, so make sure those tools are accessible to people. You wanna have tools and resources on your website so people can download them, people can find answers for what they're looking for. And it's also important to meet people where they are at. So some people might be looking for free information, so have free information for them. Some people might be looking for community or tribe, so have that available to them. And some people might be looking to start working with you, so have that available to them. So we have a start here section on our page and on that section we have three options. I have a welcome video and then I have three options for that individual. You know, it says, you know, if you're, if you're just starting out, click here for some free information to see if you can help yourself. If you'd like to connect with our tribe, see if our tribe can help you get healthy and if you want to go deep, then let's figure out if we can work together to help you. So we give them three options. You can browse for free information and get our free 30 day tools, or you can join our community or you can join our practice. You choose. So we have three different options so that people can be met where they're at. Now another thing to be shared on your website are case studies. These are people that you've helped and dissecting how you've helped them. So a case study is different than a testimonial because a case study breaks down your process and, and some people are going to want to be, are going to want to be share, are going to want to know, I'm sorry, your process because they're going to be process oriented and process driven. So case studies are a great way to help people in that. And then you also want to share testimonials. Of course, we've got hundreds on our website and again, that builds preeminence. Okay, so all of this you can see is building preeminence is creating a user experience and you're building a case for somebody to do business with you. Scheduling should also be easy on your website. So people should be able to find an easy way to schedule online with you. And then another thing that you can do is you can have a quiz. Having a quiz on your website helps to sift, sort and screen people. So that they can self identify if they're a good fit to work with you or not. Now another thing that you want to do once you get people onto your website is migrate them over to your autoresponder or your CRM software, which is your customer relationship management software. And this is where I highly encourage you to get professional help. You know, for years I was trying to figure this out on my own and I did a half decent job, but then I hired an expert and I realized I was doing a half assed job. So get professional help. If you need help with this, contact us. My guy Fabio is phenomenal. He handles all of my deep integrations with Active Campaign, which is the application that we use. You know, with ActiveCampaign, you can tag and segment your list so you can identify where people are coming from, what they're interested in, why they signed up, where they signed up from, what landing page they opted in from. And you can also keep track of these individuals. You can see what website pages they visited, how many emails they've opened up, what lists they've joined on your practice. I'm sorry, what lists they've joined. You know, through the different offerings that you have, you know, all of this information becomes accessible and trackable with ActiveCampaign. And there are some other CRMs that do this, but I like ActiveCampaign for its efficiency of cost and its effectiveness and how easy it is to use. Now I want to remind you that you're not building a list, you're building a tribe. Okay, so the idea here isn't to just build a list of people, it's to build a tribe of engaged members. You want to send frequent value driven emails. So if you're upgrading your skills, if you're traveling, if you're learning new stuff, if you're reading a book and you find it valuable, share it with your tribe. Everyone is interested in what you're doing. That's why they signed up to be part of your community. So deliver value and be consistent. You want to be consistently offering value to people. And of course, track, track, track. Make sure you've got integrations and automations in there that are showing you the engagement level of your list. And then also make sure that your ActiveCampaign account is integrated with your website and that your website is properly pixelated so that you could do Facebook retargeting as well. So your autoresponder is really gonna help you build up value in your consumer's mind. And again, all about building that preeminence. Now Another way to build preeminence is live or prerecorded webinars. And what I suggest, I've done a whole presentation on webinars and you can go back to that episode on how to actually break down a webinar step by step. But here's the thing you always want to start with. Why? Why are you sharing this information? How is it relevant to you? And how do you feel like it's relevant to your audience members? You want to focus on topics that you love to talk about. That's the other thing, is that these topics should be of interest to you. When you talk about things that you're specifically interested in, guess what? You're going to deliver so much more value because you've done some deep work in this particular area. Another thing that you can do is if you're not sure about what topics to cover, ask your avatar, ask your audience what they want to learn more about, and then curate the experts or become the expert on the topic so that you can provide information. And then I always suggest that when you do a webinar that you have a compelling and transparent offer. You know, here's the thing, people want to buy stuff from you. People like buying stuff in general. And why wouldn't they buy from you if they know, like and trust you if you've built up this preeminence with them? Now, if you and I did a webinar and we both did the exact same webinar and we both presented the exact same way, but you didn't build up any preeminence. You've never done Facebook posts, you've never done a Facebook live, you don't have a Facebook group, you've got a crummy website, you have no autoresponder, you've never sent anyone an email before. Guess who's gonna get way better outcomes and way better results? Of course I am, because I've done the work. So keep in mind that it's not just about the content, but it's about the preeminence that you've created that is compelling to your audience that makes them want to buy from you. Okay? Now if you're recording a webinar that you want to pre record for the future, it could take five or six times to get your message fine tuned. And what we use is the genius webinar format. I've been trained by one of the world's leading webinar experts, the world's leading webinar expert, Jason Fladlin. And so I've taken his training courses and I've met him personally. He's a great friend of mine. We've done some webinars together, believe it or not, and he is the master. So we use his genius webinar format. And I'll be doing some webinars with him in the future so that you can get access to his course. It's just been game changing for us to be able to use Jason's platform and formula now. Another great way to create preeminence, and if you're listening to this, you may already have a copy of it, is to write a book. You know, I've written a book called Perfect Practice. I've written a book called the Motivation Molecule and I've also written a book called Become Proof. So I've written three books, actually, I've written four books. I co authored a book a few years ago. And so that's a way to build authority. It gives you instant credibility. Even if people don't read the book, you get instant credibility. So that's a cool way to build authority amongst your tribe and amongst your audience and amongst your followers. You've got several books in you. I mean, if you're listening to this, you've got your own story that you can share about how you got into functional medicine or whatever field of healthcare you're in. And the tips and things that you can share with people can be quite profound. The stuff that you take for granted, most people don't even know. Now here's the thing about books. There's so many books that are information based, especially in healthcare. And everyone's trying to outsmart the other person and write a new thyroid book. And then you've got people trying to outsmart the other person and write a gut book. And here's the thing, information is becomes obsolete very, very quickly. Information is constantly changing. Information can be questioned, information can be ridiculed, information can be wrong, you know, because we're learning information at such a fast pace. So I would not write a book based on information. I would write a book based on your experience because your experience can never be wrong. It's your experience. Your experience can never be ridiculed. It's your experience. It can never be, you know, invalidated. Like information can be invalidated. So, you know, I wrote a book called Perfect Practice based on my experience of building, growing and scaling a functional medicine business. And so no, there's information in there, but it's based on my experience. It's not based on data or facts that somebody else conjured up. So if you're thinking about writing a book, write it about your experience, not about information. So the last thing we need is another book on thyroid disease. Okay. The last thing we need is another book on food. You know, write a book based on your experience. And the cool thing about writing a book is you can repurpose your content. So guess what? Much of the content from my book I repurpose in different ways. I write blog articles from there. I write Facebook posts from there. You know, I obviously base topics of my podcast from my book, so that content can be repurposed in so many different ways. Now, short books are more likely to be read. So if you're trying to write a 500 page manuscript, nobody's going to read it. When's the last time you read a book cover to cover those 500 pages? Now, if you have a copy of Perfect Practice, you'll see that I practice what I preach, and you'll see that each chapter is only one or two pages. And you could pick that book up anywhere, anywhere in the world. And anywhere in the book you could read one or two pages and you'll get profound value out of it. Now always remember your audience in the book. You know, you want to try to appeal to as many people as possible. Now, another way to get continue up the preeminence ladder, if you will, and get more followers and more fans and build more trust like. And no factor is to do podcasts and interviews. So here's the thing. Podcasts open up virtually any door that you can think of. So you can invite virtually any person to jump on your podcast. And people are gonna be excited to do that. People who are very successful and influential, Guess what? They love sharing their knowledge and information with other people. Now if you're gonna be on a podcast or an interview, now this is, you know, you being on a podcast, then you wanna have a backend offer that you can track. And you know, for me, I have a 30 day program. It's called 30 Ways in 30 Days. It's www.30in30.org. And I make that offer that anyone can join that program for free at the end of every podcast I do or any interview that I have, because having that program is great. Now the fact that I'm on a podcast builds preeminence for me because I'm on the podcast. But then when people go in that 30 day program, it builds even more preeminence for me, so they're more likely positioned to do business with my organization. And here's the thing. Be so good and consistent that people invite you to be on their podcast. So there's a few podcasts that I have in mind that I love to be on. But guess what? I'm just gonna be so good and so consistent and so compelling with my message that my vision is to be invited to these podcasts. And I've crossed off pretty much all the podcasts that I wanna be on up to this point. I just got invited to be on I Love Marketing, which is a podcast I've been following for many, many years. And I'm gonna be on that next week talking all about marketing for healthcare professionals. Now, if you decide that you want to start your own podcast, then there's a company that I use. The very company that's actually doing this podcast for me is called Podfly. The gentleman that you want to connect with is Corey and he's totally awesome. I want to give a shout out to my team who is actually editing this podcast for me. So all I have to do is, all I have to do is record this presentation. I record it on my iPhone or on my computer, I send it over to the team. And Rafael and the rest of the team take this podcast. They sound engineer it, they add the intro to it, they digitally master it, they write an article for me, which basically goes with the podcast. They pull in all the links that are necessary so that everything is hyperlinked for me and my team, and then they upload it into the appropriate website so that it then goes to all the different podcast platforms. So I use Podfly. You can learn more about their services@podfly.com and check them out. And you know, that's a great way for you to build preeminence. So I hope this helps you. I hope I've given you lots to think about, lots of action steps that you can take if you're not doing, you know, any of these things. I would suggest start with the social media posts, you know, and then work your way down or up the ladder rather, and build that preeminence. So just to review, here's the order in which you can build preeminence. Facebook posts, Facebook lives, Facebook groups, stunning world class website, your autoresponder, your webinar, your podcasts and interviews that you do. You can write a book, you can host live events as well. So I've hosted a couple live events now with about 70 to 80 practitioners. And guess what? You know, if I'm going to be hosting an event, then the people that show up there, we're gonna blow their socks off. I mean, we're gonna just, like, take it to the next level and deliver so much value and then make them a compelling offer. I mean, people are gonna want to do business with you when you blow them away with tremendous, tremendous amounts of value. And then, you know, with preeminence, you get referrals. People, you know, refer individuals to you, and that's a great way for preeminence. A referral is like the gold mine, if you will, for your practice. And, you know, this is very important that you do this, because I believe that you have. If you're listening to this. If you're listening to this podcast and you're at this point in the podcast, I believe that you're highly interested in building your practice. I believe that you have a powerful message that services your community and the world around you, and more and more people need to hear it. Don't be afraid to share your best and most valuable information. I'm trying to lead by example. I think I give a lot of golden nuggets to you for absolutely free. Not in the hopes that you do business with me in the future, because I don't know if you're the right fit, but if you feel like you're the right fit, then I'm gonna do everything that I can to make sure that I'm delivering as much value to you as possible so that at some point, when you're ready to hire a coach, when you're ready to scale your practice and take it to the next level, that you at least think of me and you think of all the work that I've done to help you up this ladder and the information and the content that I've delivered to you. And that's what you need to do for your patients. You need to deliver as much value to them as possible so that you're positioned in their mind as the authority when they're ready for help. Here's the thing. It's not gonna happen instantly. So you're not gonna do a Facebook Live and have a ton of people lined up around the corner at your office. I've done thousands of posts. I've done hundreds of videos. I have 5,000 people in my group. You know, we've got an awesome website. We have 40,000 people on our autoresponder and email list. I continue to do webinars, at least on a monthly basis, if not more than that. You know, I've got a podcast. I'm releasing new episodes every single week. I've written three books. I've done live events, I go to live events, and I network and I connect with people. We have over 200 testimonials on our website. So by building up this preeminence over the years, we've positioned ourself as the leading authority, at least in our community, if not even in a broader audience than that. And that's what it's gonna take. You know, don't expect to have outstanding results without having outstanding preeminence. And here's the cool thing about it, too. When people think that you're the best person for them to see, they automatically get better results, because in their minds, they're seeing the absolute best person. Now, here's the thing. Like, all of this should be authentic. So you should never lie when you're trying to create preeminence. You should never be misrepresentative of your credentials or your capabilities. You should never coerce people into doing things that are illegitimate or, you know, unethical. So when you build preeminence, you also have a responsibility to be very moral and ethical and not take advantage of people. So with that, I leave you with this amazing topic. You might want to listen to this a couple of times. You. You might wanna write a few things down, you might wanna make a checklist, but this is the formula for ultimate success. Now, I'll clue you into something that you may not be aware of in 2018. You know, right now, we're in the month of August. We haven't spent a single penny on marketing, and very few businesses can do that and continue to grow and thrive and have a great position in the marketplace. So I highly encourage you to build preeminence. In the beginning, it's gonna cost you time, money, energy, and effort, but then you'll get to a point where you're having fun, you're having a great time. People love what you do. You've built up this amazing community. People are ready to do business with you, and you don't have to spend an arm and a leg on marketing and give your money away to Mark Zuckerberg. You can keep it in your pocket, or you can pay your staff more, or you can build a hospital. You can do all kinds of fun stuff when you have extra money laying around and help other people if you choose to do that. All right, guys, I'm going to jump off. I love you, and I hope this helps you. And if it does, please share this episode and this podcast with somebody else that you know who could benefit. Because you and I both know that we need more and more people just like you, successful in their practices, helping scale functional medicine and integrative medicine and lifestyle medicine to the masses. Talk to you soon. Have an awesome, fantastic day.