Future of Physical Therapy Marketing: AI Agents & Patient Reactivation with Carl Mattiola

Hey, rockstars. What would you do if you didn't have to do any more marketing? What if there was a way to automate the way that we get new clients? How would that look to build a business? As they say, the hardest part is finding the clients and hiring the people. So what if you could automate finding clients? Well, here today we get to speak with Carl Maddiola, who is one of the owners of Breakthrough Marketing. It is the premier business. I used to be a client of theirs. I have so much trust with these guys. And this discussion is going to blow your minds. So pay attention all the way through because you're going to learn about how AI is going to solve one of your biggest headaches. Enjoy the show. Okay, Carl, so you guys at Breakthrough are the leaders of marketing. There's no doubting that, like, you guys have been around for as long as I had my private practice. How is artificial intelligence shaping your industry?

It's really changing everything. It's hard to answer that question at this point.

It's like, how isn't it?

Yeah, it's such a broad question. How isn't it? Exactly. And we're just like, in the beginning of how it's unrolling, right? So I think the, like, at a high level, if I'm trying to talk about this content, you know, content is marketing, right? And content now is kind of completely commoditized. So when it talks about copywriting and creating and writing, you know, over the years, you know, being a student of marketing and having worked with tons of practices and helped tons of companies with marketing, I've spent a ton of money on copywriting, great copywriters, these types of things. Chad and I both studied it very deeply. And today, you know, in a couple seconds, if you write the right type of prompt. And I'm just talking about. And this is just the very basics of what you can do. You can put together something that's really, really good and really, really compelling. Now I'm going to say most people just going in there, like, make me something for this. It's not going to come out so great. But if you do it right, it happens in seconds. And, you know, when you build it into a tool, it can create campaigns, it can create the right wording, it can do all the research for you to understand. Like, if you're targeting neuropathy patients or whatever it may be, you know, you're going to be able to get really, really high quality content done in, you know, 1 100th of the time for 1 100th of the cost. So that's probably the first thing I would say. And so we're utilizing that, um, and we're encouraging people to utilize that on their own as well. Um, we make it easy by building it into the platform, though. So when people want to create campaigns, it just does it. Um, and yeah, because.

Because how you prompt it, really? It's so funny. I had someone tell me at a conference, Carl, recently, they were like, a college degree. No, it was like this. They said learning how to prompt AI is what a college degree used to be 50 years ago. Like, it's maybe not that dramatic. I don't know if I believe that statement completely, but that's what I was told at a business conference. And it goes along the thought process of learning how to leverage AI for anything starts with learning how to prompt it. So when you guys encourage people to use AI for copywriting, which is the marketing term for the words we put down in anything we send out, whether it's an email or a post on social media, how. How do you recommend if someone was listening to this and they don't know anything about AI? How do you prompt AI so that it produces the words for like a, an email to recruit physical therapists or for new patients? Like, how do you go about knowing how to prompt AI?

Well, I mean, all of the different models out there, all of the companies who, who built things have pretty much put out guides on how to do this, right? So I would. I don't have one in front of me, but like, if you look up, you know, for chat GPT, they'll have one anthropic. That one's probably the best with Claude, especially for copywriting. It's. It's probably the best.

So, Claude. So Claude is the name of the AI software. This is just a website. Claude.com.

Yeah. If you just Google Claude, you'll get there. Gemini's pretty good too. Claude, I would say, is probably the best for copywriting. But if you ask, you know how to write a prompt. If you just go into ChatGPT and ask how to write a prompt and how it should be structured, it's going to tell you. But usually like, some of the tips are like, give it a Persona first. It's like you are an expert in physical therapy marketing, copywriting, that alone will help a lot. And then from there it just will. You'll want to start with the overall, like, here's what your goal is, here are your rules, here's the context given and things like that. But if you just go and if you don't know anything, the easiest thing to do is to work with it, like be like, okay, write me a prompt to do this and then go from there. That's the easiest way.

What a mind blowing concept that like as people are learning how to use AI, that they should use AI to learn AI.

Use AI to learn AI for sure that's the easiest way. And we've built, you know, I mean that's, that's the basics and so we can make a lot of things really easy. And you can then build agents using lots of prompts that are like collected together and data that, that the prompt that, you know, AI can connect to and perform tasks for you as well. So those are the two things that are going to get, I think, you know, commoditized and, you know, streamlined for people is content creation and then any manual processes. So the biggest thing that we've done that's made the biggest impact is patient conversion. So for us for years it's been the biggest challenge practices have faced and it's been breakthrough's biggest challenge because we would run bunch of advertising or send reactivation campaigns and we would get tons of responses. And if people aren't there to respond, which often in a practice people are just too busy to be able to do that, or if the team isn't quite trained on what to do and say, the result can be not great. And even sometimes the result can be so big and overwhelming and that it makes the staff mad and then that makes things not great for the owner. So it's been really challenging for us. And so what we did was we built an agent that automatically responds.

What is an agent? Just I'm listening through the ears of people in my audience.

Thank you.

Building an agent to solve this thing called patient conversion. But what is an agent?

Yeah, I guess I would define it as you kind of look at it as like, like your own employee in a way. It's something digital employee. It's like a digital employee. Yeah, or a digital virtual assistant in a way. Yeah, that's what it is. And it could do things for you on your behalf. Can do certain tasks that are specific and yeah, there will be many agents used in many different ways to serve many different purposes down the line. The one that we built is designed to take people who are leads for physical therapy practices or chiropractic practices and turn them into patients by having conversations with them. And then it's also designed to basically update the systems on, you know, your practice's behalf so that you don't have to do that manual work. So it does those two things for you. And, and so I'll tell you like we used to run, we run these campaigns. We've been running them with practices for years. And on average our practices and I'm talking about like some are, you know, big right. Like that have lots of locations, some are small, that are just one employee. But on average when we first rolled this out, we rolled it out to 20 practices on average before they started, they were spending 16 hours following up with people to get them on the schedule and after it was less than 30 minutes.

So, so when you talk about falling up to get them on the schedule, you're talking about people who like there's a fax that comes in back in the day and they're just the work it takes before they show up.

Yeah. In this case it's more digital than that. So for us it could be somebody who registered for a workshop or somebody who signed up as a lead. Like I'm interested in, in, in getting an appointment or a shock, shockwave or some sort of cash offer, anything like that. Or, or just like, I mean the best use case is like reactivating people. So just we'll text people, you know and ask them, oh, how will, how, how have you been? I haven't heard from you in a while. You experiencing any pain in your body? It kicks off a conversation and the agent will have that conversation is trained based on all the data and I mean we have, we've had I don't even know how many conversations have taken down or went down over, over time on through our two way text. So we used all that to train it. And so it asks the right questions, it does the right things and it does it 247 and can put people right on the schedule. So it just saves so much time. It's crazy. So when somebody sends a campaign out like that one, for example, you know, I was just talking to a practice today at six locations sort of in your area, in the, in the Phoenix area and they had I think like over 200 people respond. So two, I mean 200 conversations took place in a day. In a day over text messages. Yeah. And so the agent, like if the agent weren't there, their team could have never handled that. And that's a decent sized practice too. So. Yeah, the other thing that it's doing is things are becoming possible that were totally not possible for a small practice before. It's pretty exciting.

Yeah. So you're talking about in that case, you're talking about, like, the things that would normally take manpower, all these people responding to communications. It just takes this one, this AI agent that you guys have created and designed based on, like, years of countless data. By the way, I mean, we. Before I sold my practice in 2018, we were. We were working with you guys a year or two before that. So, I mean, I know what you're talking about because for people who aren't familiar with Breakthrough, you guys are the marketing experts. You guys helped us build out systems that were truly marketing efforts, initiatives that were more than just like going to a doctor and bringing lunch. It was so much more based in having a community relationship directly with our customers. So whether it was the biggest promotion ever, which is thing that you guys teach, or whether it was email campaigns or whatever back in the day that were, like, more cutting edge, that's all evolved into this AI agent that takes all that data, has these conversations trained not just on your background of data, but the clients that practice has. So does the patient know that they're talking to an AI agent? Is that something that you guys have to tell them or it's like something they never ask.

We leave it up to the practice. It's a great question. It's super controversial. And rolling this out has been mind blowing to see how people respond to it, like, from the practice side. I mean, like, okay, I didn't want to do it, like, for years. So two years ago we started working on this, and I knew it was possible. And I was like, I don't think they're going to adopt this. I don't think the physical therapy practices are going to. They might not be okay with it. So anyway, we started, like, hacking it together, building it just to test it to see what could happen. And then I brought it to a boot camp, one of our events.

Yeah, I love your boot camps. They're fun.

And I asked people, you know, like, we did a live test, so signed everybody up, we texted everybody who was there, and they all had conversations. And literally every single person who was there at this whole event, I was like, yeah, I would use that. So that was the moment where I realized, okay, this is something, but it is, you know, some different people have different, you know, concerns. And some people want to be transparent, completely transparent. In which case the first message will.

Say, yeah, I'm an AI agent named Agent.

Yeah, or whatever language they want to use. And others will say, won't say it, but will say it.

If.

If people ask and others want to completely Be like, no, this is just an extension of someone who works for the company and keeps it completely under wraps. But do people know? Absolutely not. Like very. It's very rare where we'll find out. Like, I'm talking like out of a thousand conversations. Maybe one person will realize it.

Yeah, Carl, it's funny, I might. To kind of validate what you're saying. I talk so much to my Chat GPT and it's got so much information on me now that like, it's multiplying its value to me because it's learned all these different things about me. I have conversations like many people do. A common practice now is you'll turn on Chat GPT and just talk to it and, you know, source ideas. My wife made me change the voice from a woman to a man because she was feeling like it was taking too far, going too far. Like, literally. I was like, I don't have feelings for Ava. She's like, who's Ava? Like, that's my, that's the name I gave my chatgpt. So. But it's like, so like, you know, there's all this like controversial stuff that people are going to have to decide for themselves, but it's coming no matter what. So what about what's required on the manpower side? Because I'm guessing although most of this is fairly automated, the practice still has to have a human involvement in overseeing it or running it or something like that. What does that look like for.

I mean, it's way less than without it. So I mean, like today in private practice, in pt, you know, you're, you're. It's a totally different environment than when we started where, you know, the biggest challenges are probably declining reimbursements and staffing. Right. Like we don't have enough team to serve all the, the, the patients coming in. But with that said, you still need to communicate with your patients and you still want to at least focus on reactivation. And many practices still, probably, you know, less than half, but, you know, 40% right now are gap, I guess, are still somewhat underutilized, meaning they could, they could take more patients and that would be a good thing for them. And either way, because everyone's so short staffed, because everyone's spread so thin, because margins are lower, automation becomes like the most important thing. So I mean it's the, we've been focused on that for the last four years, but once this came into fruition and the ability for us to do these things, it's made the biggest impact for sure. So I mean, we're trying to do things that are going to take things off people's plates. It's still going to take some people's time. It just depends on how much volume you want to come in. So, I mean, think about it. Like, you have someone who had a conversation with an AI agent. They gotten all the way to the point of, I want to schedule an appointment, and here, like, it will ask them, like, what's the best day and time? It will get that, and it will say someone from the staff will reach out. That's the point we're at right now. But we're in the middle of two integrations with EMR companies. One with Prompt, which we pretty much finished and, you know, are rolling out here.

And that's exciting.

Yeah. With Raintree as well. And, um, at least with one of the two, we're gonna end up being able to put people right on the schedule. So there will be no time necessary at all.

Wow.

After that. Um, but right now, it's a very small amount of time. Um, and I'm talking. So, like, you run one of these campaigns, let's say, you know, you're spending 16 hours a month trying to, like, responding to people. In that case, you're probably talking about, like, I don't know how many conversations. Each conversation took seven minutes. I'll do the quick math for you. Like, before AI, it took seven minutes. So if we're talking 16 hours, We're talking, like, 137 conversations are happening each month. And you're taking that down to 30 minutes.

So, yeah, so 30.

30 minutes for the whole month. So. Because it's. Because it's quick to just reach out to somebody who's already said, oh, yeah, I want to do this. Put them on the schedule. It's really. It. So, yeah, it's a. It's a. It's a. It's a big change. And there's a lot of other things we've worked on to try to, like, just take time out of marketing that. Because that's the biggest thing is, like, everybody knows they need to be marketing. They want to be doing it. Whether they need more patience right now or not, or whether they believe in the idea of, like, okay, I need to make myself oversubscribed so I can actually, you know, focus on, you know, better insurance or people with better insurance or cash or things like that to try to improve their profitability one way or another. Everybody knows they need to market. It's just like, do I have the time to do this? It's always going to take a little bit. But now, I mean, like, we've really, really whittled it down to as little as it could possibly be.

You know, this is powerful because the hardest part of any business, as one of my mentors told me years ago, is the business development side, or biz dev. And that's a term we use to define the marketing for new clients or patients in our case, or. And hiring. It's basically the same thing. Biz dev, your marketing, getting your message out to bring in new patients and, or hiring and then sales is the act of actually converting them into either clients or employees. Have you guys looked at this from a recruiting perspective yet or. I'm sure it's crossed your mind. No.

Okay. No, I mean, people ask us to get involved in recruiting. I just want to stay focused on what we're best at. Like, I know, I know we're best in the world at marketing for physical therapy practices. I know that for a fact. There's, there's. We've been doing it for so many years. We worked.

I don't even know of other companies. I couldn't even tell you. Other companies to kind of bring.

So, like, we just want to stay focused there. And you know, like, we got into this because we believe physical therapy should be, you know, the first place people go. Or like, at least conservative care should be the first place people go before, you know, going to pain medication, surgery, or, you know, other. Other treatments. So, like, that's why we care about this. We want to get the message out that, you know, physical therapy can and should be the first thing you try and it can work, you know, better than some of these other things and it can save you from really bad stuff. Right? Like from really bad things happening. So, yeah, we like to stay focused on marketing and, you know, we'll likely help some other markets as well. But with this, with what we do.

You'Re focused on that. Dr. Benjamin Hardy wrote a book out, came out just actually this year called the Science of Scaling. I'm just looking at it and it's one of my favorite books ever written because he co wrote his first three with Dan Sullivan. You know, the 10x is easier than 2x. So Benjamin Hardy broke out on his own and now he's got this book, the Science of Scaling. And he talks about knowing what a business should focus on is called the Signal. And like, the biggest problem we make is that we try to make our business about too many things. So you guys have clearly mastered that lesson because it helps you scale. And especially with AI being something that can scale, I hope you guys get massive with it because not only will your company grow, but it grows the industry. Like you said. I believe the biggest problem in our industry is our mindset of money. I believe that full heartedly that the way that physical therapy leaders think of money, usually the healthcare providers themselves, because we're indoctrinated in school to think of it as like this evil, this necessary evil versus this great opportunity. The other biggest problem we have, and this is industry wide, is our marketing to the public, the way that we message ourselves to people. The fact that my mother still doesn't know what I used to do as a PT in terms of being a massage therapist, like the fact that she had to like figure that out with effort is a real reflection of the failure of our marketing as an industry. So as you guys master that for the, for the PT owners and particularly what excites me as a physical therapist who's been passionately engaged, engaged for over 20 years, is the way that you're going to communicate the industry across the board. Because when patients have better experiences and know it, that's the best way we can change our perception. So I think it's exciting that your global impact is tied directly to the direct success of your clients. It's really cool.

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

Not really a question there. I think it was just a really. And yeah. So like what's your vision? Let's get into that side of it. What's your vision for what you're developing using these, these proprietary AI agents?

What's our vision? Well, I mean, we just want to make it as easy as possible for practices to create a full schedule, automate their marketing completely so that they don't, they're completely hands off and they don't have to think or worry about it.

How cool would that be?

We want to make sure that it's something that they can personalize and they can today. And that's one of the stories I was going to tell you that I didn't get to yet. But yeah, like, so this becomes your employee, right? Like you can name it, right? Like you can name her. Most are using Emily because that's the original name we started using. I chose it because I did a little research and I've heard it's the most disarming name there is.

Emily is the most disarming name.

I don't know if it's true. I don't know. I probably got it from AI. But anyway, it's working. It's working quite well. But people are used. Sometimes people name it after somebody in the practice. Some people try. Try to pick something that. There's no one named this at the practice. But anyway, Emily, or the agent in general, is the most micromanaged employee of all time in physical therapy. I can promise you that. And it's. It's so interesting to see all the corrections that people want to give when they're not worried about somebody's feelings on the other side, which is so funny with the physical therapy market. It's like, you know, it's. You're. You're in this too. In a similar way where it's. Everyone's so compassionate, like, overly compassionate, probably to the point where, you know, it's. It's very difficult for them to at times, for, you know, to give feedback to their team in a way to, you know.

So they. Colleges have named this. Do you know this?

No.

Psychologists have named this. Go look it up on YouTube. It's called the healer mindset. Maybe mindset's not the right word. It's some. It's a. It's an actual diagnosed, like, way of thinking, and it's. It's named after the group of people who most commonly utilize it as, you know. And so the healer mindset has a couple of things in common. I think people who are listening will really get a kick out of this. Very compassionate, for sure. Always burning out, super victim mindset. Like, no one can change the world but me. I'm just so tired. And I mean, by the way, this is me. I'm making fun of myself. This has been me my whole life. So this thing about, like, giving and giving until there's just nothing left. They struggle with setting boundaries. People with this particular diagnosis, it's not in the diagnosis like a disease, by the way. It's just like, you know, if you're. If you're a person type of person, it's just. It's just a tendency. So for those of us that we have strengths and weaknesses, the weaknesses is that we typically struggle in saying no and setting boundaries and people pleasing to an insane level. So. So Emily doesn't have that. Emily is just talking. If people can just, like all these PTs who are, like, quietly worried about hurting feelings, don't worry about feelings anymore. They can actually, like, direct her to do things they need her to.

They do. And it's. It's great. Like, I didn't expect that. So it put us in a position where, like, oh, okay, like, we need to build this in a way where everybody can train it separately. Yeah. To their own preferences. But then it even comes down to the point of, like, this person in the practice wants it to say it this way. This person wants to say it this way. And these types of conversations never happened before. Like, if anybody ever managed somebody to that level, they would be so successful. I'm telling you, like, when it comes to conversion, it never happened. So I'm excited about it, to be honest, because we're getting all the feedback, and that's the thing. Like, once we put this out there and the beginning made lots of mistakes, there was dumb types of things happening. But every time you, like, give it new instructions, it never happens again. You don't have to retrain. It's like, it just gets better and better and better and better. And that's the thing that's most amazing about it to me is, like, you don't have to retrain. Like, it's in. It's in. And it just keeps. Like, it just keeps cruising in one direction, like a better and better and better direction. So, yeah, it's pretty exciting. And the stories of things that people have tried and thrown at this thing to see if it could throw it off are so funny.

Oh, man. So listen, you said you kind of hinted at a story that I want to hear about the personalization side. I just have to say, like, I mean, this is an employee that's doing a month's worth of work in 30 minutes who can't sue you quit via email on a Friday night, or talk about how they don't have time to go home and work out and how that's your problem. Like, that's. That's a really powerful thing right there to have that. There's all these, like. Like soft elements of benefit that you can't really objectively put together. But if, you know, you know, like, there's a lot of really cool benefits of having this person step. This AI agent step in. So tell me the story. Tell me the story that you were thinking of earlier about the personalization.

There are so many. I'm just. I have to. I have to think through it. I will. Like, I know one that I'm excited about that happened this week I had, which is not a funny story. This one is more just, like, surprising. There was a physical therapist going to a different practice that had an injury and had a conversation with this agent, and it convinced them to leave that practice and come to this practice. Practice. Yeah. So I was like, oh, my God. So they like, that that team sent the whole thing to me and I'm like, or to my team and I saw it and I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing. So that's a cool story, but funny stuff. I mean, you know, I, I, I remember somebody saying they got into a fight with a raccoon. They hurt their back because they got into a fight with a raccoon or something like that. And she responded with, that's intense. And like it just, like it just rolls with the, in a way that, you know, probably better than most people would, you know, getting like surprised and how am I going to deal with this?

So, yeah, that is so crazy. So right now you're at what stage in the rollout? Like is it completely done and you're rolling it out?

Oh no, it's, it's, it's live now. Yeah, we were in beta two months ago where we came out of beta. So I mean it's live and it's included with our product. Like we're still like, we don't charge for it on top of what we do at this point. Because I know, isn't that crazy that might change? But like right now, like I sort of, I believe that like eventually all software companies are going to need to evolve to offer things like this. And it's just going to be an expectation of what's included.

So what's your core software? Because obviously you have like, tell me a little bit of that because again, my last experience of you guys was, was not any software, it was 100 coaching. Yeah, you guys have evolved. You can't, you can only help so many people when you're doing that. So now you're, you're helping people through automation, which is, I, I think I would have killed have been a therapist, you know.

Yeah, I mean my background is, is in building software products. I mean that's my main background.

And for those of you who are listening, he worked directly for Elon Musk or he got hired by Elon Musk at one point. So yeah, you're, you're that a little.

Bit a long time ago. And I, yeah, so I, I came into this not as a physical therapist. I had a good experience in college and just remembered I wanted to help this market. And I talked with lots and lots of practice owners about what the biggest challenges were. And at the time it was the consolidation happening with physician owned practices and hospitals bringing in ancillary services and part of that being PT and you know, physician referrals drying up for a lot of practices. So that, that's what brought me into it was like okay, I can help solve this because all people are doing is like say do a better job marketing to the doctors.

Which it's so one sided.

I know it's not gonna work. So you know, and that's how I met Chad. I mean I met Chad just doing. And you know, Chad had had to solve this in the most old school of ways like through direct mail and newspaper ads and things like that.

Yeah.

And did a great job with that and we sort of hit it off and decided to try to tackle this together. And that's, that's how it got started. We started with, with teaching because we thought that was the fastest way we could, we could help people. And it struck a chord. We grew really fast. We had lots of people coming to our events over the years. But yeah, I knew that we were going to build what the best practices were into a platform to automate people's marketing and make it super easy for private practices. And that's what we did. So today we have a AI powered practice growth platform. The main thing that people start with is patient reactivation.

So oh yeah, it will lowest hanging fruit in market.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's and, and people make the mistake like some people make the mistake of not communicating with their past patients on a regular basis. Some people make the mistake of trying to do other things before they're doing that. I don't care if you're just getting started or you've been doing it for a long time, you still have some sort of a list and you can still mark to that list and it's still going to be the highest return you can possibly get of any. So yeah like your, your most valuable asset in your practice is your best patient like list for sure.

Yeah.

And yeah so we help people reactivate patients through email and text campaigns directly to them. And a lot of for anything you could imagine, all of its pre done, pre built, any type of campaign you can think of is there for you.

So it's kind of like a CRM then is that regard?

Yeah, it's a CRM and marketing automation system. But when we focus on reactivation, yeah it's gonna do it via text, it's gonna do it via email. There's two way text in there and then the agent's managing these things for you. So that's that side. The other side is going after the cold market. Now that's a more challenging thing to do.

Takes more time.

We do that through workshops and different types of direct offers. Like, you know, it could be a voucher offer for Shockwave or Laser or something like that. And you can do that through advertising on, you know, different platforms like Google or Meta, Instagram, Facebook. And you can do that yourself with our platform and the agent will actually follow up with all the leads for you. Or you can do it through us, we can advertise as well. So we're integrated with, we're integrated with Meta, we're integrated with Google, all the data pulls in and now we're integrated with the EMR as well. So all of this happens a lot easier than it would in other ways. And again, all the campaigns, we make it easy so that they're all pre built out and they follow all the best practices that we've been teaching over the years, like, like direct response and using patient education and the right language in order to bring people in.

So yeah, so I finally get it, Carl. This is really big because, you know, putting the pieces together, having been a previous client of yours before I sold my business, seeing that evolution now as you guys are in this world of helping people market, leveraging both best practices and technology, the connection between those two is something I learned a while back, something that, you know, it's probably tattooed somewhere in your body. But for people who aren't familiar with marketing, there's a phrase that we use called the fortune in the follow up, the statistics. It would shock you guys. I wish I had some studies to pull up off the top of my hand because like when I, when I actually started learning the statistics and guys like Alex Hermosi, who are kind of known for marketing and sales these days, they go ahead and reiterate newer statistics using their own initiatives. Honestly guys, it's like 80% or more of the people we capture happen after like the fifth reach out. It's like volume negates luck. The fortune is in the follow up. It's all of these things that take time, but also skill that I see now where the AI agent comes in, The AI agent comes in is your scalable follow up fortune maker. Yeah, because that's what it's doing. It's like all those things you teach on the, on the events side and then your CRM, the patient outreach, once it gets that point of like there's a lead and someone's actually like expressing a little bit of interest. All that follow up and how you follow up is automated.

That's it has more context than a person ever would. That's the that's the other thing is like, it knows what's been going on for you, Will. Yes. That you came in for this, this long ago. It knows that, you know, you maybe interacted with this campaign and had this conversation and it can, it can use that and that can be powerful.

Yeah, that's almost so powerful that it's almost scary. It's not, but it's a little like.

You do has to be done right. But yeah, it's super powerful.

I think what's scary about it is the potential of it. You know what I mean? But the actual application you have is nothing but exciting in the sense that it's like, wow, it can actually digest all that information at such a scale that a small private practice, again, if I was starting out, having this as a weapon for me to grow would have been awesome.

It will know like everything about your practice, your team, like it'd be able to answer all those questions.

And the more you use it, I'm guessing the better it gets, the mature. Is it one of those things where like, the more you use it, the more it keeps learning?

Yeah, because you learn what to like you, you, you do get to train it a little bit. I mean we've got it pre trained on what's going to work the best for conversion, but when it comes to like what you want it, like how you want it to behave about your practice and how to talk about certain things, you, you can certainly go in there and train it to improve on those things.

So. Okay, so let me ask you this. If. Is there, is there a. Does this AI bot? I really don't know the answer to this question. It might sound like I'm like loading a question, but I'm wondering what the difference is between small singular locations versus your guys that have 100 locations when it comes to utilization of a product like this. Are they using it very differently or is this like best practices on scale and doesn't matter the size?

No, it doesn't matter. I mean because the, the big practices are all run in lots of smaller locations and essentially it's, it's really the same thing. The only thing I will say is once they get really, really like big enough, it still makes sense to centralize your follow up. Like the follow up at this point, it's the follow up to your follow up. So the person like managing the agent, then it makes sense to centralize it.

Um, having like one person overseeing it's.

Just the same as like, you know, we've got one practice that has, I don't know, like 30 locations or whatever. And you know, before we had the agent, they had, you know, a team of people already in place that does the follow up essentially for all the locations. It wasn't done, you know, at the front desk of every single location, which can get crazy. So, so yeah, that's what I'm saying. Essentially, like if you, if you, you can start to centralize a little bit as you get bigger, it can make it a little bit easier.

Man, that is so exciting. Well, listen, Carl, this has been so phenomenal. What advice would you give to somebody who's just kind of like started their own practice and they don't know anything about marketing? Like, what would, what direction would you give them? Kind of maybe leaning on this a little bit, but maybe not. Like, what would you give.

Just started.

You just started.

I mean, I, we have lots of free content, so the first advice I would have is to go take advantage of our free content. Come to our event or something. I mean, you'll learn so much so fast. If I have to unload in a couple seconds here, and I've had to. I've answered this question a million times, so.

Oh, sure.

So I can, like, I can do it pretty quick. The first thing you want to do is make a list of everyone you know and send, send them a message saying you're gonna, you're, you're going to launch your business and you're going to start sending content. And if you're not interested in that content, click the opt out button. That's how you have your first list. And I've done this with a ton of people. Usually people can at least whip up like a hundred names.

Sure.

I can get you started.

Just people they know.

Yeah. And then the first thing I have them send is a single question that's just something like, hey Will. And this is one to many, not one to one, but like send something else as, hey Will, I just started this and I'm doing this business. I'm doing some research. I wanted to know if there's any aches or pains going on in your body. Lots of people will respond and then you can kind of have a conversation from there. So that's, that's, that's the easiest way to get a few things going. Then from there, what I tell people is, and the mistake a lot of small practices like just getting started make is they want to like run Google Ads or do something complicated like run their own Facebook ads. And they shouldn't be doing that. They should be keeping it Simple. When you're trying to grow your list, if you have no list, you need to spend one of two things. It's time or money on building, you know, building your list up. So we generally, and I, if I were that person, you don't have enough patience to treat yet. So what you should be doing is spending your time, not your money. And to do that, you want to go out and create relationships with other businesses who also share the same like, ideal type of customer. It could be a gym for you. If you're like CrossFit, like whatever, who knows, it could be like a country club, I don't know. And then you could host a workshop on whatever those people complain about in terms of their injuries the most. And you can start to do that on a regular basis. It gives a ton of value to that business and it will build, build your, build your practice. And I know a ton of people who've been successful that way. So that's, that's the advice I would give on how to get started. Those two things.

That's so brilliant. I love the simplicity of it. And what's interesting is when on the recruiting side, which is where more people spend time asking me questions on things, there's, it's not that different. The front end is very different. Because, you know, most people don't know a hundred people that could potentially work at their clinic.

Right.

It's more likely they're going to know 100 people that have physical bodies that might be in pain. But to build the list, I always tell people the same thing about like, yeah, your, your list, your network is your net worth when it comes to recruiting. It's like you gotta, you gotta have that list of people you know and nurture. So again, it's all marketing. It's all about messaging. It's all, it's just, it's the different targets. But it's so powerful that this is. If there was one thing again that our people struggle with, it's the mindset of money. The second thing is marketing as an industry. But that begins with the healthcare providers who get zero training or support. And that's why I love you guys. When we were coming to you before we met, you know, your, your team, we were going to doctor's offices and knocking on doors and listen, I had practices that weren't like struggling for new patients. I had two locations that just geographically drew so many patients in. But just like my mindset was that I had to like own these relationships with doctors that totally felt like I was at cause where like, if they needed something, I had to jump. And then later because I started holding, you know, the different, like marketing things that we would learn. Events. Yeah, it, it, and this is true, Carl. By the time we were done, doctors were calling me to market to me. Because in smaller towns, which is where I specialized, we owned the community relationship, not the other way around.

Yeah.

And so that, that was cool because it shifted the power dynamic. Our business was growing just because we were the only game in town in a couple of our cities. But just the fact that the doctors were like, hey man, how's everything going? Like, they're checking in with me. That energy shift alone was freedom. And then other locations that were more competitive. No, no one could compete with us because most pts don't know any of this stuff. So that's where I think Breakthrough comes in as an educational piece. So I'm sad to see that the coaching isn't as big as it used to be. But I actually believe that in the end it won't matter.

We're still doing a ton of it. We just don't charge for it.

Like you said, if you're starting out, just get familiar with Breakthrough.

We're doing a ton of coaching still. We, we, we just, we don't charge for it. Essentially it's just free content. And we have a ton of others like now. I mean, like our community is really strong. We have practices or practice owners who are in there who have retired even that are just still hanging around to help help each other out. So it's a really cool thing. And that's one of the good things I think about the, I forget the caregiver mindset probably that, you know, takes place in this market that I sort of just like really love. And it's part of the reason I love this market is because everybody really wants to help each other. And yeah, so, I mean, we, we have a lot of free stuff. Definitely come to one of our events.

How can they learn about all this stuff? That's a nice segue into your, your, how do they get a hold of you business. Like how, how can people learn more about the free stuff? How can they learn more? I guarantee people are going to be like, yeah, I just want to learn more about these AI agents. How can they learn about all of it?

Yeah, I mean, you could just go to getbreakthrough.com and get breakthrough.com. yeah. Get BreakThroug and if you go there to our website, you're going to be able to find a number of ways to a number of forums to fill out if you want. So to sign up to chat with us, you can learn more on the website itself as well. Just learn by going and checking it out. If you're interested in our free content, you know, just go ahead and fill any, you know, fill out any of the forms you see on there. There's lots of free things that we give away or check out our blog or follow. Follow us on our podcast, the Grow your practice podcast that that Chad Madden runs and you'll hear more and more about what we're doing. We do have an event coming up in Orlando which I'll see you at.

Well, hopefully that's right.

And yeah, it's in, it's January 15th I think to 18th is if I'm guessing right. And we're going to be talking about marketing, we're going to be talking about recruiting, we're going to be talking, we have experts in all kinds of things, lots of experts in the cash space as well in terms of like how to have cash add ons in your business and things like that. So definitely come. It's going to be a huge party. We have a mechanical bull. It's western.

Oh, no way.

Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a good time. We've got a lot of great, great speakers and it should be, some, should be super fun.

So yeah, let me, let me, let me rephrase that last part for Carl. It's going to be super worth it. I. Listen guys, I get nothing for saying this. I was a client of theirs. I've been in the B2B space with them. If you've been living under a rock and you don't know who Breakthrough is, take my word for it, this is a company you need to know. This is one of those connections and relationships that will offload you in a way where you can focus on what you love and not have to worry about what we call the hardest part of the business, the biz dev, the high, the getting new clients part. If you're struggling with that on any level, please go to getbreakthrough.com yeah, and.

If you want to come to an event, feel free to just email me. Email me@carl getbreakthrough.com and I'll get you a free ticket if you're listening to this.

Oh my gosh, guys, that's, that's a big thing right there. Thank you, Carl, that's very generous of you.

No worries.

All right, guys, Rockstars, thanks for tuning in. As always. This is Will Humphreys reminding you to lead with love and to never give up. Until next time.