Yusuf “JP” Saleeby talks about the trials of selecting a marketing company and he answers the question "What was harder, going to Med School or starting a business?".

Our episode highlights:

• Fail fast, fail early...
• Spent time looking at the references that they gave and talked with the owner of the company.
• Develop a set of core values (this will be your guiding light)

Bio: Dr. Yusuf “JP” Saleeby is a graduate from the Medical College of Georgia (Augusta, Georgia) and completed post-graduate training at East Carolina University School of Medicine in Greenville, North Carolina. He pursued a career in emergency medicine (EM) for almost two decades. During his career in medicine held posts in occupational medicine (DOD) and Urgent Care and Family Medicine. Currently, he practices Integrative & Functional Medicine at Carolina Holistic Medicine with sites in the Southeastern USA.

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yusuf-jp-saleeby-md-b3826615/
• Website: https://carolinaholisticmedicine.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CarolinaHolisticMedicine

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I'm excited for today's episode.

We have use of, solidi also known as JP on the show with us today.

JP has been faced with the challenge of marketing in his business.

However, despite the.

He has really solved this issue through trial and error, he's

seen a 275% increase new clients.

And JP has an amazing list of past achievements and

recognition in the medical field.

And he'll dive into that a little bit further here in just a second.

He's helped lead shape and guide all different aspects of

medical and health over the past 30 plus years in that medical.

He's helped his patients improve their health in spite of that

ever-growing challenges of reaching more people and that marketing aspect.

There's so much to learn from him.

And I'm super excited to jump in and learn about all he's overcame

and where his business is today.

Glad to have you on the show today.

Thanks Joshua.

Awesome.

So let's dive in and walk through.

What is your sort of gives that 92nd background, who

are you how did you get here?

When, what do you do?

Sure.

I'm classified as a functional medicine physician.

Currently.

This is my second career in medicine.

My first was about a 20 year career in more conventional

mainstream emergency meds.

With that, job of dealing with urgent and emergent care both the acute injuries

we're great at that in the United States.

A dislocated shoulder, gunshot wound, no better place in the

world to be taken care of.

But on the other hand, we have chronic illness and things like

diabetes, obesity, hypertension, renal failure, and we don't do real well.

So then during those 20 years, I realized there was something better.

So I transitioned away from the mainstream.

Into a functional and integrative medicine, which I think serves that

population of chronic illness in a true preventive mode, not just

giving lip service to preventative medicine but really honestly doing it.

And in my clinical career, I also, it gave birth to a nonprofit organization,

a teaching academy where I can actually teach other advanced providers the same

skills that I'm, that I practice here.

So that's in a nutshell.

Awesome.

Yeah.

And the difference there you're talking about is that active versus reactive

or the proactive rather than reactive.

And like you said our medical industry is great at being reactive

to whatever is thrown at it, but the proactive aspect I definitely have seen

personally it's definitely something.

I think there's a big room for improvement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's like I said, there's a lot of lip service in conventional medicine about

preventive medicine, but in actuality, it's not really practiced very well.

There's a lot we can do for our patients with lifestyle management

modifications and keeping people off of chronic illness meds.

Most medications are a patch.

Relieving symptoms, but not, dealing with the root cause.

So I know we were talking before I hit record about one of

your business challenges has been or that marketing piece walk us through.

What were the needs there?

Why marketing and what did that look like for them?

Sure.

So this was all new.

In medical school they teach us anatomy and physiology, but they

don't teach us any business courses.

And my undergraduate was science-based as well.

So I was protected for the first career by large hospital systems

and they did all the marketing.

They did all the hiring.

My, my overhead was basically my scrubs and my stethoscope and that's all.

To deal with, I didn't have any HR or anything else in my

first 20 years of medicine.

So when I embarked on a solo practice, private practice and initially embraced

the insurance model, but that didn't work.

And after 18 months I decided.

looked at the numbers and I say I'll be out of business in three

months if I keep going this route.

So I had to terminate all my managed care contracts and opt out of Medicare

and all that stuff just turned my back completely away from that model and

in doing so, it really cut into the number of patients being referred to

me, to my practice by that system.

We lost about 60% of our Medicare patients.

So I realized real quickly, I had a, it was a new practice.

It started into the end of 2013 brand new practice.

Had a very low patient base and it wasn't as if it was a traditional

internal medicine practice of something like 10 or 20 years where they had

built up a clientele of, 3000 patients.

And then they.

VIP MD.

And they basically whittled it down to 300 lucky ones.

We didn't have that.

We didn't have a patient.

So we had to build it from scratch.

And, it took me almost six different marketing companies

to finally have one that worked.

The first three were really very traditional bill, large marketing

companies that did both print ads and billboards, and they did some.

Marketing, but their main focus was on print and that just didn't work for us.

There, there was no return on investment.

It was negative return on investment so quickly migrated from one to another.

Usually not lasting more than a year with these groups.

The second to last one, Almost did me in almost put me out of business.

They were a local company it's pretty small and they promised the

world and they delivered nothing.

They were basically really super expensive and they came with

a couple of good references.

I spoke to other physician groups that were utilizing them and

they give them good reviews.

But it seems the.

The information they were trying to push on us was a lot of social.

Marketing these big campaigns, big, expensive campaigns and like

Facebook and a few other social media.

And I was a little hesitant, but I said, these guys are the pros.

They know what they're doing, let's go for it.

And it was a complete disaster.

They did have some staffing issues.

Their turnover was really high.

We lost our account.

Two, two different ones.

And it just, it, we were pretty much a small player in their group of

companies that we're working with.

And so we got the put on the back burner and as a consequence Google

apparently went through an algorithm change and it devastated our website.

They fell asleep on the job.

They did not realize it.

They did not make the corrections or updates.

And so we lost so much real estate on the internet over a period of three

or four months before we caught it.

And had it turned.

We had to terminate them.

And we were scrambling because our number of new patient inquiries

had dropped significantly.

And I thought, oh my God, I might, this might do us in.

Landed a fellow who was referred to me from another business associate.

I knew.

And he built up our website, corrected all the problems with

the algorithms and the SEO, and got us back on track and his current.

We liked him a lot.

He did a great job.

He's very personable, but he got really too big, too fast and he couldn't

keep up with his other clients.

So again, we felt a little bit of our R input, the folks making inquiries

and all that was drifting off.

There were some problems that weren't corrected with some of the links.

There were some dead links.

So I went on the search, I interviewed two more local marketing,

digital marketing companies.

Cause this one that we were leaving was based out of Florida,

so he wasn't readily available.

So I wanted someone local and after interviewing two

different companies, I selected.

And this guy has done remarkable work for us are the return

on the investment is amazing.

He is affordable and he knows what he's doing and he's on top of everything.

So that saved our business.

And within the first six months, I would have to say his work alone has

increased our volume of inquiries by 275%.

Our conversion rate is about 48% of 52, depending on which month you study, which

is unheard of in the industry, that's

just digitally.

But there were a couple of other things we

implemented that we did at our end.

But just the fact that SEO, we we did a, we did one more.

Google ads and it didn't pan out.

It was, there was no return on that investment, so we've let go.

They added the paid for advertising and we've let go

of all this social media stuff.

My, my wife is the office manager.

She maintains a little contact with the social media and we'll answer

inquiries that come in through there.

But most of it is just a digital marketing, 99%.

We do have one paid print ad that we run in a local medical focused magazine

that comes out every two months.

And it's a quarter page ad, but it doesn't amount to much just gives us a presence,

but it's all basically I would have to say anyone that's doing functional

medicine who starting up a practice, I would do, think about doing 90, 90% just.

Marketing and the search has to go on for the right person to do the, do it for you.

And that can be the challenge.

But in addition to the digital marketing, we implemented a very much.

Personal touch.

We didn't want to automate our websites.

That, that became a cliche and a lot of people just don't like that.

Especially older patients, they like that human contact.

So we actually hired two staff members who work from home and all they do

is they make that initial contact.

They're our Walmart greeters, if you will.

And that has bolstered our conversion rate.

They are the ones that are responsible for us closing the deal

on new patient inquiries coming in.

They understand the practice.

They feel there's a personal touch.

We have a set of core values that are adhered to everyone, knows them.

They're posted all over the place.

And we're getting this this influx of patients that are looking for that.

They're looking for that human touch.

They're looking for compassionate people, and that's what we're portraying

our business as, and in this last two years with the COVID pandemic

where other businesses and including medical offices have suffered.

Ours has flourished.

My accountant asked me last year when he was handing me my tax returns.

How the hell did you do that?

You did better in 2020 than you did in 2019.

Whereas all of my other clients have.

And I said first of all, we're medical.

So that accounts for something, but also going from about

40 to now, 70% telemedicine.

And we had all platforms already set up.

We didn't have to reinvent the wheel.

We were doing telemedicine back in 2013.

So we had all of our platforms.

All of our staff and providers were all solid with those.

And it was nothing for us.

From doing about 30 to 40% and now doing about 70.

And so I think the combination of both the marketing and also some strategies

we we embarked on in our practice really helped put us where we are today.

That's awesome.

I want to highlight one element that you said is that you

guys in a day and age where.

So many companies are focused on chat bots and these automated marketing tools.

You guys literally went the other direction.

You said we're gonna hire two full-time staff members that are going to be

physical people that answer the phone, make phone calls, do that initial,

like you said, Walmart, greeter style, contact where so many companies.

Are wanting to use a chat bot.

And I think that's something that, companies who are considering utilizing a

chat bot, if it's not done for the right reasons, it will turn customers away.

I know for my personal experience, I've been on websites where I'm like, all I

want to know is if you're open tomorrow and this chat bot just has no idea.

And it's would you like to schedule an appointment?

Tomorrow's hours and it's I'm sorry.

I didn't understand.

And it's just are you open tomorrow?

And it's so frustrating.

And then sadly, I closed the website and all under the next company and I go

find someone else who is, or has that information more readily available.

That's, my modus operandi, my emo in running my business.

Whether it's this practice or I had a previous integrative practice in

Savannah, Georgia years ago, it was always being 20 years ahead of everyone else.

As a functional medicine physician, I'm practicing medicine.

That's in the 21st century.

A lot of our practice guidelines and mainstream medicine are

20th century guidelines.

Look at the disaster we're having.

Doctors are sitting on their hands.

They don't know what to do for their patients.

As far as outpatient therapy, they're sending people home and after a

positive COVID-19 test and say, drink water, take aspirin or Tylenol.

And then come back.

If you're having respiratory problems, we'll put you in the hospital.

That's unacceptable.

So we're as a consequence of doing stuff, being proactive,

And tr and offering treatments, viable treatments to our patients.

We're getting a flood of patients.

And this has actually happened in the last six weeks.

We've had such a flood I've had to actually hire.

Staff and hire two new, two more nurse practitioners to

help him with the patient load

I think so much of that is also that transition aspect of what

we talked about at the beginning is the aspect of preventative versus that

reactive and so much, the reactive of.

Go home.

And if you get sick, then come back rather than, okay.

What are two things I can do?

Maybe it's at home that are preventative.

So I don't end up back here.

I want to hone in on, on the marketing aspect a little bit you touched base

on, you guys have gone through a handful of companies and for all different

reasons, they made, they didn't work out for whatever reason, that might be.

But what is your advice for a business owner who is saying, Hey, I am facing a

marketing challenge and I'm looking to hire a company, or if you were able to

talk to your younger self and say, Hey, here's the advice of what I would do?

That's a real big challenge because, really,

unless you go in and have several sit down meetings, I was impressed with

what some places looked like when I would walk through their front door.

It was really this really cool vibe, very modern architecture

looked like it was well-funded.

And so I thought I'm pretty comfortable with this.

These guys must be doing well.

They've got big contracts.

They're name dropping.

All these big companies in the area and they must be doing well.

And, they weren't a good fit for me.

After a few months it was, brutally honest I was with myself.

I was like I, they say keep going.

It takes three months.

It takes six months.

And I had to be honest with myself and say, really let me sit

down and think this through and realize that it wasn't a good fit.

Fulfill anything they had promised, it seemed several of them had gone

to the same conferences and they would say the same thing over and

over again about how they wanted to structure our marketing plan.

And it just, I was like these guys must all gone to the same conference.

You're speaking the same kind of language.

I didn't hear anything really novel.

So what I did with the last.

Search was I, spent some time looking at the references they gave looking at

the websites, how they were structured.

And then I assume I got an honest representation of what they could do.

I just clicked with the business owners because these were small.

Marketing companies with a very small staff.

And so I got the chance to speak to the owners directly

and I felt very comfortable.

And I think that's the thing.

If it's a big company and you can't get to the president or the CEO you

may want to move on and it's better to start out with someone small that can

actually do some very personalized.

It's almost akin to looking at how we, as a small practice, small

private practice treat our patients versus a big hospital system.

You may have a big hospital system with 300 physicians and, huge,

beautiful marble floors, modern looking buildings and you are not

going to get the same care you will.

By a small office of really highly trained, skilled clinicians who have

the patient's best interest in mind.

And that's what I was looking for.

I put my model of as a healthcare provider and I said, let me find the

same model in the marketing company.

So I avoided these big companies with the big flashy presentations

or big, name-dropping.

And I went with a fellow who kind of instant.

Some, he like he is still confidence and he was confident.

He knew he could help.

He knew where the problem is, what he did an analysis for free a free analysis

and told me we spend an hour and a half on the phone on a actually was a zoom.

And he pointed out all the deficiencies in my website and all the broken links.

And I'm like, oh my God that's the problem.

And he said, that's easy fix.

I can fix it.

And it was that confidence that he had and his honesty that made me select him.

And it was a, it was the right choice.

Yeah.

I know the hospital analogy that you use with, the architecture in that I

look at sometimes in you walk into a lobby like that, and you're like, cool.

So you spend a million dollars or more on a, off a lobby renovation rather

than buying a new x-ray machine.

They're cutting back on essential staff

members like nurses and respiratory therapists and phlebotomist.

And yet they have this really posh foyer or entrance way.

And you think they're just crushing it and it's and it's a little deceptive.

You have to be careful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like the aspect of being able to have a conversation with the team a

lot of agencies, like you said, will you get to talk to a salesperson and

you're not gonna talk to an account rep until you sign on the dotted line.

I know of an agency in California that they have an NDA before you

see the contract, which is just.

Scammy as all get up.

And it's one of those things that being able to have that connection,

this is hiring an agency is not just, it's not a one-time interaction.

It's something where you're going to have a relationship with this business.

For hopefully a long time, hopefully, the agency that you hire thinking,

you the team you're working with, hopefully you guys are working

together for the next, 10 plus years.

And you're able to see this 275% increase year over year for the next 10 years.

At that point 10 years from now, maybe you're their only client or

maybe they've grown, a little bit more or whatever that looks like.

But I think it's really focusing on.

Ensuring that agency understands your business, understands who you are.

We'll spend the time to, like you said, go through your website, find a few

things, explain the reasons to you and all that stuff and really make sure.

You as the potential customer, understand that they know who you are

and they know what your business is.

And all of that, I think that's really critical rather than just coming in.

Anyone can come in with flashy logos, and to your point, there are

a lot of conferences that a lot of big agencies will send their whole

sales team to They're all talking the same thing, because they all

learned it at the same place.

Yeah, that's what I figured it was happening.

We had a situation where we were getting these notifications through the postal

system that we had assigned for a package.

And so in medicine we think, oh, they're probably health records.

Somebody laboratory.

There hospital discharge summary.

So we'd go to the post office and we'd have to send a staff member over there

and sign for these packages and we'd get them back to the office and open it up.

And it was advertising.

From one of the another practice, like a urological specialty practice

or allergy ear, nose and throat.

And it was all from this one hospital system.

That was eating up in our time and what we were doing, we were

filing it in file 13 and know this.

Okay great.

They want us to send referrals to them, but we don't really

we're not in that arena.

They wound up getting tossed in the trash.

We probably would have done that if they sent it by regular.

So my office manager had enough.

And so she writes them and says, Hey, you, and several of the other folks in

your hospital system do seem to be doing this new marketing strategy to try to

like, make us, definitely read your stuff.

That's great.

We want, that's wonderful, but you're wasting our time because we have to

go sign for these at the post office.

And and we asked them to please stop doing.

So again, it was something where different marketing companies were

all preaching the same new thing.

Hey let's make sure.

Your flyer is being read.

So we'll send it by by mail where they have to sign for it to receive

it like registered it's insane.

Yeah.

It's that kind of thing where I think when we were dealing with that one company

and they were really pushing this whole social media marketing campaign, that

didn't work, I'm like, oh, I was hearing that from five or six other agencies.

And so they must have all gone to that same conference or something.

And I will say social media is a great place.

As long as it connects with your market, and it depends on what platform, Facebook

versus Instagram, tick talk first, whatever it really depends on what your

platform is, what the demographic is and where your demographic hangs out.

If your demographic isn't on Instagram, then don't advertise on Instagram.

But at the same point, the one thing I would mention is.

If you guys do have, you have the Facebook page for the business, make

sure you guys are posting on there, major holidays, Hey, happy new year.

Hey, once a month posting on your social media accounts, at least on

a monthly basis, ensures that people don't hit it and go, oh, the last time

they posted on here was 14 months ago.

Maybe they closed with the pandemic way.

And now all of a sudden, they, maybe they may, they call the office and, some fluke,

the phones are down for 20 minutes or something and they go to your Facebook and

there's nothing on there for 14 months.

And they're like, okay.

Onto the next guy.

But if there was something on there from three weeks ago, they're like

they were there three weeks ago.

So that's not.

A year ago and maybe, at that point, that's when they give another chance

and also things like Google reviews and, that type of stuff as well.

People use that now as a metric to see, I know locally there was, stores where

I was like, I don't know if they're open or closed during the pandemic.

And I was checking their Facebook page and their Google reviews to try to

see if they were open today or not.

Some of the advice my current marketing fellows has given

us is, Google maps and Google is good.

So we do keep that abreast and current.

As far as Facebook, our Facebook page is very active.

I post a medical story or something almost on a daily basis, sometimes two

or three times a day when I come across.

That's an interesting abstract.

We'll go up there.

I think we keep a very active blog.

My blogs are, they're archived and they're also I set them up to go live

at certain times during the month.

So there's always current information coming out on a

weekly basis and we decided not to pay someone to do that for us.

We do that ourselves.

I'm a big blogger.

So I maintain the Facebook and LinkedIn, I do it on LinkedIn to almost redundantly.

And so those areas, but but what we noticed was the folks that were calling

and making inquiries were not so much coming in from the social media platforms.

They were coming in from some of the associated

organizations that I'm a member.

So I'm a member of four or five different organizations and they have physician

search built into their website.

So somebody who's looking for like a doctor that takes care of

line patients or a doctor that to.

Care of patients with a sick building syndrome.

These organizations have the ability for folks to search

for clinicians in their area.

So we found out that was happening, but then our, just our organic

Google searches were bringing us a tremendous amount of of traffic.

You can have that all funneled down, but if you don't have the needs in

your practice at the front door to handle it appropriate, you could lose.

A good number of potential clients.

I spoke with a business owner who said that they had 400 inquiries a

month, but they only gained about 20 new patients at the time I was

doing about, 30 to 40 inquiries and capturing about 20 new patients.

So now of course our funnel got bigger, but now we have the means to address.

The influx of new clients and keep them hungry for more, if you will.

Because they were really satisfied about who greeted them at the front.

And they got a feel of the humanity in our practice and our

compassion and dependability.

Those are all real big, important features.

I would also tell a prospective business owners that develop a set of core values.

I, so when I started my business, I was a member of Vistage.

Vistage is an organization that I think would was created in

the 1950s in the United States.

And it's an international fraternity of CEOs basically once a month,

a group of CEOs gets together from different industries.

No two can be the same.

We had people, architects and lawyers and paving companies, asphalt paving company.

Some of them were multimillion dollar companies, and some

of them were pretty small.

But we all have the same problems with marketing, staffing, HR, all these.

And we'd get a speaker to come in.

And then the rest of the day we would, basically identify problems and try

to work through it amongst ourselves.

And in other group, I was also a member of was tab, which is the alternative board.

Again, these are groups that are led by a facilitator and

they are, in my opinion, key.

To keeping your business solvent and sustainable and growing and scaling up.

And I, to this day still have a tab advisor I meet with every other

month who guides me through and I have someone to bounce stuff off of.

They actually helped save my practice.

At one point a few years, And they've given great advice as to, to help with the

marketing and HR and staffing problems.

So I would encourage people out there listeners to who are small

business owners to explore that and look at those kinds of groups.

Yeah, those are really good.

I'm in tab.

And that's how we connected actually through the tab sort

of global community element.

And I will say having that accountability partner and for those who are listening,

who don't understand how tab works, not gonna spend a whole ton of time on

that, but basically it's a group of.

Other business owners, who you get as a sounding board on a monthly basis, you

have, a coach who you work with depending on how your tab group is set up on either

a monthly or every other month basis.

And to be able to have that accountability of, I've got five other business owners

that I know I'm meeting with in two weeks.

And I have a to-do item that I have to get done before that, or

I have to show up to my meeting.

I didn't do it.

And having that accountability.

And the other thing is the resources.

I needed a an attorney in a specific field and.

I brought that issue to my tab board and someone goes, oh, I've got a great one.

He's super affordable charges by the quarter hour.

Like no attorney charges by the quarter hour is normally like a two hour minimum.

And so it's really nice to have those resources at your

fingertips and it's really great.

I attribute a lot of the growth of my business to.

To that.

Because when I opened up my shop, it was a solo practice outside of insurance model,

what we call DPC direct primary care.

And there was no playbook.

There was no manual to follow.

I built it along the way.

And it was, there was a lot of bumps and bruises and scrapes.

I could write a book now and tell somebody who's starting off

what to do and what to avoid.

But at the time there wasn't a playbook and I relied on tab and Vistige to help

me navigate those kinds of those rough waters so that I could build a business

that was sustainable and profitable.

And

Sustainable and profitable is definitely two primary elements.

So I have one last question before we wrap up.

But I've loved chatting and appreciate the time today.

But one last question.

So which was harder going to medical school or starting your own business.

I think for physicians now, there are other specialty

groups of like in chiropractic medicine, they teach them how to run a business.

There's a lot of business courses built into the curriculum, but in traditional

medical school for MDs or dos, there isn't an, and so while it was different

challenges medical school, the first two years, there's a lot of rope memory.

So you gotta have good memory banks and be able to assimilate

a lot of information in a big.

And then clinical your last two years of medical school and residency

training, it was, a sleep deprivation.

You were on call every third night and you were sleep deprived and you're trying to

assimilate all the things you're supposed to learn into that with sleep deprivation.

And we all know that memory, is affected by sleep deprivation.

The, to answer your question, I would have to say starting your

own business is really difficult.

It was much more challenging.

Because there are so many more aspects of it.

Then going through medical school.

The one thing I will say as a positive with medical school

is as you start a residency program, there's someone there to coach you and

to lead you through that where starting a business, there's not, and that's why

we both have found programs like tab that are essentially that for businesses.

So it's been an awesome.

I appreciate the time today.

Thanks for listening to this episode of, in the bunker.

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