Jack Hadley teaches social media marketing to MBA students at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management in Provo, Utah. He is also a founding partner at My Social Practice, an agency providing social media marketing support to dental practices worldwide.
Jack is the former CEO at Lava7, one of the nation’s first agencies focused exclusively on social media marketing solutions for businesses. And in early 2008, he founded Cowork Utah—a social media community workspace that provided a collaborative environment for independent designers, bloggers, and programmers. During that same year, Jack also cofounded the Utah Valley Social Media Club. Jack is an award-winning copywriter, epiphany catalyst, and former ad agency Creative Director with a rich background in all aspects of the creative process. As a corporate storyteller Jack has helped scores of businesses cut through the clutter by distilling and clarifying their marketing messages and positioning. Jack is an engaging speaker who is frequently asked to address business and dental groups about social media marketing, creativity, and corporate messaging.
Transcript of the Conversation
R.J. Martino:
Welcome to the iProv Made Podcast, where we teach you how to build a profitable healthcare practice. I’ve got my awesome cohost with me, Jordan.
Jordan Smith:
Hey, everybody. We’re excited to have you in on this one. They’re all special. But so I say they’re all like our children. But I’m very excited to bring this one to you guys. You guys have probably heard this organization before, specifically on here, My Social Practice, but we have the honor of having the former co-founder, who is now spending most of his time speaking at giant conferences, teaching at colleges, the same things that we’re trying to talk to you guys about every day, which are what can you do specifically on social media to help grow your practice?
R.J. Martino:
I mean, he’s a wealth of knowledge and a fabulous speaker. I’d really encourage you to dive into this one. Because at the end of it, you’re going to be inspired and ready to move.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. Speaking of that, have less time with us and more time with Jack. Let’s get started. Everyone, Jack Hadley.
Jack Hadley:
Hey, everybody. Thanks for inviting me, been looking forward to it.
Jordan Smith:
Well, we appreciate you having on for you guys who don’t know, and hopefully some of you all do already. Jack has a ton of experience in some of the stuff that you guys are listening, always listening to us talk about, specifically not only with building practices and helping them become as successful as they want to, plus probably past that, but specifically how they interact with their audience on social media. So, Jack’s been in the game for a while.
Jordan Smith:
You can often catch him on speaking tours, but for those listeners of the podcast or even people who are new to it, I would encourage you to go back and listen to a couple that we did on My Social Practice, which is a really fantastic organization that works day-to-day helping dental practices really surpassed their expectations and their goals by utilizing social media to the utmost of its ability. And Jack is a former co-founder of that organization.
R.J. Martino:
Jack, we’re just happy you’re here. We gave a little brief introduction. But from your experience, how do you typically introduce yourself?
Jack Hadley:
Well, let me give you the really short thumbnail version. I’ve been in marketing for about 30 years and in dental marketing and healthcare marketing specifically for about 20 of those 30. About 10 or 11 years ago, when it looked like social media marketing may become a big deal, which it wasn’t at the time. As you probably remember, for businesses, it was simply a personal space when it first was lunch, but I could kind of see that this was going to be a big deal and certainly in businesses that are federal that are human-driven in medical, specifically in dental. And so, I had this idea to start My Social Practice.
Jack Hadley:
And for the last 10 or 12 years, we’ve been helping practices grow and figure out how to use this crazy thing called social media. And we also have helped other healthcare industries. We’ve got a lot of optometrists that we work with, some dermatology practices. And so, most of the principles that we help practices with are good across a number of different professions. It isn’t just specifically dentistry that can be helped with some of the ideas we teach.
R.J. Martino:
Jack, you and I have had some discussions about what it’s like trying to run a business as a health care expert. We first kind of like to ask the type of people that you work with, what their life was before you started working with them and kind of what that transitions looked like. If you think about your most successful clients, what were they struggling with before and what did it look like afterwards?
Jack Hadley:
I think if I were to name kind of a typical success type practice that we would work with, it’s one that may not be a brand new practice, although we’ve worked with an awful lot of practices that are brand new.
Jack Hadley:
And typically, it’s not one that’s in the closing years of its life, but kind of that middle-ground. Where perhaps the practice is doing well, they’ve thought, “Gosh, what could we do more to grow our business using social media marketing?” and yet, they’re not really sure what to do. They know it’s important. At least in their gut, they feel like this is something they ought not to ignore and may provide some great opportunities, but they’re just not sure what to do.
Jack Hadley:
And so, what typically happens is they’ll read an article somewhere or hear something somewhere and then they’ll say, “Well, okay, well, let’s start.” And they’ll put Sally in charge at the front desk and say, “Go Sally.” And then, Sally will post a couple of things. She’ll run out of ideas. The patients don’t flock in the next day and pound the door down. And they think, gosh, I don’t know if social media works.
Jack Hadley:
So, it’s practices like that that we try to just give them the vision of how this really works overtime and how to be effective in a very small amount of time because most practices don’t have a ton of time to devote to this type of marketing.
R.J. Martino:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I think you hit the nail on the head with exactly kind of what we think about how to build a profitable practice because Jordan and I, whenever we sit and meet with these, typically, healthcare owners, they want to talk about lots of symptoms, lots of problems, and they’re hoping that we can fix those problems. And they do exactly what you just described, which is they find a symptom or a problem or something they think they can help with. And they jump straight to tactics, they give it to the front desk person. And they just say, do this just-
Jack Hadley:
Yeah.
Jordan Smith:
They’ve got their hands up, because they say, we’ve done that and it hasn’t worked before. Well, no, you were just you were just pushing out tactics for the sake of pushing out tactics.
R.J. Martino:
So, after we hear those tactics, we think the second step is just demanding accountability from yourself, just telling yourself, “Look, if this is going to get fixed, I got to get involved.” Because as physicians, we want to just throw money at problems sometimes. And you can’t do that. You’ve got to take control and actively participate if you want to see real change.
Jack Hadley:
Yeah, that’s a great point. In the old days, it used to be a little bit easier to just write a check and forget about it. You meet with the Yellow Pages guy once a year and he or she would say, “Well, are you going to run the same ad?” And you’d say, “Let’s run a bigger ad.” So, then you write a bigger check and then you could forget about it for a year. But it doesn’t really work that way anymore.
R.J. Martino:
So, that’s exactly right. And so, our job originally is just looking at those two things. Now, there are symptoms that we think we can help with. And is this the kind of person that is basically coachable?
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. And I know Jack, a lot of your day-to-day life right now is just going out and trying to add as much value to large groups as possible. We talked earlier about you’re spending a lot of your days or a lot of your weeks kind of traveling around and speaking at different conferences. Tell us how kind of involved or how focused you see most of this kind of provider-owned practices, or at least the owners of these things, how much accountability and how much day-to-day stuff they’re taking control over to try to write the ship from a marketing perspective?
Jack Hadley:
Yeah, that’s great to talk about. If I had to kind of name a typical successful practice that we would work with, for the most part, the owner, or dentist, or doctor is involved in a limited way, but typically not day-to-day, but they have the vision, the why, the big picture. But they don’t always have to execute the how, or the what, as long as they understand the why. Why are we doing this and lend that kind of support from a strategic perspective.
Jack Hadley:
Social media tactics change all the time. And so, you can’t just set it and leave it alone either. But if the owner operator of the business has the vision for why they’re doing things, it’s much easier to sustain it and much easier to get the team involved a little bit. I have found that most of the time when a business owner or a practice owner is concerned that they don’t have time to deal with this, it’s typically because they’re not sure what to do. It isn’t so much that there’s no time to do it.
Jack Hadley:
Because if you know exactly what to do and exactly what to have your team members do to make it work, you can actually execute things very, very quickly in a very short amount of time if you know exactly what to do. So, their participation and support from the global perspective, the strategic perspective is very important, but they don’t have to do everything.
Jack Hadley:
The problem comes when they don’t understand why they’re doing it. And then when they don’t see results like they maybe thought or they were a little misguided and thinking what this really is about, then consistency falls off and many times, it falls off the plate and becomes of not.
Jordan Smith:
You mentioned something important, and we talked about it all the time is your vision as an owner, that’s the thing you’re responsible for conveying to the rest of your staff. Once you get that out of the way and everybody’s aligned with that, your strategy shouldn’t change too often, but tactics can change fairly often. So, I’m glad you hit on them.
Jack Hadley:
Yeah, that’s true.
R.J. Martino:
Well, our third big step after we find out if there’s accountable is, do they have a vision? And a lot of times we have to tease that out of this because we have to figure out what are you trying to accomplish? How often is it that you meet with a dentist or a potential client and they don’t know what they’re really trying to do?
Jack Hadley:
Well, certainly when it comes to marketing specifically, that happens quite a bit. And I have tremendous empathy for owner, whether it’s a dentist or dermatologist or oral surgeon, I have so much respect for these guys and gals because I’ve been in enough practices over the last decade to know how many hats they wear. And they’re trying to be the clinician, they’re trying to run the business. Oh, and by the way, hey, put on this marketing hat and be the CMO. I mean, this is not an easy place to be. And so, I really understand their frustration sometimes with that.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. Well, all of that being said, and you mentioned part of your job is just really educating people on what best practices are and different things that they can use not only from a strategic level, but also real-life tactical level. I know there’s no secret sauce and we talk all the time, there’s no silver bullet either. But what are some of those best practices that you’re often telling people about?
Jack Hadley:
I think that to kind of distill it down to a couple of thoughts about kind of the big picture of social media marketing, the one that I find is most often misunderstood, is that practice owners have been conditioned over the years and rightly so by marketing to believe that marketing is about “selling” dental services.
Jack Hadley:
And so, in the old days of the phonebook, yes, that you turn to the ad and it absolutely talked about the features or the practice. We do root canals, we do wisdom teeth, we do fillings, we do veneers, and it was about selling. The thing that’s changed and what we call new marketing from a global idea and kind of stepping back and saying, why are we doing this, is that social media has allowed practices to have a very easy and very specific way to what I like to say, endear their business to the community.
Jack Hadley:
And in doing so, in the old days, we used to call these public relations back in the old agency days. Some people think public relations means if you have a crisis, you send somebody out to talk to the news, but public relations is much more than that. It’s building the brand in the community and making sure that people have top of mind awareness of who you are, and why you contribute to the community and why you provide value to the community.
Jack Hadley:
So, when a dentist or other healthcare professional can step back and say, “This is about more than just selling dentistry or selling optometry or whatever,” and see that kind of that vision and their eyes kind of open to that, it changes the posture and timing of everything that they do in marketing. And I think it brings great peace of mind to the practice because they know the things that the tactics, the things they’re executing day-to-ay, are leading back to this kind of bigger idea.
R.J. Martino:
That’s good stuff. I mean, what you just described, if I’m a dentist listening to that, too, in my mind’s eye, I can see what a successful social media strategy looks like now, because you’ve just helped paint that. How do you determine if you can help a practice? Or what are some things that tell you that, “Hey, I just can’t help these guys.” For whatever reason, what are you looking for in whether you know or not?
Jack Hadley:
Yeah, typically, it doesn’t have much if anything to do with the size of the practice. We have a lot of practices that we work with where there’s only two or three people in the practice, the doctor and maybe a front desk person and maybe a couple of people assisting the doctor, all the way up to practices that have 20, 30, 40 employees.
Jack Hadley:
So, it doesn’t seem to be the size of the practice. I think it’s more about and you mentioned this, when we started this visit, you said something about this idea of being teachable, and to be able to take a deep breath and have the courage maybe to throw out about half of the things that we’ve always believed about marketing and about selling services, and look back and say, “You know what, the world has changed. And I can see why. And I can show them examples or our team can show examples of how much more effective it is to take this different tack.”
Jack Hadley:
So, I think open mindedness absolutely is critical in this space. You don’t have to have tons of money. One of the cool things about social media marketing is that if you know what to do, you can do a lot of experimenting with very little amounts of money. It doesn’t take $2,000 to experiment with a little boosted post on Facebook or a little ad on Instagram. These are things that are really affordable. So, it doesn’t take a giant budget. It just kind of takes a mindset and a willingness to experiment a little bit and to put your weight and support behind it a little bit and to be patient.
R.J. Martino:
So, procedurally Jack, I think that we’ve kind of hinted around about your philosophy in the past, when it comes to actually tactically what are you doing to help a dentist or healthcare provider grow their business?
Jack Hadley:
Well, early on when we started the company, when there were hardly any businesses using social media, we try to provide content that practices could use to then go out and just raise top of mind awareness on social media. So, many times we would, for example, create a little campaign, some printed materials, some materials they could put in their office in front desk to encourage patients when they were in that practice to “Like us on Facebook,” right? You always saw especially 8 or 10 years ago when all this took off, it wouldn’t matter if you went to your dry cleaner or to your favorite restaurant or to your dentist, there was a little sign in the window said “Like us on Facebook.”
Jack Hadley:
And so, early on, we were preparing materials to kind of help practices do that. Just say, “Hey, we’re on Facebook. We provide some great dental related content. You got to follow us on Facebook.”
Jack Hadley:
And so, we created these materials including what we call and still call social signs, which are nice little graphics that are on little cards that provide a photo opportunity for a doctor to grab a patient, put his or her arm around the patient and take a little photo with a little sign that says, “I love my dentist” or “We love our patients,” which would provide some personal content to then publish on social media.
Jack Hadley:
So, that’s kind of where we started. And then of course, over the years, the tools have evolved and today, we have a number of different ways that we help practices depending on what their needs are and we kind of fit wherever they need us to fit. There are some practices that need us to help them do a lot of things. And there’s some practices where we actually do very, very little but we just provide the path and then kind of coach them along. And when someone on their team needs some help or support, they get a hold of list and we coach them a little bit.
Jack Hadley:
So, we can kind of work wherever a practice needs the most help. We have a number of different ways to do that. We’ve been working this last year or so launching the first influencer marketing program. It’s kind of the wild west out there. As you know, those of you who are familiar with Instagram, there are influencers that have a million followers and it costs you $100,000 to have them post something, which are not probably good candidates for a dental practice, for example, because of the amount of money it costs to leverage those kinds of people. And they also have international and national followers, which doesn’t do much good for a local business.
Jack Hadley:
So, we have been really focused on finding ways to leverage local influencers that have local followings, and have a lot of clout and a lot of respect and a lot of trust among their smaller audiences. And then, we negotiate contracts with them to have them maybe come in to have their teeth whitened for example, and the practice has great experience with the influencer. In exchange for getting their teeth whitened, they will agree to do it a number of stories or posts on Instagram and kind of talk about their experience.
Jack Hadley:
And not only have we found that the reach is really great for these local influencers for practices, but many times the influencers have such a great experience at the practice that they end up staying there and becoming patients there. So, that’s one little example of the kinds of things that kind of continue to evolve in this space and our goal at My Social Practice is try to take those things and distill them down for our audience and for our clients, such that they can utilize them and kind of know where to start.
Jordan Smith:
Well, and that’s huge because I bet a lot of our listeners out there, whenever you started talking about influencer marketers, they’re, “Okay, well I’m not going to get one of the Kardashians.” No, every community has one of these mommy bloggers or somebody that has thousands of followers that follow them for different things whether it’s on Pinterest for different craft ideas or different health, workout routines or cooking things or any of that type of stuff. So, every community has a set of local influencers nowadays. So, I think that service is huge.
R.J. Martino:
Well, I think it’s difficult [inaudible 00:21:33] would think it’s going to be hard for me to find those things, but the impact that it can have.
Jordan Smith:
We all have influencers in our life.
R.J. Martino:
I mean, I’ve got people I follow on Facebook and those people don’t even realize they’re influencing me. So, this idea of kind of a micro influencer. That’s really neat, Jack.
R.J. Martino:
I know a lot of people think of you as the dental expert on these speaking tours. You’ve got a lot of influence there. So, if you put your hat on and you’re just talking at these healthcare marketing conferences and dental conferences, how would you advise them to hire someone, a social media marketing company? What are some of the things you tell them to look out for?
Jack Hadley:
Well, I think the first thing to do is to get up to speed a little bit on the space and what I mean by that is there are for example, a number of website companies that specialize in building websites or maybe they specialize in SEO. And when the whole social media thing kind of became a thing, they went out to a lot of their customers and said, “Hey, by the way, we’d be happy to do your social media for you. We’ll post a graphic each day to your Facebook page that says Happy Hot Dog Day or something. And we’ll just do that for you for free.”
Jack Hadley:
And so, what happens is, maybe a practice that doesn’t really understand this space goes, “Well, gosh, that sounds good. Now, I have social media, I can check that off my list.” That kind of stuff is just so ineffective today that it’s a trap that sometimes practices get into.
Jack Hadley:
So, in advising a practice on how to kind of figure out what this space really is, we provide a number of free eBooks. We have a team of writers at My Social Practice that do an incredible job of educating. So, if anyone wants to kind of first get up to speed, you can go to our website, mysocialpractice.com. And there is a little tab that says free stuff. And inside of there are a number of eBooks that are simple to read. They’re not complex. They’re not 30 pages long.
Jack Hadley:
There are things that you can download and maybe put in the hands of your practice manager, or if you want to read them yourself or read them together or even go through them in a team meeting, and just get a little bit of a view of what this space is really about and what is being effective really mean.
Jack Hadley:
And then from there, you can sit down with the team and say, “Okay, how can we do this ourselves,” and many practices, they have the resources. They have the number of people in the practice. They can carve out a few minutes each day, and they can be super effective by themselves.
Jack Hadley:
So, I always say you don’t necessarily need anybody to help you do great social media if you understand what you’re doing. And of course, if you want a little bit of help, then there are a few companies out there that specialize in this. We kind of pioneered it, but there’s others out there.
Jack Hadley:
And so, kind of, if the company is kind of preaching the principles that you learn from this little bit of research you do on the space and reading these eBooks of ours, and they kind of align with that, it’s probably a good bet that they’ll do a good job for you. If not, then it might just be a company that thinks they could just add that to their laundry list of services without really understanding how social media works.
Jordan Smith:
Sure, I wouldn’t go to my dentist if I had an ear infection.
Jack Hadley:
Yeah, well said.
Jordan Smith:
So, talking to that, I know some of our listeners out there and some of the questions that we get and we hear other people say all the time is all of this sounds great. I talk to X, Y and Z company and they tell me one budget, I talk to another company and they tell me the same kind of tactical and strategic stuff, but the budget is completely different. How would you direct people as far as how they should think about what their budget should be, whether it’s marketing as a whole or if we’re just talking about social media.
Jack Hadley:
Yeah. Well, that is certainly a gigantic question and I’ll take a 32nd stab at it. Prior to starting My Social Practice, I actually had a traditional dental marketing company where we were doing everything from direct mail postcards to radio spots. And so, back in those days, many times, the kind of generic advice was to earmark 5 to 7% of your gross revenue each year to marketing have some form.
Jack Hadley:
Of course, for a million-dollar practice, that’s a serious investment. It’s whatever, 50 to 70,000 a year. So, more globally, I’m probably not the most qualified guy to speak to that question, but to social media specifically, if I had to guess what our average practice spends on social media, depending on how much we’re helping them, they probably spend somewhere between 200 to 5 or 600 a month to have us help them depending on how much we’re helping.
Jack Hadley:
And then they’re usually budgeting a few hundred dollars a month to boost good content or to run some ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. So, that’s just kind of an average. I mean, there’s practices that spend a lot less because they get really good at doing a lot of this themselves. And there’s practices spend a lot more. We have a number of practices that probably spend 2000 a month just boosting content on Facebook, because they get so much engagement when they boost their good posts.
Jack Hadley:
And I’m not talking about boosting a graphic that says Happy Hot Dog Day. I’m talking about boosting content that really does, in fact, endear your business to the community. And so, they get really good figuring out which ones do well and they know how to spend 50 bucks to boost it and they know how to target audiences that make a difference in their community. And they get really good at that. So, that was not a very direct answer to your question, but maybe that’ll help some people kind of-
Jordan Smith:
Again, just trying to answer questions that we all know people are asking out there as they’re listening to this, so, rather perfect. I know there’s also probably a handful of folks listening to this on their jog or while they’re getting ready in the morning or in the car, that’s saying, “Listen, if it brings a return, I’ll spend four grand a month on this stuff.”
Jack Hadley:
Sure.
Jordan Smith:
One of the things that we didn’t mention that you do, you also adjunct professor speaker, whether it’s My Social Practice or not, what are some kind of key performance indicators because we know that not everything can correlate one post to one butt in that dentist’s chair, so what are some of the other kind of measurements or progress metrics that you would tell folks to look out for just to know if you’re on the right track or even on the opposite side of that, you’re kind of off track with your messaging.
Jack Hadley:
Sure. One of the neat things about social media and about all digital strategies today is that the amount of data that can be collected is just in many cases, it’s overwhelming. But it’s so valuable, you can really hone in on what kind of content does well and what kind of content doesn’t do well in terms of engagement.
Jack Hadley:
So, in marketing, there’s a term that we’ve had forever and ever and it absolutely applies to the conversation we’re having right now, which is the term reach. And one of the things about social media marketing is that it is unlike sending a postcard to people’s mailbox in a certain ZIP code and on the postcard, it says 50% off your first visit, mention code 393K when you call, which gives you a very easy way to track the effectiveness of that postcard.
Jack Hadley:
Social media marketing doesn’t really work that way. However, over the years, we have found that when a practice is increasing their reach, meaning more people are being touched in a positive way with the message when reach grows, everything else about the practice seems to grow, calls to the practice, new patients. Patient retention seems to get much better when these relationships with current patients are cultivated.
Jack Hadley:
One of the things I talk about so much when it comes to social media marketing is the industry has been conditioned to believe that the only objective of good marketing is a new patient, and yet new patients as important as they are, and I’m not discounting their importance. And yet there are other factors that contribute to the growth of a practice, one of which is patient retention. And when we can show over a year or two that a practice is retaining their patients better, obviously, where every time you retain one, it’s one less patient new patient you have to go find.
Jack Hadley:
So, strengthening relationships is a big part of being able to gauge how well you’re doing. And many times, that starts with some of these metrics that we can cultivate and that we can get through social media that measure the reach of your content.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. No, that’s perfect. I love that because that’s one of the preaching the choir and I hope listeners heard that was start working on processes inhouse, whether it’s social media or anything that you do to focus on retention, because it’s a lot easier to keep a patient than it is to bring a brand new one in the door.
Jack Hadley:
Yeah. And another thing I talk about quite often in growth that aside from new patient acquisition is that social media offers you an opportunity to increase current patient spend in practice. And what I mean by that is, we have a number of practices that might start a new service.
Jack Hadley:
We have a practice here in Utah that we work with that started doing laser cold sore therapy in the practice. And so, instead of having to go and spend $5000 on a half-page ad in the newspaper and say we do laser cold sore therapy, they simply use social media and then in particular, they go live on Facebook and talk about this laser cold sore therapy.
Jack Hadley:
And that portion of their business has just boomed over the last eight months because they have an opportunity to reach, again, I’m using that word, to reach more people locally with a new service. So, if you can get people to spend more money in your practice than they would normally spend, whether you’re doing Invisalign or laser colds sore or sleep apnea. Prior to having social media, they had no way to disseminate that information. And now, we have powerful tools that can do that very economically.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. And we’re talking about dentists specifically, but even some of the same groups that you talk to Jack, the dermatologist of the world with all the problems-
Jack Hadley:
Absolutely.
Jordan Smith:
Optometrist, I mean, we know that those guys are really heavy retail with things like glasses and that’s a perfect opportunity to really blow out a marketing campaign on social to focus on those things that are, for lack of a better term, I mean, cash in your pocket. You don’t have to worry about insurance with a lot of those type of things.
Jack Hadley:
Absolutely. And I’m glad you brought up dermatology. I’m speaking at a dermatology national event in a couple of weeks in Denver. And in preparation for that, we’ve been talking about some of these additional services. I mean, dermatologists have lots of opportunities to add additional services and then to promote those to existing patients so you don’t have to find a new patient every single time you sell something.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. No, absolutely.
R.J. Martino:
Well, we talked about vision, we talked about strategy, we asked you what tactics to do. Our next big one is tracking that progress. I love how you’ve made it so clear. And you’ve nailed it on something that a lot of people don’t talk about. But that idea of let’s measure reach as our key performance and let’s watch that and because if your reach can grow, it uses so many other things. That is very cool.
R.J. Martino:
The next thing we always focus on is really engaging your team. Because these health care providers can’t do it all themselves. So, what team members are kind of critical for this to work? Does the dentist have to participate? Does the front desk have to participate? Who are the critical members?
Jack Hadley:
I’m going to answer that in a very probably unexpected way. I think just from having experienced this for a long time, that any team member who’s willing to just be a little bit personal is a valuable team member. Let me explain what I mean. The worst thing to do is to get all of your team into a meeting one day and say, “Okay, gang, we’re going to really blow it out on social media. Now, I want every one of you, every time we share something on social media, I want you to push that out on your personal post and tell all your friends and neighbors and blah, blah, blah,” and you kind of coerce people and twist their arms a little bit into participating, that does not work.
Jack Hadley:
So, the better way to do that is to get into a team meeting and say, look, it’s to all of our advantage to have our business do well. It helps everybody in this room when we’re doing well in business. And one of the ways to do that is to talk about our people. We are in a relationship-based business, which is very unique. There aren’t a lot of those actually in the world where people come in, talk to you face-to-face, you sit knee to knee, hand to mouth, eye to eye and those are the people, your team members are the ones that are sitting with these patients and have this relationship with them.
Jack Hadley:
The way that you can help us grow our business is just to love our patients. And when you do, look for those little opportunities now and then to share that online. And put your arm around a patient. Take a photo and ask the patient if he or she would mind sharing that to his or her own social media channel. Because if you can get a patient to share it on their personal page, it actually gets a lot more traction than you sharing it on your business page. So, train the team to just be good to your patients.
Jack Hadley:
And here’s one more tip. Get the team together and say, “Those of you who would be willing and we’re not forcing any of you, but if you’re willing to even talk about something that you’re doing personally, on social media, we’d love to have to feature you.” For example, let’s say your office manager. Her son is the captain of the local basketball team at the local high school.
Jack Hadley:
Pull out your amazing smartphone that has that amazing movie camera on it and turn it on and have your office manager talk about the game last Friday when her son led the Wolverines to win the local high school championship. Because that’s the kind of content that gets shared. That’s the stuff that endears you to other people in a human-based business.
Jack Hadley:
So, I think any team member can be valuable if they’re just willing to share a little bit. And there usually are if you talk about them, all of us like to talk about what we like to talk about. If I’m the captain of the basket weavers association in my community, then let’s talk about basket weaving. I mean, people like to talk about the things they are interested in. And if you can learn how to leverage that in your business, it has huge impact on your social media effectiveness.
Jordan Smith:
That’s a great point. We were talking about influencers earlier. And at every practice right now, if you just went and looked at some of your office staffs following on Instagram and Facebook, I bet that you probably [inaudible 00:38:58] who’s an influencer within their own office. So, if you can get one of them to share or even start to post kind of that business-related content on their personal page, I bet you guys would be surprised at the results.
Jack Hadley:
It is surprising.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah.
R.J. Martino:
One of the next questions that I have on my mind is how to have previous customers gotten buy-in from their team and you just nailed it. I mean, just that empathetic message to your people. We’re not making you do this. Whereas as leaders, as business owners, as the ones responsible to grow an organization, we want to get the team in a room and say, “Guess what? Here’s your marching orders. See you later.”
Jack Hadley:
Yeah, exactly.
R.J. Martino:
Taking that opposite approach on being empathetic, what you said it earlier telling him why we’re doing.
Jack Hadley:
Yeah. It’s funny, I’ll tell a very quick story. I won’t mention the doctor’s name, but an older doctor that I met probably five years ago and they started working with us. And I met him at a dental event and he said, “Hey, Jack, we’re going to start doing the things that you just talked about, but just know, I don’t like social media, and I probably will never do any of that myself.” And I said, “Well, that’s okay. Just think about it, do a little something.”
Jack Hadley:
And about six months later, I was talking to him again on the phone, and I said, “Hey, aren’t you a fisherman?” And he goes, “Oh, are you kidding? There’s nothing I’d rather do than fish.” And I said, “Why don’t you just start talking about fishing and how much you love fishing?” And to his surprise, he posted a few things when he went fishing with his grandson. And to his surprise, the next couple of weeks he had a dozen patients come in and say, “Hey, doctor so-and-so. I saw your little post with your grandson and saw you fishing, where do you like the fish?”
Jack Hadley:
And it just started all these conversations and it kind of reinvigorated this doctor’s interest in his patient’s and his business and when the team members saw him excited about that interaction, it spread and other team members were happy to participate as well.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah. That’s a great story. I love that and that’s funny how some people, “I’m never going to do social media for my business.” And then you look and you got that information that he loved to fish probably from looking at his private Facebook page. Call something and post some big picture in that.
Jack Hadley:
Exactly.
Jordan Smith:
How you’re going to put that, you’re doing it for your organization. Just sticking on the engaging your team and getting buy-in, I know that talking from listeners and other organizations that we’ve talked to that sometimes there’s some practices that seeing success by rewarding people monetarily or giving people certain metrics that they have to follow. What is your thought on engaging your team that way?
Jack Hadley:
I’ve seen it work. I don’t want to disparage that strategy at all because I’ve seen them do some fun things like whoever can get the most people to follow us on Instagram or whatever, we’ll treat them to dinner or whatever. So, I’ve seen it work and I have nothing against that. You know the personality of your practice much better than I do. Some practices that probably do really well. But don’t feel like that’s the only way to do it.
Jack Hadley:
I think when you put your arm around people, and just love them and let them know that you need their help and that they’re valuable, grab your hygienist and have her just do a little quick video on some oral hygiene tips and feature her and say, “Hey, we love Suzy. She’s been with us for a year now and she’s so good with the patients and she’s just awesome. And she has a little tip for you today.” I mean, make her a hero, and people do more for recognition, honestly, than they do for a prize or whatever, because we’re all human. We’re all that way. So, just love your people and they’ll help you.
Jordan Smith:
Wow.
R.J. Martino:
Well, this has been awesome. We’ve got kind of a last section that we call the final round because we’re usually talking to business leaders and our audience as business leaders. And as business leaders, we all kind of want this practice or a business that has systematic, predictable, repeatable results. And for a lot of people like you and me who have started and ran a business, we kind of know how hard it is to get to that point. So, the first thing I like to ask is if there was just a magic reset button, and you could go back to day one when you started your own business, what things would you kind of hit reset on and do so much earlier than you did?
Jack Hadley:
I think that if I had one thing that I really feel like I’ve could have done better, it was to partner with more businesses to create win-win situations. And I think if you have a small business in a certain community and you can walk down the street to, let’s say, your dermatology practice, but there’s this amazing little cafe down the street, and they have a great social media following, walk down there one day and introduce yourself to the owner of the cafe and say, “We’ve been thinking, we ought to do something really fun together. Let’s do a little package together where people can come in for free this or that and they also get to come in and have a free dessert on you and let’s promote together. Let’s raise all ships.”
Jack Hadley:
In my industry, in the dental industry, we learned after three or four years, we finally got smart enough to realize that we didn’t have to go out and create our own audiences all the time, but there are other businesses that have tremendous reach and tremendous audiences, if you can walk them there and provide them with some value of some kind. You can’t just go in and ask for a favor. You have to go in and say, “Here’s something that we can help you with.” You have to have a giving heart.
Jack Hadley:
If you’ve never read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, it’s a good read, even though it was written in 1932. He said you can make more friends in two hours by talking about other people and helping other people than you can in two years just talking about yourself.
Jack Hadley:
So, leveraging relationships, whether it’s local or whether it’s in a particular industry, spending time thinking about how to provide value to other people, I think comes back to you in spades and I wish I’d learned that earlier in my career.
R.J. Martino:
I know there’s somebody listening out there that that just hit home with, so.
Jack Hadley:
I hope so.
R.J. Martino:
I’m glad you shared that information. So, thinking kind of fast forwarding and let’s say that now you’ve hit that reset button, you fast forward, and you’re looking back on the hiring decision you’re considering making right now and imagine the people you hired today exceeded your highest expectations. I mean, they were just A-players, your whole team, what recipe or strategy did they consistently apply to deliver the most value to the business? What is being repeated over and over that you think makes your A team members a team member?
Jack Hadley:
Well, it’s funny that you would ask me that, because I have the answer right on the tip of my tongue and you and I didn’t talk about this question at all before we got started. So, this really is something that’s just foremost on my mind. I just finished this last weekend I was in California with my wife and I bought a book to read on the plane and I read the first half on the ride down to Palm Springs and the other half on the way home.
Jack Hadley:
And the name of the book and I would highly recommend it to anyone who’s listening is Covert, C-O-V-E-R-T Cows, Covert Cows. It’s the story of a gentleman by the name of Truett, who started the Chick-fil-A franchises. And the book is a quick read and an amazing read about people and how to surround yourself with people that builds your business. And he has this really simple formula, which is to really hire people not based on their skills necessarily, all those skills are certainly important, not to hire people based on their resume or what school they came out of, or whatever else, but hire people based on their heart.
Jack Hadley:
Find people that have a giving heart because they are willing to learn. They may not be the smartest guy in the room on day one, but boy, do they want to learn and do they want to serve people. And that was the foundation of his success. That’s how he built a $2 billion company was by surrounding himself with people that had a giving spirit. So, if I had it all do over again, I wish I would have read this book 10 years ago, or 20 years ago for that matter. It’s written by Steve Robinson, who is the guy that was kind of Truett’s right hand man in marketing who helped build their company.
Jack Hadley:
But find those kinds of people because, man, they not only love what they do, but they’ll build the company and they’ll stay. If you treat them that way, they stay. They don’t look for the next big thing all the time. I mean, that’s so important.
Jordan Smith:
Well, I know you said that that’s one thing you would do, but from talking to a couple key members of My Social Practice, an organization that he cofounded, I would tell you that you’ve already done it.
Jack Hadley:
Well, that’s kind of you. Thank you. We do have a lot of great people working for us. I appreciate that.
Jordan Smith:
Well, yeah. No, I mean, they’re great folks. Well, like I’ve heard a quote where Chick-fil-A sells more than chicken, they sell an experience and [inaudible 00:49:33].
Jack Hadley:
Yeah, they do.
R.J. Martino:
Yeah. If audience likes that message, we’ve actually as a group have read, Go-Giver, and there’s a book called The Go-Giver that has the same principle behind it is give, give, give, so big thing.
Jack Hadley:
Go-Giver. I’m going to write that down. I love books like that.
R.J. Martino:
Okay. So, I want you to imagine yourself and this is not going to be hard for you. But imagine yourself standing in front of a room of new physician. People just like you when you were starting out. They’re battling their way through their fears, worries, doubts and struggling to find a footing with their new practices. What are two or three strategies you would recommend that they focus on right now to go ahead and ensure their success?
Jack Hadley:
I think just be open to the space that’s been created for small businesses. I mean, when you think about it, never before in the history of marketing or in the history of being able to grow a business have we had such easy access to such powerful tools that are really relatively easy to learn how to use and are as effective as they are. Most healthcare professionals have always been dependent on other people to market their businesses.
Jack Hadley:
And today, they’re not as dependent because the tools are accessible. Now, do you need a little help in doing that? Maybe you do and that’s great, do that. But I think embrace this idea that you are the captain of the ship and you didn’t use to be able to be the captain of this ship.
Jack Hadley:
So, embrace this opportunity and decide what kind of business you want to build, decide what kind of influence you’re going to be in your community and what you want your community brand to feel like, and what you want people to think of you when they walk in the grocery store and see you across the aisle and tell the person with them, “Oh, that’s my dermatologist,” or “That’s my oral surgeon. He really helped my mom or whatever.” Create that vision because now you can actually execute on it.
Jack Hadley:
So, I think embracing that idea, it would absolutely be number one. Number two is probably what we just talked about, hire the people that share that vision and have a giving heart and surround yourself with people like that. And I think those are the two that come to my mind first. I think those are so important right now especially.
Jordan Smith:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I would agree with you. And I want to say, I’ve got a ton of value off this. RJ and I have both independently already gone on Amazon and purchase the book.
Jack Hadley:
Great.
Jordan Smith:
[inaudible 00:52:35]. I want to say thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. I know that your super busy. Listeners out there, if you want to engage with anybody from Jack’s team at My Social Practice, I know that you will be more than pleased. If you are going to or thinking about going to any conference and you see Jack’s name on there, go ahead and sign up for a ticket.
Jack Hadley:
That’s kind of you. And let me just mention if anybody has any questions and want to just, I’m happy to answer anybody’s email about anything. My email so simple. It’s just my name jack@mysocialpractice.com. So, if I don’t know the answer, I’ll forward it to somebody on our team that does or I’ll refer you to an article or some way to help you. I’m absolutely happy to do that.
Jordan Smith:
That’s perfect. And Jack, tell them how else they can get ahold of you or if they just want more information about you.
Jack Hadley:
Yeah. The best way is just to go to our website, mysocialpractice.com. And if you click on the speaking tab there, there’s more information about me and some of the things that I’ve been doing. And you’re absolutely welcome to go to my personal website. It’s just my name Jack Hadley, H-A-D-L-E-Y J-A-C-K H-A-D-L-E-Y dot com and connect with me there. All my social media channels and things are linked from there.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah, I’ll go check them out. If you’re thinking about organizing a conference or you just want more information, there’s no better person in this field to talk to than Jack. So, we’ll include all those links in the show notes. Jack, anything else you want to leave our listeners with?
Jack Hadley:
No. I just admire you guys for bringing this kind of value. There are a lot of folks who are doing vlogging and podcasting that maybe don’t have the … I don’t know, it feels to me like in looking at the content that you guys have been producing that you really have the best interest of the practice at heart. And not only that, but you’re actually doing things that are really pragmatic. These aren’t just theoretical. You’re not just trying to sell stuff, but you’re really providing value. And so, I admire you guys and I feel honored that you asked me to participate today.
Jordan Smith:
Well, we appreciate that and your check’s in the mail. Thank you, sir. Very sweet. Thank you so much, Jack. That’s what we’re trying to do.
Jordan Smith:
And listeners out there, if you know more people like Jack, or there’s specific content that you want, we say this at the end of every episode, feel free to let us know. We are producing this for you. We want to make sure that we’re adding value to what you guys are trying to do out there.
R.J. Martino:
Guys, if you have any questions, please reach out to us. Go share this with a dentist or a healthcare provider that you think needs to hear this message. And Jack, again, thank you. I think you’ve got enough wisdom where we could do a followup, would love to have you on anytime you’re free. But thank you.
Jack Hadley:
Anytime, I’d look forward to that. Thanks.
Jordan Smith:
All right. Thanks, Jack.
Jack Hadley:
You take care.
Jordan Smith:
I hope that all the listeners out there got as much value as we did from that right, RJ?
R.J. Martino:
Man, he’s great. We’ve had the luxury of spending a little bit more time than just the podcast with him and I really think that he’s got nothing … I’d love to have him back on.
Jordan Smith:
Yeah, I would too. So, guys, if you’d like to have Jack back on, let us know. If you know other guys like Jack, I know we just said it. But we’re trying to produce as much value as we can. So, let us know how we’re doing. You hate the show, let us know. You love it, definitely let us know. And if you know anybody that you’d like to see on, shoot us an email. We just gave all of Jack’s information. It’ll be in the show notes. And if you have any questions for him, he was not lying when he said, “If anybody has any questions, send me an email.” I would encourage you guys beyond questions to reach out to him.
R.J. Martino:
All right, Jordan, thanks so much for your time. Audience, thank you, love you. See you later.
Jordan Smith:
Until next time.
