Andy Steuer has 20 years of VP and C-level experience leading business development and product innovation in both a startup environment and at Fortune 500 companies. He’s been on the Executive Leadership Team at 8 fast-growing companies – 3 of which became Top 10 Internet companies (CNET/CBS, Infoseek/Disney, Xoom/NBC), one went through a successful IPO (Xoom.com), and 7 were acquired. In all, these companies generated over $6B in enterprise value while he worked there.
Andy is a technical product development leader, and deal-focused strategic thinker with expertise in corporate strategy, business development, team building, managing $100m+ P&L, and Corp Dev financial forecasting.
Find out more about Andy and his team – https://writeforme.io/
Reach out to Andy – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andysteuer
Name: Andy Steuer, Chief Marketing Officer / Co-Founder
Company: WriteForMe
URL: https://writeforme.io/
Transcript of the Conversation:
Jordan Smith
Hey everybody, welcome to the iProvmade podcast where we help you build a more profitable, successful healthcare practice. I’m excited to bring everybody today’s guest. It’s Andy Steuer, with right for me, but he’s a unique guest because he’s got his kind of one foot in the agency world where he helps practices be more successful, but he also runs his own practice and helps with the operations for a multi location pain management practice. So I’m excited to bring you guys this conversation, because he’s gonna bring a really unique perspective to how to build profitable practices, because he’s, he’s done it throughout his career. And he’ll talk a little bit about his experience. But one of the other more impactful things that we discussed during this conversation, were real life practical things that practices can start to implement today, that will help them get the results that they want. And that’s why I’m so excited to bring you guys today’s guest. So without further ado, Andy Steuer from right for me, everybody, welcome to the iProvmade podcast where we help you build a more profitable, successful practice. I’m Jordan Smith, excited, very excited to bring a guest in today. Andy Steuer. With WriteForMe, also with MidSouth pain treatment centers. And like I said in the intro, we’re in for a real treat. Andy and I had about an hour long conversation separately that, Andy, I honestly wish we would have hit record on because that was a great conversation. But Andy, say hi.
Andy Steuer
Hey, how are you, everybody? Pleasure to meet you. Looking forward to this conversation.
Jordan Smith
Well give everybody a quick background on you, you’ve got a couple different things going on. And like I was joking about before we hit record, we could almost do an entire podcast series on just ground. But kind of give everybody an idea of kind of who you are and what you got working now.
Andy Steuer
Sure, sure. My brother and I are partners in a company called MidSouth Pain Treatment Center, which is a pain management company. We have five clinics and three surgery centers in the Mid South area, around Memphis, and in Mississippi as well. And in Tennessee. So we’ve got, we received 1000s of patients a month. We help people with their chronic pain, back pain, knee pain, neck pain, and so forth. And, you know, we’re keeping people out of the hospital through COVID. And it’s been a godsend for those people. It’s been. We’ve weathered the storm, I think through COVID here and businesses growing, we’ll talk a little bit about that, and what are some of the drivers of growth. And we also operate a content marketing company called right for me, is right for me.io where we help clients build their content marketing roadmap, and help them write content for their blog, so they can have a brand voice and become the expert and authority in their market.
Jordan Smith
Yeah, and drive people to the website, which hopefully drives them to the clinics and exactly, you know, that’s, that’s what I said in the intro to everybody listening to this where, where I feel like Andy has a really unique perspective. You know, typically, we have both operators and people that work with operators to help them be successful, or work directly with providers to help them be successful. And you’ve kind of got this really unique and exciting conversation for the listeners out there. Because you’ve kind of got a foot in both worlds, you know, both is that value added resource, but also an operator of a multi location, multi state healthcare practice.
Andy Steuer
Yeah, it’s exciting. You know, my background is in internet marketing and helping companies grow. Been part of eight fast growing companies over the years. Seven of those companies were acquired and scaled from 234 person teams, to 1000s of people. And one company was acquired by Disney and another company by NBC, another by IAC, another by Deluxe Corporation. So this kind of pattern of starting companies small, growing and scaling them and, and then because they’re attractive acquisition targets we’ve been fortunate to, to sell those companies. And I used to manage our venture fund as well, helping companies grow so helping companies grow has always been the common theme in my career. And I love doing what we do. We apply These strategies and methodologies with our growth at MidSouth pain, which is really exciting. And we’ve seen lots of growth with the business by doing, you know, a lot of that block and tackle kind of work that you have to do when you grow and scale a business. And at WriteForMe, we’re seeing the same thing. And it’s, it’s just, uh, you know, we with COVID, you know, there’s so many people now using the internet a lot more than people are at home a lot more. So they’re using the internet more, and content is front center, people are looking to learn more about whatever it is that they’re looking for. So if you can become the expert and authority in the space, and help people learn a little bit along the way, they get closer to whatever it is that they’re that they’re looking for, and then they tend to transact that much more. And that obviously helps the company grow. So I love this common theme of helping companies grow and scaling companies that way.
Jordan Smith
That’s awesome. And, you know, for all the listeners out there, too, I know Andy and I speak the same language when we always talk about from a, from a patient perspective. What do you do whenever you have a problem where you start searching for those symptoms, right, so when Andy’s talking about being the expert in your field, you know, you draw them in with symptoms, then you hook them with those solutions. And that’s what you do, once somebody gets in the practice, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be thinking like that from a strategic standpoint. But the information that you’re putting out there to the world, to try to attract not only new patients, but the patients that you want to actually attract the folks you actually want to work for and serve.
Andy Steuer
Yeah, so if I zoom out of what you’re saying that I’ll come back in, marketing is a game of going fishing where the fish are, right. So you want to be able to know what people are looking for in search, for example, if that’s where you’re going to target people. And so the very first thing I recommend to anybody who’s looking to scale their business online, and target people who are looking for their solution is to do some keyword research. And look at both topics and specific keywords, keyword variations around what people might be searching for, to find you. ways that you can do this is there are several tools out there that you can use. To do this. Google has a keyword planning tool. There are several search tools like ahrefs, ahrefs.com or semrush.com, a couple of great tools there. And they both have all those tools have capabilities, where you can look at what competitors, how competitors are ranking, what keywords they’re ranking for, in the market, you start to build this list of what are the search terms that people are looking for, and you start to build out the search, list of keywords, and then you start to cluster them under different topics. Right. So back in Mid South Haynes case, for example, back pain, knee pain, neck pain, are all common themes that we see patients for. So we want to be able to show up on those search results when people are looking for those keywords. But then there are all kinds of other related keywords like cervical back pain, or cervical neck pain rather, and or it could be lower back pain or upper back pain and those kinds of related search terms. And, and so that’s what you want to do is you want to start to build out these keywords. And then look at the volume that people are searching for, for those keywords so that you can identify what you want to target and how you want to write your content. Because ultimately, you want to write content that is useful for those people when they’re searching for what you’re looking for. You want to be able to meet them, they’re going to Google asking questions. So you want to ask the question, and then answer the question in your content. And that’s when it becomes useful content, just like we all do on our own searches that we do. Yeah, that’s a great place to start.
Jordan Smith
No, I love that. And you know, I like that concept of you know, first and foremost, just be a problem solver. You know, just just what absolutely all the questions that you get in your office all the time, right start thinking strategically about how to turn those things into kind of marketing collateral and pieces that you can use to attract people that don’t even know you exist.
Andy Steuer
That’s exactly right. Yeah, does my insurance cover this, you know, is always the question. So, you know, maybe break out those types of questions into categories. So that could be a financial related question and other financial related questions or treatment related questions, you know, and unpack those and put them into a list or look Based questions that might be relevant for you and certainly with healthcare practices. We’re all geographically based. So coupling, you know, the root keyword with the location that you’re in, helps you rank locally for those search terms as well.
Jordan Smith
Yeah, yeah, we all know that not only provider experience and, and reviews, and that stuff matters, but also distance. So like he said, fish where the fish are, you know, yep. And I love this concept. And I love the direction we’re heading, because we’re talking about, you know, being very strategic about this stuff. And I know a lot of practices that and probably, both you and I have had experience with are always very tactical when it comes to this stuff. So it falls along with, you know, what we always call our VISTA process, which is vision, strategy, tactics and alignment. So even starting, before figuring out what the vision for the organization is, you know, when, what, what is what does success look like? And, and, and, and what are what are very specific, not only outcomes that you want, but but but what are the steps that you need to take in order to get to those outcomes, and being both aspirational and realistic, with a couple of those from there, then you can move into, you know, the strategic stuff that Andy’s talking about, you know, then you’ve got a really clear idea on what tactics to execute, you know, but, but so many people start with those tactics first, then what this entire process does is make sure that you and your, you know, if you’re an operator, if you’re a provider, it just makes sure that everybody in the organization is aligned, because we’re all pointed in the same direction, from a vision perspective. So Andy, you’ve had a lot of success growing different types of practices. And now with kind of your, your feet in both worlds, let’s take a step back real quick, and talk about kind of the most successful practices that you’ve had experience with, you know, what are what are, what are some commonalities that you typically see with the most successful types of healthcare practice? You know, even beyond the marketing side of things?
Andy Steuer
Well, I’d say the common theme with successful practices and growth is measuring, you know, the key performance indicators are the KPIs. And measurement is critical. So being able to define what metrics matter, for example, we have a document called metrics that matter. And that includes, you know, several, several KPIs that that you have to keep track of, and, you know, the old adage applies that you can’t, you can’t approve what you don’t measure, right. So you got to measure your performance. And that includes everything from number of appointments, cancellations, no shows, reschedules, and, and ultimately, charges and collections. All of those are super important KPIs to be able to measure the scale of healthcare practice. But then, it and that’s, that’s, that’s root level. Above that is all of the marketing tactics that you apply. So whether it’s a marketing kind of thing that you do, or eat, for example, if you’re sending out emails, you want to look at your open rate and your click through rate or your response rate, schedule rate. If you have a schedule link in the email, for example. You want to look at all those details, because what you can determine is that certain themes may resonate more with people than others. And if that’s what resonates, then do more of that. If you’re getting a low open rate on your emails, for example, that might be because your subject line wasn’t, you know, as it wasn’t hitting the audience in the way that you thought it would. So what I recommend doing in that kind of scenario is AV testing your headlines. And maybe instead of sending out an email to your whole list right up front, maybe pick a subset of that group, send, you know, 50 emails, or 100 emails, or depending on how large your list is, send it to a cohort of people with one headline, and then send another headline to another cohort of people see what gets a better open rate. And then you know that you’ve got this champion challenger kind of thing, where you go with the one that has the better open rate so that when you send your whole audience at that point, You’re now increasing your chances of getting more people reading your content, taking action. And all of that translates into little dials of growth and, and growth, oftentimes, are lots of little dials and tweaks that you make along the way. But you have to measure all of these things. So so you know, if you have an email campaign, for example, or if you have a paid search campaign, or paid social campaign, or just your organic, social media, or content marketing, campaigns, all of those, go into this spreadsheet, so that you can measure the performance along the way and, and then you can make your tweaks in your in your strategy, and then tactically how that works, so that you can measure the performance and continuous improvement kind of plan that you do from there.
Jordan Smith
No, that’s, that’s great advice for everybody out there. So I want to make sure that a couple people heard some very important things. Because all that sounds like a lot of work, because it is, you know, again, what you measure moves, and it’s a lot of, like he said, a lot of a lot of small wins equal big success, you know, because yeah, often if you run into a practice, that’s, that’s busy, but not necessarily profitable, you know?
Andy Steuer
Right. Yeah. So yeah. And so and, of course, watching your costs is, you know, is, is root level kind of stuff. So you want to make sure your services business. So yeah, to make sure that your costs are not, you’re not getting over your skis on your costs. And then managing the growth, managing the revenue side of it, so that you can continually, incrementally grow.
Jordan Smith
So going back to, you know, because I know, we’ve seen it on the on, I probably the marketing agency side a lot. where, you know, I know, there’s a couple listeners out there, that’s like, yeah, we’ve tried that email thing, and it didn’t work, or we, we did that social media thing, and it didn’t work. You know what, so being able to measure in taking a step back and again, thinking strategically about it, and digging in and doing some real work to figure that type of stuff out is essential in your experience. Andy, how, how involved? Have you seen the actual owners, providers, doctors, involved in that kind of content planning process, and I know every owner is different. But for the providers that are out there listening, or even the office managers or operators, they’re like, Yeah, all this sounds great, but I’m not gonna get Jordan to be able to do any of that. But what typically, do you find the most successful clinics? What? How much involvement is there from kind of leadership with all of this?
Andy Steuer
It starts from the top right. So if it’s not, if the the desire isn’t there from the top, then oftentimes, what happens is that these initiatives kind of peter out, and they don’t really get the full value that that they that they could. But if there’s buy in from the top, and there’s, you know, a desire to really go after building your customer base, then there are a few key things to consider. One is, what technologies Am I going to use? You know, that’s, that’s always a key consideration. So for example, are you what are what EHR are using? Does that EHR have any kind of marketing capabilities built into it? If not, then you want to look at a HIPAA compliant kind of toolset that will help you be able to market to your, your, your prospects or customers? Does that toolset also provide any kind of analytics or measurement, performance analysis so that you can you can measure performance and growth? Those are, those are some fundamental aspects of what you want to look at first. But other areas, you know, when when there’s buy in from the top, then would I recommend doing is looking at all these, unpack the details. So don’t don’t keep it in your head, put it into a spreadsheet or into a document so that you can name each initiative that you have, identify who’s going to be in charge of each initiative, what the goals of each initiative are. And then once you have that, then then you you kind of have a Northstar, then you kind of know where you’re going. And that’s, that’s important because you don’t want to just kind of gamble your way through this stuff you want to, you want to have a tactical plan for each one of these areas and ownership around it, who’s going to be driving it either internally A company, or if you’re partnering with an agency like AI prov, which I recommend actually because, you know, you have a lot of depth and expertise with an agency to be able to actually do these tactical tasks. And along the way, you’re going to learn a lot by doing this. So if you don’t already know how to do these things, partnering with an agency is a great way to go. Because it’ll accelerate your time to market, you’ll reduce your spend on things that you thought may have worked, but an agency might have approached it differently, and guide you in a different kind of way to say, we, this is what we do, we know that if you do A, B, and C with each of these, you’ll start to see some success. So having, you know, some depth in your corner, like a coach or advisor, agency kind of relationship will certainly be helpful to accelerate your success.
Jordan Smith
Yeah, cuz if all that stuff that Andy mentioned earlier sounds like a lot it is, which are groups, which is why groups like right for me is so great, because just like you brought in somebody to handle billing and collections, or, you know, you brought in a specific specialist, and nurse practitioner, like there’s, there’s, there’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same thing with other parts of your business, because it is a business and you gotta start thinking about it like a business. Speaking of that, you mentioned something that I want to make sure we don’t gloss over at all. And I love that I haven’t heard it phrased like this. So I love this, unpack the details. Yeah, get it, get, get that vision out of your head, practice owner, practice runner, practice operator, and get it in a spot where it’s centralized, and that you can assign ownership and desired outcomes to each one of those things. That’s super important, you know?
Andy Steuer
It is super important. And that’s part of that gets tied to the vision aspect of what you’re talking about. And it’s really the glue between the vision and the tactical aspect of this, because having ownership around it, it means that somebody is actually going to be responsible for driving it. And, there’s going to be accountability and end results that happen. And the goals and you want to be realistic with your goals, too. You can’t, you know, you’re not gonna say I’m gonna go from, you know, zero to 190 days or something like that, it takes time. And these are all incremental steps that happen. But as you start to measure these tactics that you start to apply, you’ll be able to see where you can make improvements, and lots of these little incremental improvements turns into growth.
Jordan Smith
Now, I love that, you know, we, we’ve, our listeners have heard this, because I feel like we’ve talked about this before, but you know, if, if, if no one owns a specific result, well, don’t expect to get that result, there has to be somebody that’s responsible for that specific task, you know, you don’t just have the front desk person, you know, also, I just post on social every once in a while, well, you’re gonna get frustrated, because those things are gonna happen, but you’re probably not going to get the results you want out of them.
Andy Steuer
That’s exactly right. And now I’ll go back to what you were saying where, you know, people have said, Oh, social doesn’t work for us, maybe because they applied it the way that you’re talking about and didn’t actually have, you know, a professional kind of an approach to it. So, of course, you didn’t get the results that you’re looking for, because there wasn’t maybe the right messaging or you didn’t, you didn’t focus on building your audience, and identifying ways that you can do that. Or maybe it was just so intermittent, and posts were far and few in between that you just didn’t get the results. And so don’t throw away the channel. Because of a way that you may have tried it in the past. Yeah. We all live in a social world, social media world now. Billions of people are on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn. And yeah, that’s, that’s where your audience is hanging out there. They’re doing their thing there. So if you can get your message in front of them while they’re doing their thing, and then they follow you, which is a key aspect of building your audience that’s in the upper funnel part of that so that every time you start posting, you have an audience that that you’re building, you start to see results from that. And, you know, I was talking with a friend of mine not too long ago who mentioned this, and I thought it’s so insightful. You know, historically, we’ve all gone to media publications like you know, advertise in the newspaper, mag Is your local publication here there. And we did that because those places had audience, the world has changed now and that media has become and content has become democratized meaning you, as a practice owner, have the ability to build your own audience now, just like the publication did, that you’re paying lots of money to every month to advertise against, well, instead of spending that money on those publications, you can start to cultivate your own audience and invest that into your own practice and into your own follower base. So that you have this addressable audience that wants to read your content and wants to engage with you, and has lots of friends. And they can tell their friends about you. And, and you can create messaging around that, so that it attracts those people and also engages other, you know, friends and family that they might have, or if you provide useful content to them, they might share that or they might like it, and it shows up on their feed, so that their friends start to see it. And, those are great ways to be able to drive engagement, build an audience, and invest the money that you may have in other channels into building your own channel.
Jordan Smith
Yeah, no, I love that. That’s a fantastic way to think about all of this stuff, too. You know, which is why partnering with groups like right for me, for these clinics, works so well. Because, you know, how often have you run across the doctor that’s saying, Yeah, I wrote blogs for a little bit, and it didn’t work? Well, Doc, how many did you write? And how often? And what was the concept behind it? And, you know, how did you use that? That one piece of content and and as many, and they just probably like deer in headlights?
Andy Steuer
That’s right. Yeah. And was there a keyword strategy behind it? How are you following up on that? And how are you targeting those keywords? And what kind of interlinking are you doing on your website to be able to demonstrate to Google that you are the authority and experts in the space? Yeah. Because that’s what they want to do. They want to serve as customers who are searching, and provide them with expertise and authority on content so that we all get a good customer experience when we go to Google. So if you think about it like that, delivering content that is useful to people when they’re searching for relevant keywords for your business, that’s the way that you’re going to get ranking on Google.
Jordan Smith
So if there’s a listener out there, that says to him, you know, yes, I love this. I agree with everything that you’re saying, I wish we would do this kind of. What are some determining factors that you would use to see if it would be a good fit? set another way? Like, kind of what determines if you guys are able to come in and help somebody? What, what should that individual listening think about?
Andy Steuer
Yeah. So the common theme, I think, at the ground floor with all of our clients is that they have a desire to grow. They want they’re in growth mode. So they know that, you know, they’ve got some budget that they’re going to put behind this, they know it’s going to take some investment to do this. And so they want to do that. The other kind of driver for us is to look at what their goals are in building out their brand voice, what are some things that they’re looking to accomplish within their own market and help them stand out from their competition. The combination of those two are, that’s just, you know, energy that’s going to get things moving. The other thing that we like to look at is relevant searches and search volume and the competitive aspect of it. There’s a concept called Keyword Difficulty, how competitive those keywords are in search. And what we do is we look for opportunities where the Keyword Difficulty is low, but the search volume is relatively high. And we start there because we can get some quick wins for our clients, we can help them build their brand voice to get in front of people who are searching for those search terms. And, then we leverage social media channels and clients websites together to be able to build that audience. And so table stakes are you have to have a Google My Business listing. You have to have social media profiles, on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, even Pinterest. If it’s relevant for your audience. And you may want to even start building an audience on medium, or other places, blogger comm or other places like that, that that, that that’s kind of stuff that we do is we help build an audience there. So what we’ll do is we’ll leverage those different distribution channels on behalf of our clients. We have a publishing tool, for example, that connects to all those different social media channels into your website so that once a piece of content gets approved by the client, we publish it, we press a button to publish it to the website. Now it’s up on the website. And then we step two is we promote that content through the social media channels, and start building that audience so that people start clicking through from any one of those from Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, for example, they’ll click through to go to our client’s website, start reading that content, and begin to engage with them. And that creates that growth.
Jordan Smith
Yeah, you know, so many, so many people who don’t live and breathe in this world, right, treat everything that they do. None of these things should exist in a vacuum. You know, I heard this analogy A while ago, whenever conferences in person were a thing where this concept of you create a Thanksgiving dinner, and then you and your family eat off of it for the entire rest of the week? Well, this is the same thing, right? What’s the big kind of big giant meal prep dinner that we could make on a Sunday? Right? What Andy just said is, what’s the thing that we can do there that we can use? And 20 different ways? Yeah. That way, we’re capturing people, whether they’re on Facebook, or Instagram, or Tiktok, or LinkedIn, or they’re on Google, like, what’s the, you know, what’s that? You know, another way to think about it is an iceberg. We create this thing, but most of it is beneath the surface, and how many different ways can we carve that thing?
Andy Steuer
Yeah, and there’s, there’s an old media, you know, catchphrase called, right? Once published, many? Yep. Right. So the idea is, you know, you write a piece of content, once you publish it on your website, you have social media posts that are customized for each channel, but it’s pretty much the same messaging. And you publish it many times throughout different channels, and then you push it to promote it. So each time you publish a piece of content, it’s almost like a publishing event that happens. And then you follow that up with a consistent kind of velocity. And the way that you’re doing that, so that your audience goes, Wow, you guys are all over this. And, people really get attracted to that kind of leadership that a company will demonstrate.
Jordan Smith
Now. That’s, that’s perfect. And I love this. And this is one of the reasons, listeners, why I was excited to bring Andy to the table today, because I knew that we’d have some real life practical advice. Sometimes we have guests to talk in the abstract, and that’s great. But I kind of love the practicality and the specific pneus at which the conversation is going. So great. That’s a lot of moving pieces to it. And one of the most important pieces to do this properly has to be communication with the individual clinics. So talk to what team members, we talked about involvement from an owner standpoint, right? They have to set the tone and the vision for everything. But what other team members are typically, would you say have to be involved are critical for this to be successful?
Andy Steuer
Yeah, the buy-in has to happen across the board. From this, again, it starts from the top, but you have key stakeholders within the company that they continue to champion, whether it’s the effort that the company is doing. And following up with that. One of the things I recommend doing is kind of diagramming this out get in front of either a whiteboard or sheet of paper, I wouldn’t recommend necessarily doing it on a computer first, because you’re probably going to erase a bunch of stuff as you go and, you know, start drawing lines as to how these things happen. But what you want to do is think about workflows. So for example, there’s a workflow from taking a piece of content, publishing it to your website, and then publishing it to social media to drive traffic to your website. Then from that point, that’s like a little square right here, that square then somebody fills out a form on your website, or they call in, when they call in. Are they calling through a caller ID or a call tracking number? For example? Are they just calling through a regular phone number? How are you tracking those calls that come in? How do you know how many phone calls you got from your website versus just somebody finding you on Google, for example, call tracking numbers are great to be able to segment that audience, then they call in, what happens from there? Who’s answering those phones? Do you have a clear line to somebody who’s accountable to do that? Or do you have several people that are doing that across locations? And what does that look like? And then from that call, then what happens? Are you tracking those calls? How many inbound calls are you getting? How many of those calls are converting to appointments, measuring those kinds of details, and then, of course, appointments to a show rate, and then show rate to those charges, and then to collections and find that all the way through. And that’s just one track. But there are several other tracks that you have. And so if you visually diagram these different tracks out there, what you’ll have is a pretty clear path as to what these workflows are. And then you can attribute goals and conversion points, for example, or what should my conversion be from an inbound call to an appointment? Or if it’s a referral that you’re getting from another provider? That’s a different workflow? What does that look like, right? And so and then, you know, different kinds of what happens if somebody is responding to you in social media on Facebook, but they’re not going to your website? What does that workflow look like? So all of these different touch points that you have with prospects and your patients? They’re coming through all these different channels, and you want to build out a workflow for what that looks like? Who’s responding on Facebook, for example, to questions that people have, or responses that people have to oppose, so that you can engage with those people. And hopefully, because you’re engaging with them, they say, you know, what, I want to come in, let’s schedule an appointment. And so doing those kinds of things, and having that workflow planned out. It’s sort of like building out a blueprint for how people come to you, and how you want to engage with them, and how you can convert them so that you can grow your business?
Jordan Smith
Well, it makes perfect sense, you know, going back to those metrics that matter, he’s exactly, you know, and building that out. And, you know, I love that idea of the whiteboard. It’s kind of like the old detective shows where you have the mob boss up at the top, and then all the stories. That’s exactly right, yeah, like doing that. But you would be surprised to just all the listeners out there, I would challenge, if you do nothing else, based off this podcast, take your practice through this exercise. And even if you think you’ve got every workflow and every process nailed down, I guarantee you will find a couple weeks spots, you know, just just going through the process, there’s, there’s a ton of value in that, you know?
Andy Steuer
There really is and what it does is it becomes a centerpiece for other discussions internally around the company to say, you know, we hadn’t really thought about our business like this, but now that we, our subsequent conversations start to happen around that with like, hey, what if we tighten this up? or what have you know, it looks like we got, you know, a bunch of missed calls, people left voicemail as far as what happened there, you know, maybe we can do something to make sure that we don’t miss any inbound calls are coming in, because that’s, that’s gold people are calling in, you want them to you want to answer their questions and provide excellent customer service. So you know, so as you start to build these workflows, you’re going to surface up, maybe weaknesses, or maybe areas that you didn’t necessarily think that you had covered. And you start to cover those, all of those are sort of like, you know, patching up the boat, so you don’t have any leaks in the boat. And that’s that just right there is going to get you growth right out of the gate.
Jordan Smith
Yeah, and you know, growth, even not necessarily from a new patient perspective, but just growth is new revenue by plugging some of those holes that you talked about.
Andy Steuer
You got it. Yeah.
Jordan Smith
It doesn’t make sense to build a house without a blueprint. And what Andy’s talking about is building a blueprint for what the organization looks like and how you’re going to take that patient through every stage from discovery to you know, appointment setting, to post appointment to follow ups. You know, you need a blueprint for each one of these things, just like you would if you were building any type of building.
Andy Steuer
Exactly. And follow ups are super important. Right? So what happens the day after somebody comes in for their treatment, there’s somebody calling them to say, you know, hey, Jordan, how are you feeling today? You know, you know, how’s your appointment yesterday? And then you know, if it’s great then we’d love it if you give us a review. Let me text you a link, you know, and then you start building up your reviews because you start to put that onto your blueprint as part of you in the way that you’re engaging with your patients. And those kinds of things will help drive more reviews, more reviews begets more customers. And HubSpot has this whole concept called the flywheel, which you can definitely apply it to this. But the idea is that your customers can become champions, and they can tell other people about it through reviews, the and then you start writing more content that attracts more people, those people start to see the reviews and other good things that are being said about you, along with well written content, which then drives more adoption. And that starts to build this flywheel that starts going, and that that really drives the growth of your business.
Jordan Smith
Oh, I’m hearing the Lion King, Lion King, theme song in my head, it’s the circle of life. No, all these topics, like you mentioned that it goes beyond just kind of just beyond digital, you know? Yeah, the best stories that I’ve ever heard about, one of these types of processes is a dental office. And I wish we came up with this idea, but we didn’t, but a dental office where they’ve got an automatic procedure setup, where every time somebody has some sort of invasive dental procedure, like a root canal, you know, any anything like that, they automatically two days after or the day after their appointment, what do they get in the mail, they get a little ice pack with that Dennis brand on it, that they use for their face. And something little like that, whenever I was reading this interview, transformed their referral and testimonial side of the business, just thinking of, you know, probably six bucks all in getting it, getting it, you know, printed and, and, and mailed and all that other type of stuff. They saw, I think over a 300% increase in testimonials, and 150% increase in referrals. That’s fantastic. Just from getting an ice pack in the mail that has your dentist’s name on it with a note that says, hey, use this. Hope you’re feeling great. Call us if you have any questions or concerns.
Andy Steuer
You know, love that. And you know that that is a direct result of this kind of workflow mapping. You know, it’s, it’s called, you know, defining the patient journey. Yep. Right. And so when you do that, you can look at opportunities like that, like, Well, okay, so they come in for their appointment. Great. We got, you know, we generated revenue. Awesome. Now what? Yeah, how do you continue to engage those people? How do you continue to, you know, have them tell others about how their experience was, so that, as those other people see it, they become patients as well.
Jordan Smith
I love that. So, and then we’ve got some listeners out there, and I keep talking to you guys, because this is important, that are on board with everything that you’re saying, but you know, sometimes especially, what would your recommendation be for somebody that’s maybe listening this that’s trying to do a lot of that stuff right now, you know, for their employer? What is some advice that you would give them to take an idea like this, to take AMD or group like, right for me up the chain and convince their doctor to at least start to consider this? What are? Said another way. What are some ways that you guys typically help people like that get buy-in from the people that sign their paychecks, you know?
Andy Steuer
Great, great question. One great way to do it is to go to Google right now and go look at do a search on something that’s relevant for your business and see who’s showing up. Likely what will happen is that if you’re not doing this kind of stuff, you’re gonna see your competitors there who are doing it, and you’re gonna say, Man, they’re eating my lunch here, I gotta do something about this. And so that oftentimes can become a driver. The next thing that you can do is you can start looking at some of these relevant search terms, and seeing how much volume is there. And you can know, Hey, you know what, there are 1000s of people in my market that are looking for what I offer, and I’m not getting in front of them. Right, so I got to get in front of those people. Now, that builds a business case to say, Okay, we got to do something about this. I might not have all the answers, but I can frame it up to say, here’s the problem. And we need a solution to meet that problem. So that oftentimes can start to get internal and people rallied around this idea of, I got to do, we got to do something about this.
Jordan Smith
Now I love that build a business case for you know, yeah, that competitiveness that’s in all of us, especially a run businesses.
Andy Steuer
Yeah, you’re running a business. You got expenses, you got a staff, you got rent, you got to pay for all that stuff. So, you know, that’s not going away, you got to grow.
Jordan Smith
Yeah. Well and a second note. Now I know, because we’ve been in a couple of those conversations with you guys talking about right for me specifically, that a conversation doesn’t cost anything, you know, so that, you know, we always say there’s this simple shovel concept to push everything out of the way, and make the decision as simple as possible. Hey, make that business case. Like Andy said, next step, I’ve already got something on our calendar, you know, I’ve got access to your schedule, I think it’s worth having a conversation with these guys. And if nothing comes from it, that’s fine. You know, but it’s worth having a conversation.
Andy Steuer
Yeah. One thing I’ll offer up on this call to anybody who’s listening here is that, if you’re looking to do any kind of keyword research, or you know, just get a benchmark in your audience, if you email me at Andy at WriteForMe.io, it’s Andy at WriteForMe, W-R-I-T-E-F-O-R-M-E.io. If you email me there, what we’ll do is we’ll do free keyword research for you so that we can, you know, help you kind of get an idea of what’s going on in your market and what the opportunities are. And then from there, you can start to build a roadmap around, you know, how you can write content and build a social media audience to be able to grow your business.
Jordan Smith
That there is no excuse for everybody listening to this. That’s very, and will Andy at WriteForMe.io, we’ll also have that email address linked, wherever you’re absorbing this content at. So we’ll make sure that it’s prominent on there, too. But that’s a great offer. I also feel like that’s a great transition, to move into what we call our final round, which are one or two questions where I like to turn the spotlight back on you and ask you about a couple kind of key moments and, and some things that really transformed you know, what you do, like you talked about right? Yeah, you’re not only helping clinics with WriteForMe, you also help run a very successful and run and operate very successful practice. And you’ve run and sold very successful practices to giant organizations. So and this final round. And this is a big question, but what are maybe, kind of, two or three key things that helped you find the success that you have today? I know, there’s, you know, there’s this whole concept of there’s no overnight successes, and there’s not an I know, there’s more things that went into it and a lot of night sweats and, you know, hard conversations, but what are kind of two or three kind of things that that you say, Man, these, these kind of things or stages really helped elevate me to be able to be as successful as I am?
Andy Steuer
Yeah, I, you know, I would say that learning how to measure a lot of these different details was really illuminating for me. You know, oftentimes, you know, at an early stage in a business or when you’re trying something new, you’re not really sure if it’s catching, you know, there’s wind in your sail, and things are moving. So, you know, measuring those details is really important. And what I recommend doing is, we do this in a Google Doc, right? So we do it in it, and we use sheets to do those because their numbers, and that way you can look at you know, some of these key performance indicators and how you’re going to measure them. week over week, month over month. And don’t expect, you know, crazy results up front. It’s gonna be a crawl, walk, run kind of an approach, it’s just how growth is. But what you want to do is you want to look at, you know, what is resonating with people what, where you are getting some results, are you are you going from zero followers to five to 11, to 17 to 35, whoa, big jump, you know, Oh, look at that, and 76 you know, and you’re kind of stair stepping up. Those are important things to look at because then you can get some insight into what’s working. And then also maybe what’s not working if you’re trying things and you’re not, you know getting growth there. So measuring the details, super important, that was a big eye opener for me. And something I learned early on in my career. So that you can, you can have an idea of where growth is coming from, and what’s driving it. That’s one, that’s one thing I would say the other thing is, just like we were talking about is mapping out the journey, the customer journey, and getting a real understanding of it and being pretty granular about it. Because when you do that, what you’re able to do is look at the experience from your customers, your patients, you know, perspective, and what might be going on there. And through that whole, building out your customer journey, identifying who your customers are, like build a persona, you know, maybe three, four, or five different kinds of personas of Who are your patients, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got one profile, that might be somebody who is, you know, in their early 20s. And, you know, they might be coming to you. For this reason, you might have another profile of somebody who is married, has one or two kids, and they live in this neighborhood. And they This is their challenge. And this is why they come to you for this might have somebody who’s elderly, and fit another profile, and this is why they’re coming to you. And so actually spending the time to build out these personas is also very helpful, because then you know who you’re talking to. And then you can start building messaging around persona one, two, or three or four, or what have you, depending on how many personas you have. But the idea is to build out a few of these personas so that you, you know, can direct your messaging to those people. And then you’ll know that your messaging is going to resonate with them.
Jordan Smith
Yeah, that’s a key point that I don’t think we’ve hit on before. So I’m happy that you mentioned that which is Yeah, it’s important to do all this stuff. But sometimes the simplest things are the ones that people forget, which is first figure out who you want to talk to.
Andy Steuer
Yeah, who are my customers anyway? You know, once you know that, then you can say, Oh, you know what? This profile person, they’re a mom, and they had, you know, they have kids, or kids or maybe like eight to 12. So they spent a lot of time at school or in school events or with other parents. And because of that, I might want to direct my messaging. And I might want to sponsor a school event or something like that, to be able to get in front of all those other parents. Yeah. And just by knowing that persona, you can start to think about, well, what does their world look like? And how can I insert myself into that world?
Jordan Smith
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the one of the things that we say all the time, as you know, don’t write this stuff for other doctors, unless you want other doctors coming for you, like, you know, think about, think of like Andy just mentioned, think about those moms, who were, for all intents purposes responsible for the health care of three generations of their family, then their husband, their kids, and a lot of the times their parents do, who are young, they’re an age. So consider who you’re talking to. Well, I love that. Now, I have one last question for you. And this is always kind of an interesting one. Again, you are where you are for a lot of different reasons. But if there was kind of one magic reset button that you could hit throughout your career, whether it’s I would do this completely differently or implement this sooner than I would, what would that one kind of that one reset be that you would use in your professional career? If there is one?
Andy Steuer
You know, I don’t know if there’s a magic reset button because, you know, anything that I’ve done, if it’s been successful, then, whoo, it’s been successful. That’s great. If it hasn’t, you know, then I’ve learned something from it, and why hasn’t it been? And sometimes those hard lessons are important lessons to say, Okay, I learned something from that. And I’m, I’m going to do things differently from that going forward. So I would say rather than maybe a reset button, I would look at things to say, what were some of those challenges that I learned from? And how do I avoid that? And then on the flip side of that, the successes that I’ve built, what’s driving those successes, one thing I can say, from you know, managing what we do at MidSouth pain, for example, is building a team and focusing on building your team is critical. Another life lesson that I learned throughout, is, you know, team building is super important employee satisfaction, very important. And, you know, happy employees make happy customers. And that is a true thing. And so, spending some time building your employee base and being mindful of how you build a great company and great company culture is a very important aspect. And I think that’s been a big takeaway for me as I’ve grown businesses over the years.
Jordan Smith
No, I love that, you know, you can’t do it all yourself, building a team and focusing on culture is important. And also the concept of it takes a village. Yeah. What’s the saying? You never have lost as long as you learned. It’s that concept. Yeah. You know, that’s right. Well, Andy, store your thank you so much. I know this has been enlightening for the audience. I’ve enjoyed our conversations, I look forward to having more with you the pleasure of mine, and maybe even another one of these two, we’ll see. But for all those listening that want to follow you or love to want to get more information about or even reach out to you what kind of give everybody out there some links, where they can find out more information and reach out to you if they want to.
Andy Steuer
Again, we’re WriteForMe.io, W-R-I-T-E-F-O-R-M-E, WriteForMe.io. Definitely visit us there, you can search for right for me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, follow us on any of those channels, LinkedIn, we’re all there. Once you follow us, you’ll start to receive useful content as to how to build your audience and grow it online. So we’ll be glad to do that. And then feel free to reach out to me directly via email. And that offer is is there for you. So we’ll do some keyword research for you. We’ll help you build a roadmap so that you have a clear content marketing roadmap and messaging as to what you can, what you can say to prospects and how you can build an audience that way through content marketing.
Jordan Smith
Absolutely. And again, I can’t reiterate this enough, listeners, doesn’t matter. If you’re working with a group or everything’s working great. Like just, I would encourage everybody to reach out to Andy and get that keyword research done. It’s just, it’s free. There’s no reason not to have no time apart. That’s a great and very generous offer. And Andy, we appreciate it. Andy Steuer, thank you so much. All those links, and Andy talked about will be included in the show notes. As always, like, subscribe, pass this podcast over to a friend if there’s something that Andy mentioned that, that you found valuable chances are somebody in your network or your circle, found it valuable, or will find that valuable as well. So do us a favor, also follow Andy on LinkedIn. I know he puts out lots of good information on there as well. Andy, thank you so much. I look forward to getting in touch with you.
Andy Steuer
Thank you, Jordan. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you, everybody, for listening.
Jordan Smith
Hey, guys, Andy, store your Listen, that is a great offer that he’s throwing out there. So I would encourage everybody who’s listening to this. If there’s any inkling that you guys need to do anything better, or you just want to see kind of where you are, I would definitely take advantage of Andy’s offer. As always, we’ve got all the links that he talked about in the show description. So check that out. He mentioned a couple tools that are great, but also some different ways to get a hold of him and get some more information. So again, just a couple takeaways from there that I love this concept of unpacking the details, assigning ownership, measure the details, and mapping out that entire journey. You know, I love that he talks all the time about the way he says his metrics matter, right? And you can’t determine what those metrics that you should be tracking are sometimes without taking a step back and figuring out what that entire path or journey that somebody might take to you guys and after they talk to you guys maybe. So anyway, I hope you guys loved it. If you have suggestions or there’s different topics or people that you want us to talk to please feel free to reach out we’d love the comments. We love the engagement, looking forward to bringing you guys more guests that can provide a specific kind of impact and can share their story and, and help you guys along your path. So as always, Jordan Smith. Looking forward to the next one. Like Subscribe, Comment if you’ve got suggestions or comments, and until next time, Peace Peeps.