Evan Engel is a natural innovator and continually challenges systems, ideas, and people to think bigger to create business growth. And he’s really good at it too. Evan is a proud veteran having served in Kuwait and Iraq, and he currently resides in Israel with his wife and 3 sons. He has held leadership roles in community engagement, marketing, and business development. His entrepreneurial approach to business was shaped by his experience having successfully built his own company that was eventually acquired.
Evan spent close to 3 years developing marketing one on one with practices, which he credits as the secret to great marketing. His expertise in every facet of optometry when combined with in depth know how of high level marketing strategy, is how he is able to continuously drive the products and services at EyeCarePro to drive greater ROI to our clients.
In addition to his passion for helping practices grow their revenue, Evan is particularly passionate about helping change lives by more effectively marketing important health topics such as blue light, vision therapy, scleral lenses, and low vision.
Visit their website: www.EyeCarePro.net
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eyecarepro/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pg/EyeCareProEyeCarePro
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eyecarepronetEyeCarePro
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eyecarepro/
Transcript of the Conversation
RJ Martino: I’m your host, RJ Martino, president of iProv and scale technology. There are sponsors for the show. I’ve grown multiple businesses and I’m always trying to learn new ways to grow my companies.
RJ Martino: I’ve always done it my own way, but I want to learn other ways. I want to hear how others have grown. I’m addicted to growing companies and as we speak, I’m still growing my company right now. I’m super excited to introduce Evan angle a from EyeCarePro. Evan is just got a world of knowledge, specifically targeted optometrists. For the last four years he’s been consulting some of the most successful optometrists across the country.
RJ Martino: He’s also got a Peer Group of 70 other consultants, that that’s all they do is help up optometrists grow. He’s going to talk a lot about return on investment for marketing and how they justify some of the techniques. He’s going to give tips on some things that you can do almost immediately. And he’s also going to give tips for people that might already have a completely full book, but they’re looking for maybe more profitable profit centers. So I’m excited to introduce you to Ebony Engal, the EyeCarePro.
RJ Martino: Evan Engal, I’m excited you’re here on the podcast with us today. I know you and I have spent some time together, but there is so much knowledge wrapped in your brain that I’m just excited to hear you pour into our optometrists and even ophthalmologists that are listening today. So thank you for being with us.
Evan: Thanks for having me, RJ. It’s really a pleasure to be here.
RJ Martino: Well, I want to start off with talking about you, yourself and then move in and give an elevator pitch of what you guys do at EyeCarePro. Obviously we’ve talked about, who our audience is, but maybe if you could frame it, to the audience and what you think their expectations might be.
Evan: Okay, sure. So, first of all, my name is Evan Angle. I’m a father of three little boys. I live in Jerusalem, Israel, so that’s nice and interesting. I moved here around 12 years ago after spending quite a few years in the U.S army, and then basically went to university and came to Israel and ran my own business for a number of years.
Evan: And then I got involved with a marketing for optometrists and I’ve been doing that for close to four years. And so our company has been around for 14 years and we work basically exclusively with optometrist. So, few ophthalmologists that work in optometry practices or with them and we’re a virtual company, so where we’re based in Toronto, but we have 70 employees all over the world spread around.
Evan: So, it’s always an interesting, discussion there with doctors, Oh, you’re in Israel so, and that’s Kinda cool. And in terms of just framing this conversation, I mean, having spent, two years one-on-one, working really hands on with optometrists on a higher level marketing service, my knowledge base or my focus has really bent to just dig deep into an optometry practice.
Evan: Which is really an interesting just cause it combines both, medical services and retail, but really just dig deep into the profit centers and how a business can have measurable impact on growing their business, even if they’re a 30 year old business or brand new business. And just looking at strategies that will actually, drive measurable growth and not being beholden perhaps to a frame of reference of, marketing is social media and marketing is website and Google, but looking holistically and saying, ultimately marketing is about growing the business.
Evan: And it doesn’t really matter where that activity takes place. It could be opening your doors early or it could be how you’re talking to patients, but as long as you can deliver a measurable growth all the time to a business, that’s really exciting, and there’s just tons of potentials. So that’s really our whole… my focus personally.
RJ Martino: Now that’s great. And I love the concept of marketing isn’t just, in our world, social media or website. Talk more about what marketing means and you guys are working exclusively with optometrists, ophthalmologist and that’s Kind of you guys’ focus. Is that right?
Evan: That’s correct. So we’re exceptionally deep within that industry and that it’s an amazing experience because what ends up happening is you just start learning about new ways to help a business grow that you would never have got to if you weren’t specialized within that industry.
Evan: But that’s a new kind of… yeah.
RJ Martino: We’ll tell them, I’m sorry to cut you off. Tell me a little bit about that. Who are like normal clients of yours or who are you consulting with? What do they look like and what problems are they experiencing now?
Evan: So, the normal client is really just a local optometrist with maybe one to five doctors, one location possibly, two, three locations, looking at an annual revenue of one to $2 million for the practice. They’re profit centers are usually kind of split between optical and services. Many of the practices that I worked with were a little bit more focused on the service side and in optometry, a lot of the newer technology has allowed for kind of more advanced solutions and bigger, and higher level services and profit in the general eye exam and optical model is one way of knowing.
Evan: I’ve taught this, the old optometry and not necessarily, oh, but that’s just one kind of practice. And then there are also a lot of practices out there that really get passionate and excited about certain like specialized medical care. And that was kind of a niche area that I focused on, but that’s… the average practice is a practice that is extremely busy and every single prep person in that practice is busy sort of facing quite a few, considerations within marketing.
Evan: Number one is they need to be shown ROI before they can spend money, right? It’s, the cashflow is not huge, and so you’re looking at taking steps within your marketing and understanding the revenue and impact of what you’re doing and before you move to like, let’s say more money.
Evan: And it’s also a lot about working one on one with the practice and knowing that they’re busy, so you have to leverage whatever time you can get out of them to Max value. But at the same point, they need a lot of marketing guidance because a lot of things that are done in the office, in the exam, when they’re visiting an optician even before or after, there’s just so many aspects of running a medical practice, running a retail practice, a business that requires a lot of, marketing support.
Evan: So it’s basically, leveraging the doctor’s time and resources in a way that’s going to, get max results and then also kind of slowly build them into the understanding of why marketing is just so valuable. It’s really about digging deeper into their business and understanding how they can grow. And I would say like the last part would be, data and just realizing that as a local small practice that, they’re not a corporate entity with billions of dollars to spend, it’s important to be able to have just really clear facts on the ground. Is it working? Is it not working, what’s the impact? And therefore decisions can be made better.
RJ Martino: Well, I thought it was interesting you brought up the fact that sometimes they need kind of return on investment proof before they move into marketing. So a lot of your patient or a lot of your customers are not coming to saying, I definitely need your services. Tell me about what we would, I’d call the sales process. Is it consultated are they coming to you raising their hand? Saying, I know exactly what I need you to do. How do they find you in the first place?
Evan: So that’s a great question and we definitely do it very differently than any of the other kind of companies in our space. Our approach is that we position ourselves as the expert in optometry and as long as you can communicate all the time that there’s just many ways to grow, you’re sharing how to do it, you’re explaining to them what to do, why it’s important, how it works as many ways as possible, so then they come to you.
Evan: And when they come to you, you’re not selling to them, but you’re just showing them based on their specific situation, what like the key or core ways that they could really have an impact on their business if they decided to go with a different company, they still are armed with that information.
Evan: So for example, I did a Webinar last week with a review of optometrist business and I was joking to somebody else and I said, hey, it was essentially a sales call to a hundred people because my Webinar, which is just talking through strategies and ideas is the same thing that would happen on a sales call.
Evan: I don’t sell it, I explain it and if they want to work with us, great. And if not, not. I would say that some of the people reach out from our marketing to sign up, the vast majority, reach out to learn more, get a little bit more of kind of an, of a feel of how it would apply to their practice.
Evan: But specifically within optometry, you’re just working with, a kind of small business that is very skeptical and doesn’t have big budgets to start off with. And so it’s really key, at least from our perspective, it’s really key to just, help them before they even start. And if you’re helping them and let’s say you give them some advice and it works and it’s, they can see that, then when they realize that they’re not actually able to implement real marketing on a mass scale, on an effective scale, then we’re positioned as the best partners for them.
Evan: So that’s our strategy. We don’t do like cold calling practices and sending out sales emails or anything like that. One of the things we just started doing recently was basically doing like these tiny little videos that we send out to practices every week. Here’s an idea, here’s a tip, here’s a… but specific to their websites, specific to their Facebook page or Google listing. So that’s our approach to kind of like a sales process.
RJ Martino: Yeah, that’s great, so it’s education, someone’s going to learn something from you, whether they use you or not, you’re going to arm them with information. So let’s talk about, now we know who’s coming to you, we kind of understand a typical process, what about some people or some examples of things that you have done tactically in results that you’ve gotten from those things?
Evan: Sure. So one of the things that I like to do is really identify the big wins that are easy to do and have the most impact and then, move from step to step, cause I can only get so much input and involvement from the practice and some things can provide tremendous value. So a good example is a Google reviews.
Evan: Pretty much any local business, if you’re going to do one thing only, having amazing, five star Google reviews that are just showcase that you’re better than the other options is gonna probably deliver the most impact over. It’s huge, and so I have quite a few examples of Brag on me, but the practice that I did this webinar with last week, they have three locations and one of their locations last year in May had five Google reviews and this year may had 55 Google reviews.
Evan: On top of that, our main strategy is not a paid ads. We’ve focused mostly on organic, although we do have, paid ads component, but using content and things like that to drive organic results. So in this one location, just excluding even the website and the actual appointment scheduled and everything like that, just the statistics from Google, my business from his Google listing itself for that one location at 160 calls more in May of 2019 versus May of 2018.
Evan: And it had 3000 more discovery searches, which is people who are looking for, not for the doctor’s name or the practice name or the address, but looking for search terms, like ‘eye examiner in my city’ or ‘optometrists near me’. That’s just one data point for a given location in a given month for practice of three located[inaudible 00:13:03]
RJ Martino: That was an additional 160 phone calls…
Evan: Yup.
RJ Martino: After that given month and how many additional discovery…?
Evan: 3000 more or 2870 or something like that more discovery searches.
RJ Martino: And again, to reiterate what a discovery search is, this is people who aren’t looking for your business but are using terms that are associated with the service you’ve offered. So people who otherwise would have never heard or known about that, right?
Evan: Right. 100%. Right. It’s like literally 3000 new patients are seeing you in that one month. Are they all scheduling? Are they all choosing no? But, and that’s just one example. I mean from the Google review side of things, I’ve got plenty of examples of the impact. I mean, I don’t want to go in there, but another great example is the idea of using, the content on a website.
Evan: And the concept is that there are just tons of opportunities to, whether it’s, you can look at the topics that your competitors talking about and say, hey, they don’t have a page on this topic. But I know for a fact that there are people who have that issue or that condition or that symptom or are looking for that service.
Evan: So grade one for optometry is eye emergencies. You slap up a couple of eye emergency pages and it’s a winner every time, right? It literally always will deliver it because the other practices around you just on their website, they don’t have decently developed pages on those topics and, or if anything they probably just have a bullet point saying a word about that topic.
Evan: So to give an example, I mean there are all kinds of different strategies for the content, but for that practice from the Webinar, their location page is on their website. So taking each location has a page and that’s going to build up the strength for those individual locations. Those location pages had 400 more people visit in May of 2019 verse 2018, for three locations.
Evan: So, just by designing and putting in some content that’s more effective from an SEO standpoint, from the search engine standpoint, practices that have few pages on… a page on a topic of eye emergencies can result in five, 10 new patients a month on an ongoing basis. It’s not something that goes away. So that’s pretty awesome.
Evan: So there’s all kinds of things like that where just using topics or using like more targeting of locations around you can provide real measurable growth or things like adding content on a website in Spanish if that’s, population area, it’s demographic that’s around you. So those are kind of interesting wins.
Evan: But there are a lot of wins that also take place in the office. And so one of my favorites that I use all the time is a doctor of ours, not a doctor I managed, but a doctor, somebody else managed. But, we helped him develop a strategy of how you present blue light protection to patients. And the idea was that you want to maximize the message by making sure that you’re talking about it at every point of contact that, that patient has.
Evan: They go to, they go to Google, they’re searching for an eye doctor near them, your Google listing has a Google post about it. You go to the website, you’ve got something about it. You go into the… you will call the office on the call waiting, there’s a recording that’s talking about it. They come in the office, the optician takes the person’s glasses and does a little, flashes that laser pen through the light, through the glasses to see, the doctor talks about it.
Evan: So basically by creating this funnel, some of it’s online, some of it’s on social media, some of it’s in the office, that result of, for this particular practice in a 40% increase in second pair of sales. And so that’s a massive, massive result for really a very small initiative. Strategic, replicatable, awesome, but still small and just impactful.
RJ Martino: Okay. That’s very cool. We keep talking marketing tactics and I can see some of my optometrist friends who are listening to this, getting excited about some of the tactics. Also getting a little bit overwhelmed. And so you bring up return on investment, measuring all this seems to be incredibly the attribution of marketing is hard.
RJ Martino: Your most successful customers, what are they using as a measuring stick for what’s working, what’s not? Are you guys digging into financials? Are you recording? Are you listen to calls or are you just looking at hits on the website? Tell me what they should be using. Your most successful, what they be using as their measuring stick.
Evan: So the first, I mean the easiest one to kind of focus in on and look at would be like a call tracking call recording. So it’s relatively easy today to set up, basically a fake phone number that routes to your regular phone number. But on the way it picks up, information. You can use different phone numbers for different topics, for different initiatives.
Evan: If you’re running print ads or you’re doing social media ads or you’re doing Google ads and you have different numbers, you can start, attribute success to different initiatives. That’s pretty helpful. Additionally, you can record calls. I mean you have to be careful from a HIPAA standpoint. So it has to be password protected and stuff like that.
Evan: But that also is a really great way cause if you can listen to the calls, you can really assess the value of it. And especially if it’s a higher revenue patient where it’s just more important for the practice to be very accurate in terms of understanding what’s going on. So that’s obviously an easy one to start with, not that difficult to set up but really valuable.
Evan: And a lot of practices have multiple different avenues or multiple different ways of doing marketing. And so if you do billboards or you do radio ads or you do social ads, you do youtube, pre roll ads, whatever the topic is, you can have a way to really understand what initiative is generating what kind of a phone volume. But if you have call recording, you can even go a step further.
Evan: Then we do a lot, well first of all, just scheduling from a website is obviously one way to also attribute success. So, having the option to choose or your new or existing patient or what’s the topic that you’re coming in for, just to be able to determine, let’s say the value of a patient is not always gonna be the same depending on the topic.
Evan: So sometimes even depending on the topic, if it’s really important for practice, you’ll set up separate forms just to have, fully verified, kind of these are people who came from the firm, from these pages.
Evan: Some of our sites also use like realtime scheduling, which integrates with their electronic health records. Some of our practices use a company called GPN, which a is basically business analytics internally. And so you can tie the appointment with GPN and have integrated data from literally from the Google search all the way down into the purchase in the optical department.
Evan: That’s pretty advanced. I wouldn’t say most practices are doing that, but on a basic level I would say, calls, call tracking, call recording, appointment scheduling, obviously having a differentiation between new and existing patients, possibly even having a little bit further differentiation by services.
Evan: There are a lot of other statistics that I would definitely recommend looking at. So your Google listing has its own analytics and that’s pretty, pretty impactful in terms of just for a local business of where people are going to find them. And so usually that is another layer of data. Now, within optometry, there’s a lot of seasonality, and so, December and April or March are never gonna be the same right?
Evan: It’s just, December is the end of the year, you got your insurance benefits that to use a, you’re gonna rush. So one thing that whenever you’re looking at data is also not only just to look at how this compares to the month prior, but also to look at how it compares to the year prior. It’s actually far more important.
RJ Martino: Sure.
Evan: Outside of that, I always look at Google search results, the time people spend on the site, the [inaudible 00:21:35] rate, basically just statistics that indicate that the person coming to the site is a quality person. And then depending on the initiative, if it’s an ad, you want to really kind of just assess what’s performing, what’s not and looking at the ROI of that.
Evan: But if it’s, let’s say an organic page, you can also look at, how many people are coming to the pages that I’ve written. And that’s another way to assess value. And then obviously internally in the office, most practices will also have their fingers on the pulse of just are they growing from last year? Did they reach their growth potential? Did they exceed it?
Evan: Obviously every practice is going to have different capabilities in that regard. So a 30 year old practice in a smaller city is not going to have the same growth potential as a newer practice and a metro area. But nonetheless, internal is also really important just to make sure that hey, you’re also kind of seeing it. Are you feeling good in the practice? Feeling good in the business? So those would be the key ways I would say that practice should just determine the effect of the ROI of what they’re doing.
RJ Martino: Now, so again, great information, love what you sharing. My optometrist brands in the audience are loving the idea, but they usually are not extremely marketing… designed to understand marketing. They’re also not always the most proficient businessman. And so if you think… or women, business women, if you think about your optometrist and the most successful ones, can you describe kind of where they spend their time with regards to what you doing?
RJ Martino: Are they in it every day with you? Are they completely hands off or is it they put an office manager ensuring something like this, like your most successful, if you’ve got an optometrists and opening up a new practice and give them guidance on how to manage marketing what would you tell them?
Evan: So, the practice I’ve worked with, it’s really been a break down between doctors that are super engaged, office managers that manage the role and some kind of combination of the both. But to look at who’s going to be the most successful, ultimately to make any initiative and in business work it has to come from the top all the time. \
Evan: And so, one of the things… what you said is extremely on point, is optometrists in our… I believe pretty much any medical professional it that’s not their expertise. They’re not markers. And so they need somebody to guide them internally on what’s important to push within the practice, what’s important to push in terms of marketing initiatives. And then sometimes there are things that a doctor can do to really drive incredible value.
Evan: So I would say if a practice wants to be effective as much as possible, then, budgeting time for marketing on the doctor’s side, even if you have an office manager or a staff person managing like, let’s say more of the implementation, is a really important call. And I would highly recommend that, every doctor does that.
Evan: I would say the practices that do the best are the practices where the doctor doesn’t see patients all the time. My previous mentor in this company, he told me that the difference between a $2 million practice and a $10 million practice is that the $10 million practice has a CEO at the helm, and the $2 million practice has a bunch of doctors. Right?
Evan: You can’t. So that’s, I really liked that it resonates with me.
RJ Martino: I love it.
Evan: I don’t think that the average doctor should spend all day long doing marketing, but to be effective and realizing that this is their business and ultimately they need to… they’re going to be the one who really cares the most about ROI and growing a business, not their office manager, not a staff person.
Evan: They’re going to be the ones who are going to have the most impact on implementing things, and there are things that they should be doing on a marketing side that are possibly the most important in terms of, maybe not most important, but well, top 10 marketing initiatives for a medical practice, I would say a couple of those fall on the doctor.
Evan: And so, yeah, I would say budgeting for two hours a week to spend on a marketing would be definitely something that I would highly recommend. And if you can do more, great. And I highly doubt that many practices or doctors do more than two hours of marketing related activities. But definitely the ultimate is to be involved.
RJ Martino: Well, I think that aligns perfectly with my thought on it too, which I’ve always said, one of the first things I would recommend optometrists do is really know the market and not just who your competitors are in the area, but research on, across the nation, what rates should be, what reimbursement rates should be, all of those things.
RJ Martino: And the way you do that is by networking with guys like you who already have access to all of that information. The second thing goes to working on the business and [inaudible 00:27:04] are notorious for always wanting to be in the clinic and not really working on the business. And there’s a great book, I don’t know if you’ve seen E-myth revisited, I’m a huge fan of quotes around, communities often, but it talks all about that.
RJ Martino: It talks about how you’ve really gotta be working on the business and not in the business. And the other part, next part to that is knowing your numbers. I mean, I think knowing your numbers is super important. And you’d talked a lot about how important data is on the marketing side, on the financial side, do you guys dig into your financials? What do you see as far as the most successful financial… the measuring stick of a finance, this dollar for dollar, what are, how do you have the most successful optometry business?
Evan: Okay. So, I think, well first of all, just taking a step back on the dollar side of things, I think that oftentimes when doctors think about marketing, they have a number in their head that sounds good, they’re comfortable with spending that amount on marketing and that makes sense to them and then, but that’s not really the best way to look at it.
Evan: The average optometry practice spends $5 in marketing for every new patient. And so what I think the first step, whenever you’re looking at, just the numbers and marketing and stuff like that and trying to understand is to say, what are my growth goals? What’s the potential revenue from those growth goals? And then how much would be a reasonable amount to spend to achieve that versus saying, I think x amount of dollars per month sounds comfortable for me.
Evan: It doesn’t mean that you have to jump into that and maybe you can make your growth goals lower or your spend per for your growth goals lower. So that’s just… and that’s going to depend on the practice. I mean, some probably some practices of mine, their average patient revenue is $1, 000, and some practice, their average patient revenue is $85. And so part of understanding just how much money to spend and the number is to understand, where do you have profit centers in the practice?
Evan: Right? What’s making you money? Where can you have the biggest impact on that? Or where do you see… and sometimes it’s not even just the financial decision. Sometimes it’s a decision about positioning in the market. Sometimes it’s a decision about the passion within a special, with a specific specialty or topic.
Evan: Some doctors are really excited, boutique opticals and some doctors are really excited about the latest contact lens that are available and so… But understanding kind of where you can… what the revenue is, what the profit is for that patient, but not just looking at it in the short term, but looking at it in a holistic… like a big picture of you and saying, okay, if I get a mother and the mother has an average two kids and a husband and she’s primary decider for her family of where they go for eyecare, and they’re going to reschedules every year and a half and 60% of my patients continue with me for 10, for 15 years.
Evan: So the financial picture is going to be based on kind of like some kind of projection that looks at a value of a new patient over a certain amount of time. And then when you want to look at is not only just the value in your patient, but also initiatives that can increase the revenue of that patient.
RJ Martino: Wow. I think that’s awesome, and that was originally how we got introduced, is I was actually doing research on what we call the lifetime value of an optometry patient. And you breezed through that. But take us back and kind of step through kind of a procedurally, how we figure out what is the lifetime value and why is it important.
Evan: Okay. So there are statistics that are industry wide and obviously each practice might have different statistics, but usually you can pull up data like, how often your patient is scheduling. You can pull up data about what the average spend of a patient is, and then you can also see what the drop off rate is.
Evan: So once you have kind of like a… you could either use industry averages and just assume, or if you have the capability to kind of pull that data from your EHR or from some kind of business intelligence software that you’re using or something like that, then you can really plan out and you might be conservative and only see like, like, assess the value of a patient at seven years or at 10 years or 15 years if you’re kind of ambitious.
Evan: But ultimately, as long as the data is relatively true, meaning as long as the assumptions of the percentage of people that are going to come back, the assumptions of how often their scheduling and the assumptions of the revenue per patient, it’s not that difficult to make a pretty rough calculation of what the value is, and so, that’s kind of how I would look at it. Did that answer it or did you want [inaudible 00:32:21]?
RJ Martino: Yeah. I believe so. And once you… if listeners have any additional questions, there’s lots of information online and how to calculate it. Now, once you know, the lifetime value, how do you use that in making decisions?
Evan: Great. So if the first thing is to set yourself a budget of what would be a good investment, a great ROI, what you will, you’d be thrilled at taking for a new patient because now that’s going to set a much more realistic budget for your marketing. if you’ve assessed that the lifetime value of a mother is $6, 000, so then if I say, would you be willing to spend $200 to acquire that patient? It’s a no brainer.
Evan: So part of it is just, it’s going to help you determine what is a reasonable amount of investment to try to generate. And then it also helps you put into perspective why spending time on this is important. That’s one aspect of looking at that data. But another aspect is also identifying, opportunities within that number, right?
Evan: So if I say, I have, 60% of my patients are coming back to my practice or one in every patient, the average patient schedules every year and a half. So how can I improve that? If I can bring it down from a year and a half to a year in three months, that’s going to have an massive impact over the long term. If I can bring that up from 60% to 65%, a big problem.
Evan: Or not a big problem, but kind of an area where a lot of practices rely on automated tools like patient recall, is often just the bare minimum of what they should be doing, right? Because the financial impact of doing a better job is so hug. And so once you have a good picture of the value of that patient, now it puts into perspective of, what would that look like if I was able to bump up the… improve this number by x percent.
Evan: What would it look like if I was apple able to get 10 new patients a month? What would it look like if I was able to increase the revenue of a new patient by $50? And so it gives you a clear indication of the value of taking on a marketing initiative that might be able to drive the revenue per patient or taking on a marketing initiative that would be able to drive new patient growth or taking on a marketing initiative to improve your recall or retention.
RJ Martino: Very good. Well, I’m hoping our audience is following along with how we do this. Again, if there are any questions, feel free to reach out to us or Evan, as we kind of break through what he’s doing here because this is valuable stuff. This is procedurally how you develop a marketing plan and even how you manage it. So I can’t thank you enough for that.
RJ Martino: Like lot of, clients I’ve worked with in the past, optometrists, always want new patients and then they get it and then they’re overbooked. And I’m sure you see this where there’s just no more time to see any more patients, and so they start asking questions like, are there ways that I can maximize profits and not have to see more patients?
RJ Martino: Are there, trends in the industry that you’re seeing or do you guys have recommendations on what happens whenever you, a book does get full?
Evan: Yeah, so there are quite a few ways of tackling that issue. So the first way is to, there are a lot of higher revenue services, right? And so those provide opportunities where as opposed to making let’s say $300 on average, you’re making two, one, $500 per patient.
Evan: So, creating room within your book and saying, okay, I’m going to slow down on my new patient marketing and really focus my attention on high revenue. Patient marketing can be one way of tackling the issue of I’m full, but I want to grow. Another thing is focusing on your attention on some of the ideas we just talked about a second ago, which is, I don’t necessarily need new patients, but what I do need is to find ways to increase the revenue per patient, whether it’s improving, the doctors conversation with the patient, whether it’s talking about proving the process of how the patient experiences the practice while they’re there.
Evan: So just as an example, I had a doctor I spoke to recently and then she told me that, they opened a new location and in the new location they basically split the exam into two parts so that the patient would go through the, general refraction part of the exam to check out what classes they need. Then they would go over to the optical and then they would come back for like a little more medical testing.
Evan: And the improvement, in optical sales, it was huge because people don’t want to sit there for an hour before they even go look shopping for glasses. Right? So small little initiatives often have a massive impact on the revenue per patient. Sometimes I’ve practices that are, really good at talking about a topic, right? Talk about the protection and blue light protection or sunglasses.
Evan: You talk passionately about the importance of controlling Myopia, progression in Kids or you talk passionately about how you believe that a daily disposable contact lenses are the best option for a patient. The doctor patient relationship is a very powerful sales medium, which is often under utilized, very often under utilized.
Evan: And so that would be kind of like, two really great examples would be, increased revenue and focus on higher revenue services for your marketing. within optometry there are definitely trends. Like there’s a lot of pressure from insurances, pricing wise. And so a practice that is really full might step back from a specific insurance that doesn’t really give them enough profitability.
Evan: And then now they’re problem cause now they need to get more new patients. But at least the new patients that they’re getting are going to be much more profitable. That’s kind of another thing. And let’s see. Yeah, it’s really just a shifting focus of your marketing efforts, but there are definitely ways to grow a business outside of getting more new patients through the door.
Evan: Sometimes I’ll recommend to a practice that’s so busy to actually like block off a certain part of their calendar for higher revenue, services. If they do that. Say, even if you’re not full today, that’s the focus of your marketing initiatives and we need to have that availability to grow that aspect. It’s going to take a little bit of time, but eventually what will happen is you’re going to increase the average revenue of your patients by x amount. That’s really impactful.
RJ Martino: Now, that’s great stuff. Well, and I’m glad you help all segments regardless of where an optometrist is, whether they’re just starting, whether they’re maybe slowly declining in wanting to increase or whether they’re too busy. It sounds like you could help optometrists regardless of where they are at.
RJ Martino: So if we’ve got an audience member, and I’m just got two more questions, but if you’ve got an audience member where you think, where they’re on the other side of the saying, hey, he’s talking directly to me. This is… I’m into this, I want to grow my practice. Do you have any closing words for them?
Evan: Do I have any closing words? That’s a good one, I know open-ended. Do I have any closing words? All right. Give me, three seconds to kind of think about this is important. So, I think my closing words are that what you need to look for is a marketing company that first and foremost is able to show measurable results because without being able to determine the ROI on what you’re doing, it’s just very hard to assess if you’re making right decisions and stuff like that.
Evan: So that, that would be my first, and that Kind of goes along with my main point, which is, there are tremendous opportunities for growth. And as an optometrist or as a doctor, you got to outsource. You can’t assume that you can do it, and you can’t assume that somebody, your office manager is a marketing expert.
Evan: You really need to look for a company that you think is a partner, that focuses in on really creating measurable growth on longterm and then let them guide you. I mean, it’s incredible how many practices come on and they start telling me how they want to have a Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and snapchat and sure, everybody’s on social media, but the practice literally has no results.
Evan: And there are 20 things that they should do before starting out. And not saying that social media is not important at all, but I’m saying is that having somebody who has experience of what’s going provide the most value in guiding a practice and letting yourself say, yes, this is my business and I’m passionate about it and I want it to grow.
Evan: But at the end of the day, you’re going to be far more effective working with somebody who shares that passion but is actually good at marketing. so that’s my closing statement.
RJ Martino: I love it. I love the conclusion because we all feel it all, everybody listening knows how fragmented and how there are just so many things that we should be doing, trying to find the proper path is so hard to do because we feel like we need to do all of the things right.
RJ Martino: I can’t tell you how much I’ve appreciated you being on the podcast. I’m excited to get this out into the hands of the audience. And, Evan, if people want to contact you EyeCarePro, can you talk about how we can find you?
Evan: Yeah, the best part is, I mean, you can reach me by email. It’s Evan evan@eyecarepro.net. You can also call my direct phone number. It’s a two zero one five, nine one four three, five zero. So really happy to, my approach has always helped first and then find out if they’re interested in sales later.
Evan: So I’m really happy to just, anybody from who’s listening, they have questions they have, anything they want to hash out, feel free to reach out to me. I’m really happy to help.
RJ Martino: Evan man, thanks so much. Excited to have you looking forward to building more of a longterm relationship with you. But thanks again for me [inaudible 00:42:54]
Evan: Thanks RJ. I appreciate, being here and it was a great time,
RJ Martino: Guys, I am pumped. I want to thank Evan for the time we’ve spent together. Love knowing that there are specialists that speak to subset of our audience, the uptime insurance and ophthalmologist group. He spoke about some easy techniques, the Google reviews and how important those are things you can get started with day one.
RJ Martino: He also talked about how awesome it is to be able to make decisions with data, which we talk about all the time. The results have to speak for themselves. We are not, often spending money for branding imaging, we actually need it to produce new patients. So data is super important.
RJ Martino: And then he also talked about ways that you can maximize revenue by looking at the profit centers. And I hope that was loud and clear. Even if you have a full book and you just think there’s not another hour in my day, but we’re not making enough money.
RJ Martino: He talked about the profit centers that you did look at looking at kind of higher, lower volume, but higher a per case visit. And, those were really strong words. And we see people struggle with that a lot. So, closing words were phenomenal. I hope you guys, heard that too, and feel free to get in touch with Evan.
RJ Martino: If I can answer any questions, I am always there. Do me a favor and please share rate and writer review of the podcast that helps get the word out for us. Use your favorite podcast tool, whatever podcasts listening app you use, and also sit next to someone that has an optometry clinic now.
RJ Martino: We’d love to get this shared and we’d also love to know of a potential speaker, someone that has helped other health care organizations grow, would love to speak to them. Whether it’s a vendor or someone who has actually scaled their healthcare business, would love to talk to them about that.
