Articles

Olympics Lesson – Preserve Your Prospects’ Momentum

Susan and I were soaking up the Olympics last night, and one of the featured events was the Men’s Alpine Skiing competition.

As these guys were traveling a death-defying 80+ mph on skis (which is insane), the commentators continually talked about the importance of momentum.

For example, If a skier takes the wrong angle around the gate, and slides out a little too much, they lose momentum. Not only does this slow them down in the moment, but it affects their speed through the remainder of the race. No momentum = no medal.

To win, you must maximize these two complementary forces – speed and momentum. Put another way, speed on the course is the result of creating and preserving momentum.

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Speed and momentum are also crucial when it comes to winning new surgery patients.

We know that the faster you can reach out to prospective patients who complete your online forms, the more likely you are to connect with them and get them booked for a consult.

This is reflected in the data of a massive study by the Harvard Business Review. Among several eye-popping results, the study showed a 400% decrease in contact and qualification rates when you wait 10 minutes to contact new leads vs contacting them in 5 minutes or less. And contact rates continued to drop the longer it took to reach out to the leads.

(Important to note this study was done before Amazon and Netflix created the “on-demand” consumer culture we have today. The thirst for NOW is higher than its ever been)

And we see this play out all the time with our clients. Anytime we help someone systematize their lead outreach so they are connecting with leads faster, they see an increase in conversions.

There are several reasons for this, one of them being the preservation of momentum…

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Imagine with me for a moment…

Your prospects are the alpine skiers. When they go to your website and fill out a contact form, they are essentially leaving the gate at the top of the mountain, and starting to make their way down to the finish line.

Unlike the world-class skiers in the alpine competition, your prospects are not knowledgeable about the course, or how to create momentum or even how to ski. In fact, it’s impossible for them to generate momentum without your help. You must work as a team.

Contact your leads quickly (within 5 minutes) to preserve (and increase) the momentum they’ve already started creating.

Because if you wait an hour, or until this afternoon, or until tomorrow (cringe) to contact your new leads, it’s much like a skier sliding out of their line and losing momentum. Or like one unfortunate athlete we saw, crashing and coming to a complete standstill.

Not-So-Fun Fact: When someone crashes on the Alpine course, there’s no one there to help them up. So we watched this guy walk back up to his skis, put them on and meander down the mountain. Obviously going much slower – with feelings of frustration and dejection – than the competitors who were able to navigate the course smoothly.

The faster you are able to contact your leads, the more momentum (through the patient journey) you will preserve. And that’s one important way to set up your patience – and your practice – for a gold medal podium finish.

Wanna dominate the competition and serve your patients at the highest level? Contact all your online leads within 5 minutes or less.

That’s all I have for you today. Godspeed to you on a highly productive week!

– Troy “Snowboarding > Skiing” Cole

PS – You may already have guidelines in place to make sure your leads are being contacted quickly. Doesn’t mean it’s happening. Check and make sure it is.

How to Avoid This Critical “Efficiency Mistake”

“Lemme know when my drugs get here,” I tell Susan.

Always around the last couple days of the month, which is when my subscription ships.

They aren’t really drugs. Far from it actually. The box is loaded with a can of protein, workout supplements and vitamins.

The shipment of not-drugs arrives from St. Louis, usually in 2-3 days, direct from 1st Phorm HQ. With the holidays + us traveling, I just opened this month’s delivery.

Yes, it contained my order. Plus one additional item they never fail to include…

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International fitness supplement powerhouse 1st Phorm started like many companies do – single location, single product, slow and steady word-of-mouth growth.

Almost 20 years later, they’re worldwide. A 9-figure (10-figure?) company.

1st Phorm fills a LOT of orders. 1st Phorm has a lot going on. 1st Phorm knows I’m a repeat customer and probably not going anywhere.

All the said, 1st Phorm never fails to add that one additional item to my order…

A handwritten a note, right on my packing slip. More accurately, one of 1st Phorm’s team members never fails to write it. Unique to me and what I’m ordering. 👇

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Let’s talk about efficiency. I’m a fan.

And I’m gonna guess that 1st Phorm – with the tens of thousands of orders a day they are filling – has highly efficient processes in place.

But there’s no way around it – writing a note on every daggum packing slip (which I assume they do because they’ve written one on every slip I’ve ever received, whether the order was big or small) is inefficient. Period.

And let’s say Mr. Hot Shot Efficiency Expert zips in for an audit. He pulls out his clipboard and says, “Ok, let’s look at everything you’re doing and how it relates to the bottom line.” It would be tough to make a case for keeping the handwritten notes.

Glowing, he reports: “Well, if we cut out these handwritten notes, it would save an average of 1.7 minutes per order. At 7,549 orders per day, which would allow us to fill 4,320 more orders daily.”

And just like that, you become more efficient. but at what cost? The cost of providing excellency customer service. The cost of being different from your competitors. The cost of reminding your team how amazing your mission is.

“Yeah, but we can make more money if we’re more efficient.” Can you? Maybe in the short-term.

But the long game – which you should be playing – gets ruined. You become like every other mediocre company. Trying to squeeze an extra buck out of every little activity, which results in falling short of customer expectations.

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1st Phorm knows this. They practice exactly what we teach the teams we coach:

Efficiency is a balancing act.

If you are too efficient in your practice, in every single little thing you do, you lose your humanity. You lose your connection with your patients. Ultimately you lose your competitive advantage.

But if you throw efficiency out the window, and just say, “We just like to spend as much time with every patient as we can…” you unnecessarily limit the number of patients you can help.

Like most things in life, efficiency has a happy middle ground. Be efficient where you can, so when you do have to take extra time with a patient, you actually have the time to take.

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When surgeons come to us to coach their phone teams to book more consults, this is one of the first things we tackle.

How to strike the Efficiency Balance – shortening marathon phone calls, reducing the time between follow-ups, how to batch followups, get prospects on the phone faster, get them in the door sooner. All activities that add efficiency, reduce wasted time and grow your surgery numbers.

At the same time, we coach on how to take the necessary steps to build rapport, build value and make the prospects comfortable to come in to the office. Inefficient activities on their face, but necessary to appropriately serve your patients and set you apart as the premium provider in your area.

So if you want your team to strike the Efficiency Balance – which ultimately maximizes your value to patients and your profits as a practice – then shoot me a message so I can show you how we do it.

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Takeaways…

Outdated Method – Efficiency at all costs.

New yet Still Broken – put efficiency on the back burner.

Growth Path – Strike the Efficiency Balance to provide the ideal patient experience. (This is the one you want).

Have an excellent week…

– T-fficient Troy

PS – I talked about efficiency of time in this email, but this also goes for other areas of your practice.

Efficiency in staffing for example. Be efficient in your hiring (don’t carry a bloated roster), but don’t be too efficient in your pay. Find good people, pay them more than anyone else does (inefficient on paper and in the short term), keep them forever (super efficient in the long term).

This 1 Aspect of Practice Growth (is completely different from bodybuilding)

I hope your holiday season has been excellent. I’m not 100% sure why, but I’m incredibly excited and bullish on 2022.

Maybe because ‘rona seems like it’s finally getting under control (whatever that means to you). Maybe because the last almost 2 years have been crazy, and we’re due for good times without (as much of) the insanity.

I think it’s mostly due to the fact that so many of our clients are making epic moves and getting dialed in for a banner year.

Regardless, I hope you’re as pumped as I am. We’re gonna crush in 2022.

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Over the last couple of months, I’ve shared a number of business lessons I’ve learned (or been reminded of) as I go through my bodybuilding show prep (A couple of the highlights are here and here if you missed them…)

I’ve found several parallels between growing Grade-A muscles and growing a Grade-A practice.

My physique show was a few weeks ago, and I haven’t shared an update since then. (No, I did not win. But the lessons I learned – and the physical results I was able to achieve – were worth the process).

To wrap up these lessons, I wanted to share one big way your practice growth efforts should in no way resemble bodybuilding, lest ye set yourself up for failure.

This will be particularly useful as you set your plans for the new year… 👇

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As you might imagine, the closer one gets to a bodybuilding competition, the more “dialed in” one needs to be. Adjusting calories and macros, meal times, meal size, changing workout styles, increasing water intake, and more.

Then of course there’s the ridiculous preening activities like dark-orange spray tan.

And all of this is scheduled down to the hour to optimize for literally a few minutes on stage.

All these efforts are designed to help showcase just a little extra muscle… shave off a bit extra fat and subcutaneous water… to get any edge possible in the competition.

Here’s the harsh reality that I learned leading up to the show (and particularly in the 3 weeks since it concluded):

Those ripped-up bodybuilders you see in magazines or on TV? Come to find out, they don’t look like that all the time. They do all these little adjustments and manipulations so they can look optimal for maybe a few hours, at their “peak.”

The premise of the entire “sport” of bodybuilding is that it’s not sustainable. It’s literally designed to NOT be.

And unsustainability is a huge red flag when it comes to your practice growth.

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The way we coach our clients (and how I live my life, if we’re gonna get personal) is the exact opposite of bodybuilding. It’s as sustainable as possible. It has to be.

We (you, your practice, me) can’t optimize our efforts around a 2-hour window every 12 weeks. We have to be ON every day. For our patients, our clients, our spouses, our children, our teams, our community.

For example, this is why we DO NOT build our trainings for the top 1% of sales people. We architect them in such a way that they are easy to implement for any competent team member who has a positive attitude and willingness to learn.

Most practices don’t have a team full of sales beasts (if you do, more power to you!). So they need strategies and coaching that works for what they do have.

Your practice growth systems must be sustainable.

Eat one wrong food at the wrong time in bodybuilding? You won’t “peak” when you need to. Mess up your water intake? You’ll miss your mark.

As much muscle and brute force is involved in getting optimal results, the sport of bodybuilding is actually quite fragile.

Your practice cannot be fragile. Because you’re thrown curve balls every day.

You’re customizing treatments to each individual patient. You’re hiring new folks. Others are out sick. A new treatment gets FDA approved and you need to check it out. You’re nurturing relationships with referring doctors (and courting new ones).

There’s always something. Especially with our clients because they move quickly, act aggressively and strive to dominate their markets.

You are blazing your trail on a daily basis, and to do that properly, you need durable, sustainable processes to make it happen.

(Don’t even get me started on how impossible it is to sustain a new physique AFTER the show. When your body is in starvation mode for the last 6 weeks of prep… and post-show you start to eat more regular food again… your body HAPPILY begins storing any extra calories it can. “You’ll never starve me again, Troy! I’ll make sure of that…” ugh)

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When it comes to sustainability, bodybuilding is NOTHING like an optimal practice growth plan. (And frankly, all the little adjustments and tweaks up until show time – only for a short window of benefit – frustrated me to no end.)

You need a sustainable process that provides predictable results with reasonable effort. That’s how we live, and it’s how we coach – from physician CEOs to surgery teams, even to my sons’ sports teams.

Going into 2022, make sure you have processes your team can execute repeatedly. Processes that are simplified. That account for curve balls.

This goes double for your team members who are responsible for booking your consults and surgeries.

And while you’re at it, take stock of your personal life. Your family. Your health. Your fitness. Where do you need to simplify processes to make them more sustainable?

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That’s it for my bodybuilding lessons. I hope this little series has been useful and maybe even entertaining for you.

If you have any questions about the physique training, hit me up. Happy to share more about my experience as a beginner, if it’s something you’re curious about.

Have a blessed rest of the year, and I’ll see you in your inbox in 2022.

– Troy “Crush The New Year” Cole

PS – A couple of folks have asked about photos from the show. If you’re curious, you can check them out here. (Or totally don’t, won’t hurt my feelings either way)

No, the Patient Does Not Come First

Time to address a trope in medical care (and business in general):

This idea that “The customer is always right” or “The customer always comes first.” (Or in your case, the patient)

Of course we focus on our patients. Of course they are a priority. No one is claiming otherwise, so don’t get triggered.

But here’s where challenges arise:

When you put patients first at the expense of your team. Over time, this destroys your culture, ruins morale and kills your excellent patient care.

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Think back to a time you were a patient, or even a customer in a business. You’ve probably been in this type of situation, which happened to me a couple weeks ago:

I’m in the waiting area. I see the team at the front desk bickering, one of them scolding another. It wasn’t loud or intense, but it was apparent. And I could feel the negative energy.

Then one of them walks out, puts on a fake-ish smile, and says “Yes, Mr. Cole, please follow me right this way…”

It was clear to me that this team probably doesn’t get along. There’s tension. Likely drama. And the fact that she’s “smiling and being kind” to me doesn’t override what I just observed.

Humans generally don’t like seeing people dump on other people. It puts off a negative vibe that repels us. Certainly was the case for me at this office.

AND SO, what am I saying?

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The patient doesn’t come first. Your team comes first.

It has to. And here’s why:

When your team comes first…

When you focus on building a thriving and positive team culture…

When everyone on your team is supporting and encouraging and assisting each other…

The natural result of this behavior is excellent patient care.

In my example above (and based on other observations I made at that practice), they clearly don’t have this positive team culture. And for that reason, their claims of “patient-focused care” and fake smiles simply ring hollow.

Strong practice culture is like ripples in the water:

1. Starts with each individual caring for themselves, then

2. It moves out to the team taking care of each other, and

3. That ripples out to the patients.

For those practices that overlook Step 1 and try to shortcut Step 2 because they’re overly concerned about what happens Step 3, that’s simply backwards thinking. Reverse it, and you’re good to go.

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Moving into a new year, it’s a great time to assess and re-focus on your team.

Are you doing team meetings? One-on-ones? Celebrating wins? Do you know what drives and motivates your people? These are all essential to building a thriving team.

You or your admin or someone take charge and build the culture you want.

Because if you want to maximize your patient experience…

Your team comes first.

– Troy “Team Work Makes the Dream Work” Cole

PS – Generally the better your practice culture, the longer good people will stick around. Good people are *really* hard to find right now, and you want to keep them!

BONUS of a strong culture – If you do accidentally hire a bad egg, they will often fire themselves because they know they don’t belong and their cancerous attitude is not welcome.

The boring thing works (so do more boring)

An update on my physique competition prep…

I’ve mentioned how my trainer talked me into doing a physique competition. In case you haven’t been opening my emails (your loss) I’ve got t-minus 3.5 weeks to go.

And I continue to learn (or at least be reminded) of principles that apply to my business and yours.

Today – we talk about doing the boring work… then doing more of it.

Since we’re closing in on the homestretch of competition prep, we’re in cutting mode. Basically a time to focus less on muscle bulking and more on trimming fat so we look nice and lean on stage.

(PAUSE: If any of this sounds ridiculously narcissistic, I totally understand. But another weird aspect of prepping for these competitions is that you start talking about your body objectively, like it’s one of the miniature donkeys I would show at the State Fair of Texas in high school. It’s less vanity and more pure assessment. Like they literally call the body a “package” as in “We gotta do XYZ to take the best package on stage.” It’s so weird…)

Alright so what do you do to trim fat? Well, you adjust your ratios to eat more protein, fewer carbs, and do more cardio. That’s about it.

New protein? No, the same boring chicken and fish I was eating before.

New cardio? No, the same boring walk on the treadmill at 15 degrees and 3.5 miles per hour that I was doing before. (Just for 60 minutes a day instead of 40.)

“But but but shouldn’t there be something new or fancy?” That’s what I thought.

And apparently the answer is no. Ever. You do the same boring thing that has been working. You just do more of it.

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This has many parallels in the business world. Entrepreneur Alex Hormozi ($100+ million in revenues each year) talks a lot about the benefits of doing the boring work.

Want to grow your practice? Keep doing the same boring thing that has been working. And just do more of it.

Do the followup calls to non-converts.

Write the Thank-You notes to patients.

Recite the same script to every happy patient, asking for a 5-star review.

Do the same intro greeting for every patient who walks in the door.

These things can be… boring. But we do them because they get the result we want.

Few people love a shiny object more than me. New ad platform? New scripting? New treatment options that we can market? LET’S GO! I love the new, the fun, the flashy.

But I have to pump the breaks on myself constantly. “Is this new thing going to keep me from doing the boring things that get me results?”

Most of the time, I take that shiny thing… add it to a list of ideas… and leave it for later. That’s a discipline I’ve had to develop over the years in my profession.

With the competition prep, it’s been much easier because I told my trainer from the start, “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” And what he continues to communicate to me is, “We’re just gonna keep doing the boring stuff, bro.”

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When you are able to focus on doing MORE of the boring thing that’s working, life gets simpler.

For example, I’m on a call with a client the other day to talk about increasing their leads. We have a self-test set up for them that converts at 20%, meaning that 1 out of 5 people who click on it turn into a lead. Pretty solid.

How do we get the result we want (more leads)? Well, I could list off 100 different things we could try. But one very easy and obvious way is to get more eyeballs on the self-test.

Driving people to a self-test = kinda boring marketing. It’s not nearly as fun as doing a silly video for Instagram, shooting a trendy TikTok, or designing a fun new t-shirt. But it’s the process that gets you closer to your surgery goals.

And following up with those folks.. .and leaving messages… and sending texts… and getting them on the phone… and getting them booked… kinda boring process. But it’s the process that gets you closer to your surgery goals.

Sure, there’s room for fun and creativity in the way you get more people to the self-test – various campaigns, different demographics, etc.

As long as all that is geared toward the successful, boring thing that you should do more of.

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The wildest part of doing the boring thing? It tends to generate the most anti-boring results.

My clients that do the boring review-ask with every happy patient? They’re the ones whose 5-star review volume is growing faster than a “Let’s Go, Brandon!” chant at a Crimson Tide football game.

And me doing the boring competition prep…

without any weird fad diets, funky workouts or off-the-wall pills and supplements…

well, I’m in the best shape of my life. And getting a little bit better each day.

In conclusion, do the boring work. And then do more of it.

And if you need me, reply to this email. I’ll be on the treadmill.

– Troy “Treading” Cole

PS – You may think, “Troy, I get what you’re saying. But we don’t know how to even do the boring work. We need a roadmap.”

If that’s you, cool. Email and tell me.

I’ve got the maps. You can have one. Just ask.