The First NewScript Summit is Ready to Roll

This week John and co-founder Tom Davis and their team are putting the final touches on NewScript's first Nonclinical Career Summit. It is designed primarily for NewScript members but is open to anyone interested in learning more about nontraditional opportunities for clinicians.

The Summit is a free live event that will be held next week! Mark your calendars for April 11 to April 13 from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM Eastern Time.    


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


What is NewScript?

NewScript is a community of mentors, career transition experts, and clinicians. It is designed for licensed healthcare workers seeking professional fulfillment and resources to help overcome burnout and transition into more fulfilling nonclinical and nontraditional careers.

As the community grows, John and Tom decided to present the Summit for these reasons:

  1. To help clinicians who are dissatisfied with their jobs.
  2. To broaden our reach and spread our message.
  3. To leverage the expertise of our Mentors and enable them to reach an even larger audience.

What Is the Summit Agenda?

This 3-day event consists of 12 live lectures and Q&A sessions with 4 topics covered each day. 

Below are the speakers and topics being covered.

Tuesday, April 11, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern Time:

  1.  Jen Barna on Success Coaching
  2.  Norman Chapin on pursuing an Advanced Degree
  3.  Andrew Wilner on Locum Tenens
  4. Cherisa and Alex Sandrow on Telemedicine/Telehealth

Wednesday, April 12, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern Time

  1. Debra Blaine on Writing and Self-Publishing
  2.  Nerissa Kreher on Pharma Jobs
  3.  Jeep and Vanessa Naum on Marriage in Professional Couples
  4.  Tom Davis on Venture Capital Advising

Thursday, April 13, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern Time:

  1. Maria Abunto on Becoming an MSL
  2.  Jonathan Vitale on Remote UM Jobs
  3.  Chelsea Turgeon on Location-Independent Work
  4. 12. John Jurica on Hospital Management Jobs

SUMMARY

In today's episode, John discusses the planning for the first Nonclinical Career Summit sponsored by NewScript, including the goals and expected outcomes. He discusses why he and his partner chose a 3-day live Zoom Conference Call format.

The faculty experts will be providing a lot of information beneficial to physicians and nonphysicians, including APNs and PAs, dentists, podiatrists, oral surgeons, social workers, and other therapists. 

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode. 


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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 294

Behind the Scenes Look at Planning the First Nonclinical Career Summit

John: Sorry if today seems like it's going to be a 25-minute promotional episode but I think we can get some good information from this. Really putting together a summit like this brings together a lot of the things I've been working on for many years. From doing marketing and emailing and social media and creating the podcast and learning how to use video and audio and run Zoom meetings and all that.

So, let's move on and let's talk about that today. That's really what I want to cover. Let's get into first of all what a summit is. Now summits have become very popular recently, and it may be a little bit amusing because really what distinguishes a summit from other types of conferences, I would say a summit is a type of conference.

But let's see how it may be different from the typical conference you might be attending live or online. Well, first of all, most summits are online. They're an online form of conference. The second thing is that the live or the basic version of a summit is usually free or extremely low cost. And then usually there's access to recordings or ancillary or bonus content that's normally sold for an additional fee. You get the free aspect of the summit. In our case, it's almost 12 hours. There are breaks in there, but it's 12 hours over three days of lectures followed by Q&A.

And the whole thing, like I said, is free. You can learn a lot, and you can take notes, but if you want to get recordings and you want to get all the bonuses that might come up to support the lectures, then you're going to have to buy the all access pass.

And usually it's focused on one particular theme. A lot of times it's something related to business, like real estate investing or careers or marketing or any other business topic. And it generally involves anywhere from 10 to even 30 or 40 presentations done over a few days up to a week.

And the other thing that usually happens with the summit and why there are so many support programs built, have grown recently to help support summits is that usually the presenters are also serving as affiliates to help market the program. So, in other words, the speakers we have, most of our speakers are mentors on NewScript, but we have some other experts that Tom and I know. We ask them if they want to go ahead and get on and give a lecture for 30 minutes, answer some Q&A for 20 minutes, and in exchange, they can get a little bit of authority, be part of something that's a positive thing. And they can also promote this to their followers, their listeners, some of their customers, and their email subscribers and make some marketing affiliate commissions. And so, it all kind of pulls together.

Now, the way they vary sometimes is a lot of summits are pre-recorded. They'll record all of the lectures and maybe even have some sort of pseudo Q&A, but they'll just record the sessions and then they'll either drip them out during the week or during the day, or each day they'll post, let's say if they're doing a three day summit or a four day summit, they'll post one third or one fourth of the lectures for that day. People can access it at their own rate and then wait till the next day when the others are dripped out and the next day and the next day. And again, usually during that time it's being promoted and people are buying access to the recordings.

Now, sometimes they're done live, which is what we decided to do. And part of the reason was that I did a survey and I pretty much asked people what they wanted. People that are on my email list, people in NewScript. And they basically said they wanted to do it in the evening, that they wanted it to be live and have a Q&A.

And there have been other summits that I've attended that this is the process that's been used. And it's really good because there's a lot of interaction and it seems more real. And really when you're learning, if you can ask questions, it's a whole lot better than just listening to a prerecorded 20 or 30 minute video that may have some good content, but then you can't follow up.

We decided, "Okay, we're going to go low tech, we're just going to run it on our Zoom. We're not going to pre-record anything." There's a little exception of that because we had a couple of speakers that for whatever reason, it would be almost impossible for them to be live on the summit because of the timing. We have a couple of them that are going to be recorded, but they'll be posted during the live event. So, we're not going to send those out to people that have signed up. If they want to really get the free version of even the recordings they have to attend, you'd have to attend.

So, we decide to do it that way, make it live, make it exciting. There might be glitches. We're prepared as best we can for that. And that's what we're going to do. And the night that we do it, the three nights that we do it from April 11, April 13, we're going to be recording the sessions including the Q&A. We're going to get those posted as quickly as we can. And anybody that buys you all access pass will have access to those forever. Plus it'll be not just the video recordings, but an audio version plus any bonuses that we have. I'll talk about the bonuses later.

I wanted to go through in detail how we approach this and the principles we decided to follow. We're going to keep it as low-tech as we can. We're not going to hire some outside firm to try and coordinate and put this whole thing together and market it and so forth, only because they take a huge chunk of money, and we're trying to keep this as low cost as possible. Hence the fact that there are 12 hours of free content. Just show up and it's there for you.

We want it to be convenient. As I said, the survey said people wanted it during the week, they don't want to screw up their weekend. And because people can't usually work during the day, it's going to be run in the evenings for four hours. As I thought about this, I thought, "What did I get myself into? I'm going to sit on a Zoom call for four hours, three nights in a row." I think I might go nuts, but I think it'll be fun actually, and I'll be really pumped when the time comes.

It needs to be affordable, which it will be. Even the all access pass is going to be so low cost, it's just crazy. We wanted to do it live to have that Q&A and we wanted it to be really powerful and impactful. We really want to help the people we serve.

Tom and I run NewScript and so we kind of gear this for them, clinicians who are looking to get away from burnout and lack of satisfaction and fulfillment in their jobs and feeling that they're being taken for granted at their jobs. And so, it's that audience, but obviously, there are a lot of people who aren't in NewScript that have the same feelings and are looking for the same things. And so, we're going to be putting this out to a very, very large audience.

All right. So, what did we do? I talked about the survey, we talked about the timing. When we first started talking about this, I think was in October of 2020. And I thought, "Well, let's see. We got three or four months, maybe we should just try and do this in the middle of January.

We're past all the holidays and everything should be quieting down." Of course, I'm talking to you now. I'm recording this in March. So that obviously didn't work out, but we looked at our calendars and Tom in particular said it's going to be tough to squeeze that in. I've got some things going on in January. So, it looks like maybe April will be better. And I'm glad we did that because there are a lot of things we had to do upfront to get this thing rolling.

And so, I'm really happy that I still have another few weeks to finish up what my part in putting this together is. And then once we made that decision, then it's kind of like Stephen Covey used to tell us "You start with the end in mind." Starting from, okay, here's what we want to create.

What do we need to do to plan this thing? I have some experience in planning big projects. I was basically in charge of the implementation of the first integrated full hospital electronic medical record, which meant it had to integrate with radiology and the pharmacy and the nursing, and all the doctors who had never done order entry before. In that project, we had at least seven different committees, call them subcommittees, and they were all working on their part of it. Of course, everything for the summit is basically Tom Davis and me. And so, it's a mini version of that.

What do I want to go into first? Well, we decided also that we wanted to try to stick with the most popular topics that were asked about in NewScript and outside of NewScript in terms of burnout and overwhelm and starting a business, starting a new clinical, or nonclinical position or non-traditional clinical position or job, side gig, full-time activity.

We wanted to use our mentors. We have over a dozen mentors now in NewScript. They're all experts on those kinds of things. Some are experts in particular industries like pharma or hospitals or academic settings or insurance or things like that. Some are coaches. Some have other expertise. We wanted to use as many of them as we could. So, we started by creating the draft schedule and we started reaching out to people to get commitments for the topic. It was early enough that I don't think the timing was going to be a big deal, meaning that we were so far out (two, three months) in advance that most people had open schedules.

We thought back and forth about how to promote this, and how to post it. Originally I was going to post all of the recordings on my Teachable account, where I have the Nonclinical Career Academy. It has a pretty slick affiliate section because what can happen is I can get affiliates for Teachable to promote my courses. Some of you may have seen that from time to time.

But at the end of the day, consulting some other people and talking, we decided to set up a separate WordPress website, and then add a plugin that could handle all the affiliate marketing, meaning that it would create the affiliate codes for people who are promoting this. It would track who sold things, and who sold access to the all access pass, and then it would automatically process their commissions as the payments came in.

And by the way, we thought about, again, keeping this affordable. And this is another feature of summits, is that a lot of times what they'll do is you've got the free version and then if you purchase the bonus side or the all access pass or there are different terms used for it to get the recordings, to get other things, then there's a small fee. In our case, it's $19. So you can get all 12 hours of everything we're doing for $19 if you sign up for that all access pass before the start of the summit on April 11th.

Now if you wait till after, there are going to be some people that won't even know about the summit, of course, for whatever reason until the summit is going, and then people might be sharing that with their friends and so forth. So, we're going to be marketing it during that week, of course. Once it kicks in on the 11th, then the all access pass increases to $39. Again, nothing. This is a ridiculously low price, but it's going to go up. And part of that is just to promote people to get off the fence and sign up because the price is going to go up.

We'll see probably a little peak on the 10th or 11th in the morning before the price goes up. Then during the summit for three days, if you come in, you're halfway through the live event and you say, "Well man, I really want those lectures, so I'm going to sign up for the pass. It's going to be $39 to do that."

Now, at the end of that three-day period we're going to be promoting it hard on the last day, and then the next day on that Friday, the price goes up to $79 now. That way, in retrospect, if someone goes to the whole thing or attends a lot of the lectures and says, "Boy, in retrospect that was really awesome and I didn't really take a lot of notes, so I want to purchase it." Then for two days, we'll be selling it for $79, and then after those two days pass, we'll be sending out a bunch of emails, letting people know, on that third day after it ends, the price is going to go up to $279 I believe.

It'll be up to us and our affiliate promoters who basically for the most part are speakers to decide if afterward, they want to sell it. And they can do that. They can do it intermittently. We can do it sometimes maybe three months later. We'll decide, "Hey, we had a great summit looking back and maybe we'll promote it again and sell it." And so, we'll keep doing that for probably several months afterward. So, that's how it works. We kind of came up with that plan.

And then we had to think about bonuses. Definitely, the recordings will be something worth a lot, but we thought, "Well, some of the lectures will have supplementary materials and we could try to distribute those during the live event." It's a little difficult. The easiest thing to do is take those bonuses, it might be a checklist, it might be a list of some topic. If the topic is about starting a UM job, it might be a list of companies. If it's about telemedicine, it might be a list of people or companies that hire physicians to work in telemedicine. For me, it's a list of 70 nonclinical jobs.

And also I'm going to put in there, because I'm talking about hospital management, one of the bonuses is going to be access to a 10-course bundle, all related to hospital management jobs. And so, I'm just going to put that up there for free. So, another reason to maybe spend $39 or $79. That course alone is worth about $270 if I remember correctly.

I had to figure out all that stuff ahead of time and how to communicate with our speakers and affiliate marketers, how to get that set up. And I had an associate, one of my social media people, actually is the guy that does my website, set up the website and the affiliate component of that.

And then we had to write a marketing schedule and plan. What does that mean? That means for us to do marketing of the summit, but also to write a bunch of emails, put together some images, some social media posts that the affiliate marketers and speakers could use without having to spend a lot of time promoting it to their customers, their followers, their listeners, readers, whatever it might be.

As of this recording, I'm about three-quarters through writing that. I've already written about 12 or 13 emails. And again, they're completely optional for people to use. They're the ones I'm going to use. But it makes it easier when people don't do a lot of affiliate marketing to be able to say, "Hey, I'm going to pull that email over. I'm going to change a few things about it, make it my own, send it out, and let my followers think about coming to hear me speak." Because each of these affiliates, for the most part, are speakers and to possibly sign up for the all access pass.

We had a lot of conversations about whether we would be able to do this with Zoom. I have a software called WebinarJam, which is actually created to do webinars. It has a lag in it and also it does not enable people to interact verbally at all on WebinarJam. And it's great software. I've made many webinars on that and promoted them, but you can't interact verbally. And so, you have to rely on the chat for people to put in their questions. It works okay.

But we thought we really want this to be live. We'll probably use the chat for most of the questions, but if we want to get someone on and say "I don't quite understand your question, why don't you raise your hand or we'll unmute you and you can ask your question directly, and we'll do our best to answer that question live during the Q&A." Right now, we're 80% of the way there, and so far so good. The thing that we're going to have to face, we need to do another dry run with a bunch of people on the call so we can make sure everything works appropriately in the version of Zoom that I'm using.

And the other thing we have to do is figure out how we're going to turn around the recordings because obviously, we'll be creating four different sessions per evening during the summit so we can hopefully try and get the video and audio recordings edited and ready for placement in the website within a day or two of the actual event. That's another thing we're working on, and trying to coordinate right now.

Those are the main things that we talked about and that we had to do to get this thing off the ground. Right now I'll just summarize where we are with the actual summit. We're on track to deliver those 12 lectures in Q&A sessions starting with four speakers on April 11th at 7:00 PM Eastern, 4:00 PM Pacific, and then four more on the 12th and four more on Thursday the 13th.

The speakers that we have, you may have heard of these people before because I think most of them have been on my podcast, if not all of them. So, let's see. We got Jen Barna who's talking about success coaching. Norman Chapin on pursuing advanced degrees. Andrew Wilner on locum tenens. Cherisa and Alex Sandrow on telemedicine, telehealth. Debra Blaine on writing and self-publishing. Nerissa Kreher on pharma jobs. Jeep and Vanessa Naum. His name is George, but he goes by Jeep. Jeep and Vanessa Naum who are going to be talking about marriage and professional couples particularly as it relates to the stress of burnout or pursuing a new job, new career, which is very stressful on families.

Tom Davis on venture capital advising. Jonathan Vitale on remote UM jobs. Chelsea Turgeon on location independent work internationally. She has a very interesting story. She's been on my podcast, but she's going to get into this in great detail and she's learned even more than she told us about when she was on the podcast a year or so ago.

I'll be talking about hospital executive jobs and I'm pretty certain that I've got someone to cover medical science liaison, which is really an important topic. It's one I talk about a lot because it's one that's accessible to physicians who don't have residency training. It's good for those with residency training and experience as well, but it's one that's commonly sought by those without residency training or board certification. My plan is that that will be Dr. Maria Abunto. All of my speakers are physicians. All of my speakers are physicians although NewScript is designed and run for all clinicians, licensed clinicians who work in the usual healthcare environments where they're abused and taken advantage of.

But a lot of the material that we're going to be talking about would be useful as well to nonphysicians like APNs and PAs and dentists and podiatrists and oral surgeons and social workers and other therapists in the hospital or office setting. We think it's going to be great. And if it goes well, then we'll plan on doing it in the future again. Maybe tweak it a little bit and expand it and we'll go from there.

That's really all I wanted to talk about today. I don't know that I hit every last topic, but these things just need to be approached like any major project. I wrote a project plan which sometimes they're called a Gantt chart. It's basically a large graphic in which each sub-project task is listed on one side. I guess that'd be the Y-axis. And then on the bottom is the X-axis, which has the dates. So I made mine a weekly and what was supposed to happen during each period of time.

And then that way you have this big graphic visual look at when things need to be done. You can check against your plan, you can adjust the plan, you can add things to it pretty easily. I just do it on Excel. That's how physically I put the plan together with Tom. But basically, we split up the different activities and just got going. And so far so good.

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