Interview with Omar Khateeb
In today’s interview, I interview Omar Khateeb, the Head of Growth at Gentem, about how to save private practice using persuasive branding and marketing.
Omar is a former medical school student who left to become a sales, marketing, and branding expert. He is the Head of Growth at Gentem. Gentem is a Billing and Revenue Cycle Management company that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to eliminate medical billing headaches for independent medical practices.
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Branding and Marketing Can Save Private Practice
Omar has been involved with the branding and marketing of healthcare companies since leaving medical school in 2012. He is also an entrepreneur, and one of the few people I know that completed Seth Godin’s altMBA program.
Aside from his foray into a nonmedical start-up, all of his marketing jobs have been with healthcare companies. Now he is working for a physician CEO and applying these skills to growing that business. But he joins us today to discuss how marketing can be applied to promoting small medical practices.
Knowledge of Business Principles
Omar is not a physician, but he definitely thinks like a physician in many ways and has been around physicians a lot. The CEO who founded Gentem, where he works now as Head of Growth, is a physician, as is his father.
I think it should be pretty evident today that small practice owners must compete with the bigger systems. But it takes a working knowledge of business principles, including marketing. I enjoyed getting some of those issues clarified by Omar during our conversation.
Maintaining a Competitive Advantage
We also spent a few minutes discussing Gentem. The company is using AI to improve billing and collections. And it has added a unique program that physicians in small practices may find helpful.
Once engaged, Gentem can use knowledge of a practice's projected revenues and earnings to provide short-term loans to physicians at lower rates and with less paperwork than through a typical bank loan department. Between the enhanced billing and the ability to access cash when needed, this physician-run company will definitely contribute to efforts to save private practice.
Free Webinar
Between recording this interview, and posting it, I provided a free webinar for Gentem's customers. It was an updated version of my lecture on the Top Nonclinical Jobs for Physicians. There is a link to the replay below.
Summary
If you’re in that situation, you should check out Gentem.com. When I was looking over the site I saw that they were offering an assessment and the first month of services for free. It’s worth taking a look if you are part of a small group or run your own practice that does its own billing or pays the usual 7 to 8% of claims.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode that you can download or read.
Links for Today's Episode:
- Gentem Website
- Omar Khateeb's LinkedIn Profile
-
For a free demo/billing assessment courtesy of Gentem click here
- Replay of Life Outside Medicine: Top Nonclinical Careers for Physicians
Download This Episode:
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Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton
Transcription - PNC Episode 194
How Persuasive Branding and Marketing Can Save Private Practice
Interview with Omar Khateeb
John: My guest today is not a physician, but he definitely thinks like a physician in many ways. And he's been around a lot of physicians, from the CEO who founded Gentem Health, where he works as head of growth to the previous health care companies that he's worked for, to his stint in medical school, which we'll get into. So, this should be pretty interesting. Omar Khateeb, welcome to the PNC podcast.
Omar Khateeb: Dr. Jurica, it's very, very good to be here. It's an honor. Thank you for having me on. I was looking forward to it. Happy Monday.
John: Yeah. It's not a bad Monday where I am, the weather's good. And I'm just looking forward to having a great conversation.
Omar Khateeb: Same here. Same here.
John: Okay. So, what we usually do, you're going to have to give us the background and get a little bit into how you happened to start medical school and decide not to finish it, what drove you to make that change and then what you've been doing since then, and we'll go from there.
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, sure. Sure thing. So yeah, just a little bit of backstory on me, and I'll be concise with this. I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, son of immigrants. My father is a surgeon from Iraq, my mother is anatomy professor from Turkey. So, I grew up in the US Mexican Border in El Paso, went to college at University of Texas El Paso and studied biology and chemistry. And like every pre-med, that's what I did, but unlike most premeds I actually stuck to it because I think everybody was pre-med at some point in college but I actually continued, I did a lot of research, did some work at Johns Hopkins. And I went on to medical school at Texas Tech University.
And after my first year there, I think I was very unhappy and I think my intuition was kind of telling me that I was in the wrong place. But you put so much time, blood, sweat, and tears to get in that I really ignored that. And so, I ended up having to repeat my first year, got through it, got to my second year, and I was feeling the same way. And I'll never forget that I sat down to speak to my father, a general surgeon. I'm a firstborn and his son, and I told him, I said "You know dad, I'm really unhappy. And I can see myself doing other things, but I don't know". And I just talked to him, like I wasn't telling him I was going to leave. I just didn't know what to do.
And I'll never forget, he looked at me, he said: "It's not going to get any easier. And if you can see yourself doing other things and you're not happy and you want to leave, I fully support you". And so that really meant a lot. And so I ended up leaving medical school, fortunately with no debt. I was lucky enough to have an academic scholarship, which was great. And so then after leaving, this was back in 2011, 2012 I didn't know what to do with myself. I almost had an identity crisis because since I was a kid, I was like, "I'm gonna be a doctor and be a surgeon", blah, blah, blah, et cetera. And I leave, I have no identity now.
And so, the logical thing was like, I have this knowledge in medicine, and I seem to like sales and marketing. I was marketing manager for The Princeton Review when I was in college. So, I was like let me try and get into med devices, try to get in. And recruiters, people told me like, "Oh, you have no background. You have no sales experience. You're going to have to start off selling band-aids" or something. And I just didn't believe that. And luckily enough, there was a little, surgical robotics company, which back at the time still is, but back then, to get into robotics was like the pinnacle of med devices. It's very, very, complicated and very competitive to get in. And it's a little Israeli company called Mazor Robotics. And the first robotic spine and neurosurgical company in the world was about 30 people. Two of which were med school dropouts like me.
So, they took a chance on me and I was fortunate enough to get in. I was mentored by some greats in our industry, Christopher Prentice, who was eventually the CEO of the U.S. division. Now he's CEO at Harmonic Bionics, Krista Purcell who's my late mentor who unfortunately passed away a year ago. Tim Moraski. So just absolute greats in our industry.
And I started in sales and they noticed that I seem to be talented in marketing. And after some convincing, they got me to take on the U.S. marketing role. And I really never looked back since, so I've done marketing in surgical robotics. I went to aesthetics. I did robotics, surgical robotics is there as well. I launched a fashion inventions company on the side through Kickstarter called PS Mister. It's still functioning today.
I got very much into content creation, videos, podcasting, writing articles back in 2014. I went over to Potrero and I became the first head of growth in the medical device industry. And then recently I took over as head of growth at Gentem Health, which stands for revival. And what Genten is, it's a Silicon Valley-based company that's developing a SAS platform. It is founded by a physician, Dr. Fisayo Ositelu who's a Stanford-educated physician and a former Facebook software engineer, Manny Akintayo.
And essentially what we're building or what we've built is a platform that helps simplify, accelerated, increased reimbursements for private medical practice. So, you never have to worry about it again. It's something my father struggled with at some point. And our biggest thing is if we use data and techniques such as machine learning, and later on AI to help maximize the amount that a physician is paid through reimbursement and accelerate that, then they have a chance to actually keep their practice to stay independent.
In my humble opinion, that's where the best medicine is delivered. It's not delivered in these large corporations where essentially they're run by business people and like any business people, I don't fault them. They're trying to maximize profit and minimize costs. So less time with patients, less resources, et cetera. And Gentem really focused on helping these private medical practices thrive and for providers to stay independent, to keep their practices.
John: Oh, that sounds awesome. I want to comment on a couple of things. First is going back to your decision and not really letting anything hold you back in terms of who you're going to try to find a job with, because I get a lot of listeners who email me or contact me one way or the other. And they feel like, "Well, I can't do this. I don't have the experience. No one's going to hire me. And I'm just frustrated. I want to get out of medicine". I tell them there are so many times I've heard someone tell me a story similar to yours in medicine, a nonclinical career. It's like, they just talked to an old classmate or they got introduced to somebody or they were networking. And they're like, "Yeah, you have the transferable skills I need, I'll hire you for this job".
So, people just go into it with the fear and then the lack of confidence. So, I think it was just what you said, it matches that, it's the same exact thing. Don't let anything hold you back. If you think it's worth shooting for it, you may be surprised.
Now, as far as the company you're working for, that was one of the things that intrigued me about having you on the show today. And I think we'll get back to that at the end because while this podcast typically is about nonclinical careers, I certainly support physicians. And there are many listeners I believe who are still in private practice. And they're doing that as their alternative to the corporate practice of medicine.
The burnout usually comes from being the hamster on the wheel in a big corporation that really doesn't care about you. And so, I think that we're going to get an increase in private practice and different formats, some of which would or would not be appropriate for, let's say help from Gentem. Like some of the concierge types of practices might not be because they're not really billing people. But let's talk about that at the end, because I think some of our listeners would be very interested in that.
But now I want to pick your brain about these terms that you've thrown out. You said something about sales, and then you said, "But then I shifted to marketing" and I'm thinking, "Well, isn't sales part of marketing?" And then you and I had talked beforehand about branding. So, I need the thumbnail sketch for our listeners, particularly the private people still in full or part-time practice in terms of how we should look at that whole bucket of marketing sales, branding, and so forth.
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's important because of the ability to delineate and understand the differences between those two, those very various terms. So, I'm going to put it back on. This is like choosing your own adventure. So, which one of those would you like me to start off with first?
John: Let's talk about marketing first.
Omar Khateeb: Okay. So, marketing means a lot of different things. And back 50, 60 years ago, marketing used to be sort of a sub-department of sales until it's separated off. And what I would say is, I was in sales first because I liked the one-to-one communication. I like the persuasion, et cetera. But at some point, I got very bored. Salespeople are going to get ticked off but I'm going to say this. A lot of sales it's kind of the same thing. A lot of it is persistence, timing, et cetera. And because I was a student and I still am a student of persuasion, I wanted to do that at a mass scale. And so, that starts introducing you to more strategy. And that involves also the future in terms of how we develop products, et cetera. And that's what kind of took me into marketing. So, I'm a sales guy that happened to go into marketing because I liked the sort of high-level strategy. I liked dealing with products, et cetera.
Now there's a big difference between marketing and branding. Branding is just another way of saying reputation, right? Whether you like it or not, you and I, we have our own reputation. We have a brand. It's the same thing with companies. And the best way to think about it is just like a reputation when it comes to your brand, what do people say about you when you're not in the room? Did they say that you have a great product? Did they say that your product is okay, but it's the cheapest? Did they say that your service is amazing? Did they say that, "Hey, their service sucks, but this product is amazing, it's worth every penny"?
That's really how you should look at a brand. And you don't develop a brand through marketing. This is the surprise, right? A lot of marketers actually get surprised when I say this. And that's because marketing is definitely strategic, but it's also tactical, right? It's where you spend the money on.
And you can't spend money to build a reputation. Well, I guess to a certain extent you have to. So, brand is really built off of public relations i.e., what third parties are saying about you. What are customers saying about you? What is the press like? A fortune magazine or your local newspaper, what do they say about you? That's how you start to build your brand and reputation.
That's why when a new product comes out, they do a press release. But then after that press is out, you've circulated that news to build that reputation, you use marketing to start amplifying it and defending it. So there's a lot of philosophy that comes along with it. That's I would say the tip of the surface when it comes to the difference between marketing, branding, and sales.
John: Okay. But it seems to me that a lot of physicians just totally blow it off, in a way. So, let's say I'm a physician and I just want to do a good job. So, I'm going to always be on time, I'm going to have set hours, I'm going to answer the phone quickly. I'm going to do all those things to kind of at least build that core of a reputation in terms of performance and delivering what I'm doing.
But what would you say just from your experiences, dealing with physicians, or maybe your father or anybody else over your years of experience, what would be the things that look like we're just such low hanging fruit, and you thought, "Man, that physician could be just blown the doors off this thing if he or she could just do this or that, do little sales or do a little different type of marketing or work on the brand"? What have you seen?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm going to use my father as a great example. When my father was practicing, he actually had a vein clinic later on in his career. He had it for about 10 years. And in his late fifties, it might've been even sixties, he invested in a new medical device, I think a laser for sclerotherapy. I might have mixed those terms up, but either way. And like most physicians, he believed the company that when they said, "Hey doc, you buy this thing, we're going to support you with marketing, we're going to send patients". None of that happened. They left him for dead practically. And that was right around the time that the financial crisis happened.
And so, my father, and I'm very proud of this. My father was against the wall with bills. He literally was taking his credit card and maxing it out just to pay his employees and going into debt himself because he refused to fire anybody or let them suffer because of what was happening. And so, he had a choice. What he decided was, he took it upon himself to go to the market. So, he worked with the little TV station and he shot a simple video and put that video up on YouTube and then paid some guy at the time, just a little bit of money just to help him set up a Facebook page and everything.
And so, from there, it started to help for him to get patients because patients were finding him. He wasn't relying on people to refer patients, although that's an important channel. He wasn't relying on the med device company. He relied on himself and he put himself in a position where he got to the patients before they had the problem. So, they knew about him. So that way, whether it's them or an aunt or whatever when they had an issue with vans, they were like, "This guy, Dr. Khateeb is on the East side of town. I really like his video. Let's go see him". And then he would have an offer. His offer was, "Hey, on Saturdays, we do free varicose vein examinations. So come in for free. I'll examine you and then I'll give you a free consult".
That's the easiest place to start. Obviously, there are so many other aspects when it comes to branding and marketing, but that's the easiest place to start because I think what physicians have the mistake of thinking is that you just open your practice and people just come in. But unfortunately, because of these large corporations, which I would do the same if I was in their place, they're buying primary care practices and everything. So, your buddies can't refer to you whether they want to or not.
And so that's the first place to really start. It's to say, "Okay, what's my bread and butter in my practice. What am I really good at? Okay. If it's this procedure, how can I make a video to show people who I am as a person? So, people say, I really like this doctor. He looks fun or she looks very warm and sweeter or funny". And then some patients say, "I went to Dr. Janet, whatever, and she really took care of me". And "Oh yeah. She took care of my mom".
How do you put that story out there? Because at the end of the day human beings have a brain for pattern recognition, which is really bad to have pattern recognition, but we resonate with stories, not through facts and logic of stats. And so, you need to put stories out there for people to discover them, and then essentially use that story themselves to justify why they're going to come to you versus let's say someone else. Why would somebody go out of the network and pay extra money to go to you? They need a story to tell themselves to say, "I'm going out of the network. I'm paying extra money. Because this doctor said in the video that she's done this for over 10 years, her patients look really happy. I know I have to pay extra, but I don't care. I'm going out of the network for this". That's what you have to think about.
John: Yeah, that makes sense. It's not really that much different from even like marketing and online business or something, those testimonials are helpful. Who goes on Amazon and picks out a product without looking at testimonials?
Omar Khateeb: Exactly.
John: I just go with the five-star. I don't even have any idea.
Omar Khateeb: You don't even look at the reviews. Look for me, I buy a lot of books and I'm not really a big fan of a lot of business books. But if I go see a business book that has over 2000 reviews, I don't care what it is. I'm just like, "This is worth me buying".
John: Yeah, the same would be true obviously to a physician. And the other thing that occurs to me is a lot of this is electronic now anyway for a practice. Everyone has a website, but what's the point of having some kind of static website that doesn't do anything. You said your father did some videos, so people can access those for free and just learn about whatever he's talking about.
Omar Khateeb: Exactly. And look, this is the easiest way to do it. I don't know if you know this, but Google owns the internet and Google also owns YouTube. And so, you can shoot a simple video, put it up on YouTube. Put a link to your website, take that video link, have that sitting on your website, that way it's driving traffic there. But then, more importantly, there's no money in easy things anymore. And so, I've seen doctors with beautiful websites and beautiful content. But if it's sitting there waiting to be discovered, you're doing it wrong. This is very proactive, they call it blocking and tackling marketing things that you have to do. And it is exhausting, but this is why, find a simple local marketing agency that for $500 or $1,000, or even $2,000 a month can do it. And a lot of doctors are like, "Oh, I don't want to spend $2,000, $3,000". Okay, this is how you justify it. You have to think about your acquisition costs, right?
So, if you on average, and this is, this is so important. If your customer actually goes to genten.com under our webinar section, there's a webinar I just did with Dr. Obinna Nwobi. It's on vein clinic success to maximize your revenue, but it's applicable to any private practice. You got to know your numbers. So, if you're doing a certain procedure and you look at your numbers in for, let's say the last month, and you say, "Hey, I saw 50 patients and I did 20 procedures".
Invest in marketing, give it one full quarter to see if it does anything. And let's just say that you only got one extra patient. Let's just say, that's it. Hey, that one extra patient is paying for that marketing, and then some. That's how you have to think about investing in your business. Because if you don't know your numbers, and then you can't delineate between what's coming in. And then if I make this investment in marketing, how much does it go up?
Look, nobody likes to spend a whole lot of money on marketing, but the other option is you don't and people go to your competitors. So, my friend has a plastic surgery practice, I think they spend about $200,000 in marketing, I think just like last month. That's an insane amount of money. That's how you have to think about it.
John: That's very interesting. No, absolutely, and it's worth spending a little bit and really doing this test, and see if it's effective. Now, do you have other videos on the website at Gentum? Because I couldn't find them when I looked at the website. So, what other kinds of videos might you have there that would be applicable to my audience or physicians?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, absolutely. I just took over as head of gross. Maybe a couple of weeks ago when you first looked, they may not have been there, but we just added a webinar tab, I think sometime last week. So, if you go to gentum.com, we have awesome resources there. I have to brag about it a little bit because let me use Gentum as a perfect example.
At Gentum we have a platform that has to do with reimbursements and billing and claims. So, if you want to get more out of medical billing and your revenue cycle, you come to us. Does that mean all the content we create is just purely on the medical billing revenue cycle? Absolutely not.
So, all the content you'll see on Gentum has to do with, how do you become a physician entrepreneur, how do you increase the valuation of your practice? How does a practice manager do his or her job better? Because when you develop a brand around helping people with a certain area, so Gentum wants to help practices stay independent.
So, what does that involve? That involves marketing, finance, all these things. So, if we have more reasons for our physician or their staff to come to our website, use our resources for free, get engaged with the brand, the day that they have the pain and they say, our revenue cycle management is not good. Our medical billing needs help. And they say, "Why don't we just use Gentum? I know about that company". That's how this works.
The chief marketing officer of Mercedes-Benz said something very, very important. This is a long time. He said that he has to start marketing Mercedes-Benz to you the moment you turn five or six years old. Because from the time that you're five years old, you have to start seeing that as a status symbol so that when you get into high school, you see it as a status symbol. And when you get out of college, you start making money, then you think, "Hey, I've made it. I'm a business professional. What's the car I'm going to buy? Mercedes-Benz". Because you've been conditioned for your entire life to associate that as a signal, as an indication that this is what you buy when you're professional.
So again, what a lot of companies make the mistake of doing, especially doctors, they say, "Hey, I'm going to market and brand when people have the problem, they should think about me". But guess what? Everybody's doing that. You got to go more upstream and teach people something else.
Let's use varicose veins as an example. A lot of teachers get varicose veins, right? So can you maybe write a blog, maybe do a video to say, "Hey, if you're a teacher, here are five things that you should make sure to do from today to help prevent getting varicose veins". You're cutting into your business, technically doing that. But guess what? It's a lot more fun when you control that and you take your own business out that way than someone else doing it. And as a result of that, you've developed brand equity. You've developed a reputation, right? People respect that.
I'm Turkish. In my opinion, we're the masters when it comes to trade and bazaars. But this is why in the bazaar you try to always help people. If you go to a bazaar in Turkey, if I go to a rug shop, if I ask for directions, not only will they point me out, they'll say, "Hey, do you want some tea? Do you want anything?" They won't sell me anything. It's just purely trying to be helpful. Because it becomes a story, it becomes an emotion so when I want to buy a rug or someone else does, I say, why don't you go see these people? They're really, really nice. It sounds simple, but that's really how the world works these days. It has for thousands of years.
John: I think I was at the bazaar. I remember coming home from a cruise stopping in Turkey. And I think I had like 10 pounds of tea that I couldn't drink in my whole life after we had gotten the directions and the help and the welcome and doing all that.
So, okay. We're going to cover a couple of other things because we're going to run out of time. But that makes a whole lot of sense. And besides, you talk about, well, I'm cutting my own customers, but no, because you're expanding your audience by five times or whatever that number is, people come to you as an authority, then there's going to be people that get varicose veins no matter what they do.
All right. So, I was going to take a detour for one minute, and then we're going to come back to Gentem. You're one of the few people I know that did the altMBA by Seth Godin. So, I think I may have mentioned it in the past in other episodes. So, tell us just briefly what that is and what was your experience of doing that for what was it like three, four months?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, actually, I want to say it was a full month. They might've extended it a little bit, but it's a very intense course. The funny thing was that, it was right when I got laid off from my first job, my first company got acquired, so I was laid off. I had a mortgage and the first thing I thought was, "Hey, I'm going to spend a few grand and go to this thing".
Essentially what the altMBA stands for is an alternative. AltMBA is not about certification. It's not about a degree. It's about a way of thinking. How do you show up and deliver and ship? Because at the end of the day, as that old saying goes, 90% of success is just showing up. Part of it is can you make a promise and can you continue to deliver on it?
So, for a full month, I'm connected to amazing people, leaders in medicine, business, technology, et cetera. And we rotate groups. And every week we have three big projects to deliver. I mean, these are really big projects. We have a new project, two or three days to deliver on it. Then we have a new team, a new project. And we do this for a full month. It's really intense. I'm telling you right now, there's never a good time to do it. I have friends who are like, "Well, I have kids, I have a job". There's never a good time to do it, but I promise you that when you do it, because it will squeeze you, it will force you to grow. Those growing pains are there for a reason. It will transform you if you let it. And I credit the altMBA for a lot of who I am today.
Because after going through the altMBA, I started writing an article back in 2014. People thought I was crazy. They're like, why are you writing these articles in marketing? Those articles paid my way to San Francisco to Silicon Valley. My last job I was hired by the CEO because he was reading my work when he was a director. And to this day, I've been doing my own book review every week. I do a full video on reviewing a book. I've been doing that for three years straight now, never missing a week.
And it's because of the leadership skills, the way I was taught to think about leadership by content, about authenticity through the altMBA. So, it's a transformative program for your listeners. Because if they're listening to the show, they are definitely the kind of person that the altMBA wants. If you go and apply to the altMBA, you can list me down as a reference, Omar Khateeb, and that kind of helps you because I know a lot of people do apply. So, if they see that they're recommended or they heard about the program from a graduate that helps a lot.
John: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, Seth Godin is sort of considered a guru genius. He just stands out from the rest. He's written tons, he's got multiple books out. And yeah, I think it's seen as something that if you can do it, do it, it's worth it. Again, it's not a long-time commitment, but when you're in it, from what you're saying, which makes perfect sense, you're going to be really committed to doing that during that time frame, otherwise, you won't get anything out of it.
Omar Khateeb: Absolutely. And one thing I'll tell you that I really learned from Seth and I preach it and I'll tell you, I think this is important for all the physicians listening. We learned from training and residency and we'd just be really hard on ourselves and expect perfection. But when it comes to marketing, when it comes to business, you can't aim for perfection all the time, because when you do that, it just makes you come up with an excuse to delay. And so, sometimes vulnerability is the answer. And in my opinion, it's the answer all the time, whether it's with your patients, with marketing and everything, put yourself out there. That's what I would say. Put yourself out there.
A lot of times when you think about marketing, people look at the whole staircase, they look at the whole building, like, "Oh my gosh, I got to climb all of these stairs". And they just say, "I'm just not going to do it". Just look down and look at the first step and just take one step. Maybe put out a little post, make a crappy iPhone video, put that out there. I don't care. Just take the first step. Then the second step gets easier, than the third step. And then before you know it, you're on the 5,000 steps, you're running, you're killing it. But don't look at the whole staircase, just take one little step.
I tell a lot of physicians today, like my classmates who graduated, don't worry about all this. Just start a LinkedIn profile and connect with some people and like some posts. Just start like that. Maybe after a few weeks, maybe post something, maybe leave a comment. Little by little. It's just like anything in life. When you're working out, you're not trying to become Arnold Schwarzenegger on day one. When you're a surgeon and you're training, you're not trying to become like Michael DeBakey after a week. It takes time. It takes patience.
John: Yeah, absolutely. That's good. That's awesome advice. Okay, I want to hear a little bit more now about Gentum. Because I really think that for the listeners here that are in private practice, it's a struggle. Everything's a struggle in private practice to some extent. You're trying to see patients. You're trying to run a business. You're going to do the marketing perhaps. And you're going to do the billing. Billing is the bane of every practice that I've ever been in. So, what is Gentum doing and how would it help that? Is it really geared more for the independent small groups or independent physicians?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah. What I would say is, we do help physician groups that are bread and butter today are really physicians that one to five in the practice, maybe up to 10. That's usually getting a little bit big. We can take that on, but especially physicians for like one to five, they really love us because we do so much.
We're kind of a combination of technology and service. So, we do have certified billers and certified revenue cycle managers. The people who love us the most actually are not, the physicians love us, but their staff, their billing team loves us as well. Internal billing team that is just because we do a really good job of not only maximizing how much they're reimbursed and how fast, we stay up to date on what's changing. That's where a lot of physicians will say, "Hey, we figured it out with what costs you", et cetera, that changes in a few months sometimes, maybe a quarter. And so, if you're behind, you just lost out on a certain amount of money, right? And that's how these things happen. So, getting plugged in with us is really, really helpful.
The other unique thing that we do. And I'm very proud of where I work. I only go to companies that really have a shot of doing something transformative. Because we're very data-driven, and a physician will benefit because we're plugged into so many different specialties, we use that data to maximize reimbursement.
The one advice I'd tell physicians, and I didn't realize this. When you're starting to expand your practice, let's say like my father, he opened a vein clinic. Don't go to the bank and take a loan. Do not do that. Banks do not understand your business. They do not care about it. They're just more than happy to give you money and then essentially, charging high interest for it.
With Genten because of our data, we're able to evaluate the risk of a claim. And so anytime a physician wants, let's say they want to invest more on a new device and they need the money, they can press a button in our portal and we do what's called "Genten Advance". It's essentially a cash advance. So immediately we advanced about 85% of the claims. So, if it's a $1,000 procedure, we advance about $850 of it. You do whatever you want with it. Then we go and collect the remaining percentage and then redistribute that to you as well. We charge a very, very low percentage. It's under 5% right now. It's a pretty low percentage for that compared to a bank.
And the reason why this is valuable is that you are now essentially taking cash based on your business. You're not going and borrowing money from somebody. And a great success story, the webinar I mentioned with Dr. Obinna Nwobi, the vein clinic one, he used Gentum Advance last year on a variety of procedures to essentially build up cash. And he went and acquired a $2 million surgical practice and just expanded it like that. Didn't go get a loan from a bank, nothing, purely through our advanced payments.
And so, I think that's the future when it comes to medicine is using technology and having different financial products so you can strategically, as a physician decide how are we going to maximize profit? How are we going to advance into certain procedures, or maybe start getting cash advances to buy something? Instead of doing what we've been doing for who knows how many decades. Going and dealing, no offence to business people and lawyers who do not understand medicine. And because physicians don't understand business, these people are more than happy to give us that money, to give us those contracts at a very high interest. And then over time we ended up screwing ourselves. So, we get rid of all of that.
John: Oh, that's awesome. I'm just trying to think through this, like how this would apply, but basically, I see any tool that we can have for physicians to maintain that level of independence is awesome. We're competing with these big systems, they got CFOs, they got finance directors, they got accountants, how do you deal with that or compete? But at the same time, that's a lot of overhead that they invest in. I can tell you from being in a hospital system, there's a huge finance department and nothing in a hospital has done efficiently by any means. If this kind of technology can just help the individual physician to kind of bypass all that and have access to some cash that they otherwise wouldn't have, just from a time standpoint, that's really helpful, the cash flow.
All right, well, I think our listeners should go watch some of the videos you have, and then if they do have any need for these kinds of services, billing and revenue cycle and so forth, it doesn't sound like it would be that difficult to find out more about it. So, they would just go to gentem.com?
Omar Khateeb: That's right. Go to genten.com. I'll provide a special link just for your listeners and they can click on it in the show notes. They can go and not only get a demo, but we also do a bit of a billing and revenue analysis kind of for free. So, I recommend doing the demo because even if you don't go with us, you're going to learn a lot about your business just by talking to our team.
John: Awesome. That'd be great. Okay, I'll put that in there for sure. If they want to get a hold of you, they could probably go through Gentem or they can look for you on LinkedIn.
Omar Khateeb: They can look for me everywhere. Omar Khateeb, I'll give you some links to put in the show notes. They can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat. I'm everywhere. I'm not on TikTok though. I'm pretty much everywhere else.
John: All right. Well, this has been really fun. I think we're going a little over now. So, I guess I am going to just say thanks a lot for being here today, Omar. It's been great. And hopefully, I'll talk to you again in the future. Maybe we'll talk to your CEO about coming on to the program sometime because he is a physician. It might be interesting to get his perspective. And I guess with that, I'll say so long.
Omar Khateeb: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
John: You're welcome.
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Transcription - PNC Episode 194
How Persuasive Branding and Marketing Can Save Private Practice
Interview with Omar Khateeb
John: My guest today is not a physician, but he definitely thinks like a physician in many ways. And he's been around a lot of physicians, from the CEO who founded Gentem Health, where he works as head of growth to the previous health care companies that he's worked for, to his stint in medical school, which we'll get into. So, this should be pretty interesting. Omar Khateeb, welcome to the PNC podcast.
Omar Khateeb: Dr. Jurica, it's very, very good to be here. It's an honor. Thank you for having me on. I was looking forward to it. Happy Monday.
John: Yeah. It's not a bad Monday where I am, the weather's good. And I'm just looking forward to having a great conversation.
Omar Khateeb: Same here. Same here.
John: Okay. So, what we usually do, you're going to have to give us the background and get a little bit into how you happened to start medical school and decide not to finish it, what drove you to make that change and then what you've been doing since then, and we'll go from there.
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, sure. Sure thing. So yeah, just a little bit of backstory on me, and I'll be concise with this. I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, son of immigrants. My father is a surgeon from Iraq, my mother is anatomy professor from Turkey. So, I grew up in the US Mexican Border in El Paso, went to college at University of Texas El Paso and studied biology and chemistry. And like every pre-med, that's what I did, but unlike most premeds I actually stuck to it because I think everybody was pre-med at some point in college but I actually continued, I did a lot of research, did some work at Johns Hopkins. And I went on to medical school at Texas Tech University.
And after my first year there, I think I was very unhappy and I think my intuition was kind of telling me that I was in the wrong place. But you put so much time, blood, sweat, and tears to get in that I really ignored that. And so, I ended up having to repeat my first year, got through it, got to my second year, and I was feeling the same way. And I'll never forget that I sat down to speak to my father, a general surgeon. I'm a firstborn and his son, and I told him, I said "You know dad, I'm really unhappy. And I can see myself doing other things, but I don't know". And I just talked to him, like I wasn't telling him I was going to leave. I just didn't know what to do.
And I'll never forget, he looked at me, he said: "It's not going to get any easier. And if you can see yourself doing other things and you're not happy and you want to leave, I fully support you". And so that really meant a lot. And so I ended up leaving medical school, fortunately with no debt. I was lucky enough to have an academic scholarship, which was great. And so then after leaving, this was back in 2011, 2012 I didn't know what to do with myself. I almost had an identity crisis because since I was a kid, I was like, "I'm gonna be a doctor and be a surgeon", blah, blah, blah, et cetera. And I leave, I have no identity now.
And so, the logical thing was like, I have this knowledge in medicine, and I seem to like sales and marketing. I was marketing manager for The Princeton Review when I was in college. So, I was like let me try and get into med devices, try to get in. And recruiters, people told me like, "Oh, you have no background. You have no sales experience. You're going to have to start off selling band-aids" or something. And I just didn't believe that. And luckily enough, there was a little, surgical robotics company, which back at the time still is, but back then, to get into robotics was like the pinnacle of med devices. It's very, very, complicated and very competitive to get in. And it's a little Israeli company called Mazor Robotics. And the first robotic spine and neurosurgical company in the world was about 30 people. Two of which were med school dropouts like me.
So, they took a chance on me and I was fortunate enough to get in. I was mentored by some greats in our industry, Christopher Prentice, who was eventually the CEO of the U.S. division. Now he's CEO at Harmonic Bionics, Krista Purcell who's my late mentor who unfortunately passed away a year ago. Tim Moraski. So just absolute greats in our industry.
And I started in sales and they noticed that I seem to be talented in marketing. And after some convincing, they got me to take on the U.S. marketing role. And I really never looked back since, so I've done marketing in surgical robotics. I went to aesthetics. I did robotics, surgical robotics is there as well. I launched a fashion inventions company on the side through Kickstarter called PS Mister. It's still functioning today.
I got very much into content creation, videos, podcasting, writing articles back in 2014. I went over to Potrero and I became the first head of growth in the medical device industry. And then recently I took over as head of growth at Gentem Health, which stands for revival. And what Genten is, it's a Silicon Valley-based company that's developing a SAS platform. It is founded by a physician, Dr. Fisayo Ositelu who's a Stanford-educated physician and a former Facebook software engineer, Manny Akintayo.
And essentially what we're building or what we've built is a platform that helps simplify, accelerated, increased reimbursements for private medical practice. So, you never have to worry about it again. It's something my father struggled with at some point. And our biggest thing is if we use data and techniques such as machine learning, and later on AI to help maximize the amount that a physician is paid through reimbursement and accelerate that, then they have a chance to actually keep their practice to stay independent.
In my humble opinion, that's where the best medicine is delivered. It's not delivered in these large corporations where essentially they're run by business people and like any business people, I don't fault them. They're trying to maximize profit and minimize costs. So less time with patients, less resources, et cetera. And Gentem really focused on helping these private medical practices thrive and for providers to stay independent, to keep their practices.
John: Oh, that sounds awesome. I want to comment on a couple of things. First is going back to your decision and not really letting anything hold you back in terms of who you're going to try to find a job with, because I get a lot of listeners who email me or contact me one way or the other. And they feel like, "Well, I can't do this. I don't have the experience. No one's going to hire me. And I'm just frustrated. I want to get out of medicine". I tell them there are so many times I've heard someone tell me a story similar to yours in medicine, a nonclinical career. It's like, they just talked to an old classmate or they got introduced to somebody or they were networking. And they're like, "Yeah, you have the transferable skills I need, I'll hire you for this job".
So, people just go into it with the fear and then the lack of confidence. So, I think it was just what you said, it matches that, it's the same exact thing. Don't let anything hold you back. If you think it's worth shooting for it, you may be surprised.
Now, as far as the company you're working for, that was one of the things that intrigued me about having you on the show today. And I think we'll get back to that at the end because while this podcast typically is about nonclinical careers, I certainly support physicians. And there are many listeners I believe who are still in private practice. And they're doing that as their alternative to the corporate practice of medicine.
The burnout usually comes from being the hamster on the wheel in a big corporation that really doesn't care about you. And so, I think that we're going to get an increase in private practice and different formats, some of which would or would not be appropriate for, let's say help from Gentem. Like some of the concierge types of practices might not be because they're not really billing people. But let's talk about that at the end, because I think some of our listeners would be very interested in that.
But now I want to pick your brain about these terms that you've thrown out. You said something about sales, and then you said, "But then I shifted to marketing" and I'm thinking, "Well, isn't sales part of marketing?" And then you and I had talked beforehand about branding. So, I need the thumbnail sketch for our listeners, particularly the private people still in full or part-time practice in terms of how we should look at that whole bucket of marketing sales, branding, and so forth.
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's important because of the ability to delineate and understand the differences between those two, those very various terms. So, I'm going to put it back on. This is like choosing your own adventure. So, which one of those would you like me to start off with first?
John: Let's talk about marketing first.
Omar Khateeb: Okay. So, marketing means a lot of different things. And back 50, 60 years ago, marketing used to be sort of a sub-department of sales until it's separated off. And what I would say is, I was in sales first because I liked the one-to-one communication. I like the persuasion, et cetera. But at some point, I got very bored. Salespeople are going to get ticked off but I'm going to say this. A lot of sales it's kind of the same thing. A lot of it is persistence, timing, et cetera. And because I was a student and I still am a student of persuasion, I wanted to do that at a mass scale. And so, that starts introducing you to more strategy. And that involves also the future in terms of how we develop products, et cetera. And that's what kind of took me into marketing. So, I'm a sales guy that happened to go into marketing because I liked the sort of high-level strategy. I liked dealing with products, et cetera.
Now there's a big difference between marketing and branding. Branding is just another way of saying reputation, right? Whether you like it or not, you and I, we have our own reputation. We have a brand. It's the same thing with companies. And the best way to think about it is just like a reputation when it comes to your brand, what do people say about you when you're not in the room? Did they say that you have a great product? Did they say that your product is okay, but it's the cheapest? Did they say that your service is amazing? Did they say that, "Hey, their service sucks, but this product is amazing, it's worth every penny"?
That's really how you should look at a brand. And you don't develop a brand through marketing. This is the surprise, right? A lot of marketers actually get surprised when I say this. And that's because marketing is definitely strategic, but it's also tactical, right? It's where you spend the money on.
And you can't spend money to build a reputation. Well, I guess to a certain extent you have to. So, brand is really built off of public relations i.e., what third parties are saying about you. What are customers saying about you? What is the press like? A fortune magazine or your local newspaper, what do they say about you? That's how you start to build your brand and reputation.
That's why when a new product comes out, they do a press release. But then after that press is out, you've circulated that news to build that reputation, you use marketing to start amplifying it and defending it. So there's a lot of philosophy that comes along with it. That's I would say the tip of the surface when it comes to the difference between marketing, branding, and sales.
John: Okay. But it seems to me that a lot of physicians just totally blow it off, in a way. So, let's say I'm a physician and I just want to do a good job. So, I'm going to always be on time, I'm going to have set hours, I'm going to answer the phone quickly. I'm going to do all those things to kind of at least build that core of a reputation in terms of performance and delivering what I'm doing.
But what would you say just from your experiences, dealing with physicians, or maybe your father or anybody else over your years of experience, what would be the things that look like we're just such low hanging fruit, and you thought, "Man, that physician could be just blown the doors off this thing if he or she could just do this or that, do little sales or do a little different type of marketing or work on the brand"? What have you seen?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, that's a great question. And I'm going to use my father as a great example. When my father was practicing, he actually had a vein clinic later on in his career. He had it for about 10 years. And in his late fifties, it might've been even sixties, he invested in a new medical device, I think a laser for sclerotherapy. I might have mixed those terms up, but either way. And like most physicians, he believed the company that when they said, "Hey doc, you buy this thing, we're going to support you with marketing, we're going to send patients". None of that happened. They left him for dead practically. And that was right around the time that the financial crisis happened.
And so, my father, and I'm very proud of this. My father was against the wall with bills. He literally was taking his credit card and maxing it out just to pay his employees and going into debt himself because he refused to fire anybody or let them suffer because of what was happening. And so, he had a choice. What he decided was, he took it upon himself to go to the market. So, he worked with the little TV station and he shot a simple video and put that video up on YouTube and then paid some guy at the time, just a little bit of money just to help him set up a Facebook page and everything.
And so, from there, it started to help for him to get patients because patients were finding him. He wasn't relying on people to refer patients, although that's an important channel. He wasn't relying on the med device company. He relied on himself and he put himself in a position where he got to the patients before they had the problem. So, they knew about him. So that way, whether it's them or an aunt or whatever when they had an issue with vans, they were like, "This guy, Dr. Khateeb is on the East side of town. I really like his video. Let's go see him". And then he would have an offer. His offer was, "Hey, on Saturdays, we do free varicose vein examinations. So come in for free. I'll examine you and then I'll give you a free consult".
That's the easiest place to start. Obviously, there are so many other aspects when it comes to branding and marketing, but that's the easiest place to start because I think what physicians have the mistake of thinking is that you just open your practice and people just come in. But unfortunately, because of these large corporations, which I would do the same if I was in their place, they're buying primary care practices and everything. So, your buddies can't refer to you whether they want to or not.
And so that's the first place to really start. It's to say, "Okay, what's my bread and butter in my practice. What am I really good at? Okay. If it's this procedure, how can I make a video to show people who I am as a person? So, people say, I really like this doctor. He looks fun or she looks very warm and sweeter or funny". And then some patients say, "I went to Dr. Janet, whatever, and she really took care of me". And "Oh yeah. She took care of my mom".
How do you put that story out there? Because at the end of the day human beings have a brain for pattern recognition, which is really bad to have pattern recognition, but we resonate with stories, not through facts and logic of stats. And so, you need to put stories out there for people to discover them, and then essentially use that story themselves to justify why they're going to come to you versus let's say someone else. Why would somebody go out of the network and pay extra money to go to you? They need a story to tell themselves to say, "I'm going out of the network. I'm paying extra money. Because this doctor said in the video that she's done this for over 10 years, her patients look really happy. I know I have to pay extra, but I don't care. I'm going out of the network for this". That's what you have to think about.
John: Yeah, that makes sense. It's not really that much different from even like marketing and online business or something, those testimonials are helpful. Who goes on Amazon and picks out a product without looking at testimonials?
Omar Khateeb: Exactly.
John: I just go with the five-star. I don't even have any idea.
Omar Khateeb: You don't even look at the reviews. Look for me, I buy a lot of books and I'm not really a big fan of a lot of business books. But if I go see a business book that has over 2000 reviews, I don't care what it is. I'm just like, "This is worth me buying".
John: Yeah, the same would be true obviously to a physician. And the other thing that occurs to me is a lot of this is electronic now anyway for a practice. Everyone has a website, but what's the point of having some kind of static website that doesn't do anything. You said your father did some videos, so people can access those for free and just learn about whatever he's talking about.
Omar Khateeb: Exactly. And look, this is the easiest way to do it. I don't know if you know this, but Google owns the internet and Google also owns YouTube. And so, you can shoot a simple video, put it up on YouTube. Put a link to your website, take that video link, have that sitting on your website, that way it's driving traffic there. But then, more importantly, there's no money in easy things anymore. And so, I've seen doctors with beautiful websites and beautiful content. But if it's sitting there waiting to be discovered, you're doing it wrong. This is very proactive, they call it blocking and tackling marketing things that you have to do. And it is exhausting, but this is why, find a simple local marketing agency that for $500 or $1,000, or even $2,000 a month can do it. And a lot of doctors are like, "Oh, I don't want to spend $2,000, $3,000". Okay, this is how you justify it. You have to think about your acquisition costs, right?
So, if you on average, and this is, this is so important. If your customer actually goes to genten.com under our webinar section, there's a webinar I just did with Dr. Obinna Nwobi. It's on vein clinic success to maximize your revenue, but it's applicable to any private practice. You got to know your numbers. So, if you're doing a certain procedure and you look at your numbers in for, let's say the last month, and you say, "Hey, I saw 50 patients and I did 20 procedures".
Invest in marketing, give it one full quarter to see if it does anything. And let's just say that you only got one extra patient. Let's just say, that's it. Hey, that one extra patient is paying for that marketing, and then some. That's how you have to think about investing in your business. Because if you don't know your numbers, and then you can't delineate between what's coming in. And then if I make this investment in marketing, how much does it go up?
Look, nobody likes to spend a whole lot of money on marketing, but the other option is you don't and people go to your competitors. So, my friend has a plastic surgery practice, I think they spend about $200,000 in marketing, I think just like last month. That's an insane amount of money. That's how you have to think about it.
John: That's very interesting. No, absolutely, and it's worth spending a little bit and really doing this test, and see if it's effective. Now, do you have other videos on the website at Gentum? Because I couldn't find them when I looked at the website. So, what other kinds of videos might you have there that would be applicable to my audience or physicians?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, absolutely. I just took over as head of gross. Maybe a couple of weeks ago when you first looked, they may not have been there, but we just added a webinar tab, I think sometime last week. So, if you go to gentum.com, we have awesome resources there. I have to brag about it a little bit because let me use Gentum as a perfect example.
At Gentum we have a platform that has to do with reimbursements and billing and claims. So, if you want to get more out of medical billing and your revenue cycle, you come to us. Does that mean all the content we create is just purely on the medical billing revenue cycle? Absolutely not.
So, all the content you'll see on Gentum has to do with, how do you become a physician entrepreneur, how do you increase the valuation of your practice? How does a practice manager do his or her job better? Because when you develop a brand around helping people with a certain area, so Gentum wants to help practices stay independent.
So, what does that involve? That involves marketing, finance, all these things. So, if we have more reasons for our physician or their staff to come to our website, use our resources for free, get engaged with the brand, the day that they have the pain and they say, our revenue cycle management is not good. Our medical billing needs help. And they say, "Why don't we just use Gentum? I know about that company". That's how this works.
The chief marketing officer of Mercedes-Benz said something very, very important. This is a long time. He said that he has to start marketing Mercedes-Benz to you the moment you turn five or six years old. Because from the time that you're five years old, you have to start seeing that as a status symbol so that when you get into high school, you see it as a status symbol. And when you get out of college, you start making money, then you think, "Hey, I've made it. I'm a business professional. What's the car I'm going to buy? Mercedes-Benz". Because you've been conditioned for your entire life to associate that as a signal, as an indication that this is what you buy when you're professional.
So again, what a lot of companies make the mistake of doing, especially doctors, they say, "Hey, I'm going to market and brand when people have the problem, they should think about me". But guess what? Everybody's doing that. You got to go more upstream and teach people something else.
Let's use varicose veins as an example. A lot of teachers get varicose veins, right? So can you maybe write a blog, maybe do a video to say, "Hey, if you're a teacher, here are five things that you should make sure to do from today to help prevent getting varicose veins". You're cutting into your business, technically doing that. But guess what? It's a lot more fun when you control that and you take your own business out that way than someone else doing it. And as a result of that, you've developed brand equity. You've developed a reputation, right? People respect that.
I'm Turkish. In my opinion, we're the masters when it comes to trade and bazaars. But this is why in the bazaar you try to always help people. If you go to a bazaar in Turkey, if I go to a rug shop, if I ask for directions, not only will they point me out, they'll say, "Hey, do you want some tea? Do you want anything?" They won't sell me anything. It's just purely trying to be helpful. Because it becomes a story, it becomes an emotion so when I want to buy a rug or someone else does, I say, why don't you go see these people? They're really, really nice. It sounds simple, but that's really how the world works these days. It has for thousands of years.
John: I think I was at the bazaar. I remember coming home from a cruise stopping in Turkey. And I think I had like 10 pounds of tea that I couldn't drink in my whole life after we had gotten the directions and the help and the welcome and doing all that.
So, okay. We're going to cover a couple of other things because we're going to run out of time. But that makes a whole lot of sense. And besides, you talk about, well, I'm cutting my own customers, but no, because you're expanding your audience by five times or whatever that number is, people come to you as an authority, then there's going to be people that get varicose veins no matter what they do.
All right. So, I was going to take a detour for one minute, and then we're going to come back to Gentem. You're one of the few people I know that did the altMBA by Seth Godin. So, I think I may have mentioned it in the past in other episodes. So, tell us just briefly what that is and what was your experience of doing that for what was it like three, four months?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah, actually, I want to say it was a full month. They might've extended it a little bit, but it's a very intense course. The funny thing was that, it was right when I got laid off from my first job, my first company got acquired, so I was laid off. I had a mortgage and the first thing I thought was, "Hey, I'm going to spend a few grand and go to this thing".
Essentially what the altMBA stands for is an alternative. AltMBA is not about certification. It's not about a degree. It's about a way of thinking. How do you show up and deliver and ship? Because at the end of the day, as that old saying goes, 90% of success is just showing up. Part of it is can you make a promise and can you continue to deliver on it?
So, for a full month, I'm connected to amazing people, leaders in medicine, business, technology, et cetera. And we rotate groups. And every week we have three big projects to deliver. I mean, these are really big projects. We have a new project, two or three days to deliver on it. Then we have a new team, a new project. And we do this for a full month. It's really intense. I'm telling you right now, there's never a good time to do it. I have friends who are like, "Well, I have kids, I have a job". There's never a good time to do it, but I promise you that when you do it, because it will squeeze you, it will force you to grow. Those growing pains are there for a reason. It will transform you if you let it. And I credit the altMBA for a lot of who I am today.
Because after going through the altMBA, I started writing an article back in 2014. People thought I was crazy. They're like, why are you writing these articles in marketing? Those articles paid my way to San Francisco to Silicon Valley. My last job I was hired by the CEO because he was reading my work when he was a director. And to this day, I've been doing my own book review every week. I do a full video on reviewing a book. I've been doing that for three years straight now, never missing a week.
And it's because of the leadership skills, the way I was taught to think about leadership by content, about authenticity through the altMBA. So, it's a transformative program for your listeners. Because if they're listening to the show, they are definitely the kind of person that the altMBA wants. If you go and apply to the altMBA, you can list me down as a reference, Omar Khateeb, and that kind of helps you because I know a lot of people do apply. So, if they see that they're recommended or they heard about the program from a graduate that helps a lot.
John: Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, Seth Godin is sort of considered a guru genius. He just stands out from the rest. He's written tons, he's got multiple books out. And yeah, I think it's seen as something that if you can do it, do it, it's worth it. Again, it's not a long-time commitment, but when you're in it, from what you're saying, which makes perfect sense, you're going to be really committed to doing that during that time frame, otherwise, you won't get anything out of it.
Omar Khateeb: Absolutely. And one thing I'll tell you that I really learned from Seth and I preach it and I'll tell you, I think this is important for all the physicians listening. We learned from training and residency and we'd just be really hard on ourselves and expect perfection. But when it comes to marketing, when it comes to business, you can't aim for perfection all the time, because when you do that, it just makes you come up with an excuse to delay. And so, sometimes vulnerability is the answer. And in my opinion, it's the answer all the time, whether it's with your patients, with marketing and everything, put yourself out there. That's what I would say. Put yourself out there.
A lot of times when you think about marketing, people look at the whole staircase, they look at the whole building, like, "Oh my gosh, I got to climb all of these stairs". And they just say, "I'm just not going to do it". Just look down and look at the first step and just take one step. Maybe put out a little post, make a crappy iPhone video, put that out there. I don't care. Just take the first step. Then the second step gets easier, than the third step. And then before you know it, you're on the 5,000 steps, you're running, you're killing it. But don't look at the whole staircase, just take one little step.
I tell a lot of physicians today, like my classmates who graduated, don't worry about all this. Just start a LinkedIn profile and connect with some people and like some posts. Just start like that. Maybe after a few weeks, maybe post something, maybe leave a comment. Little by little. It's just like anything in life. When you're working out, you're not trying to become Arnold Schwarzenegger on day one. When you're a surgeon and you're training, you're not trying to become like Michael DeBakey after a week. It takes time. It takes patience.
John: Yeah, absolutely. That's good. That's awesome advice. Okay, I want to hear a little bit more now about Gentum. Because I really think that for the listeners here that are in private practice, it's a struggle. Everything's a struggle in private practice to some extent. You're trying to see patients. You're trying to run a business. You're going to do the marketing perhaps. And you're going to do the billing. Billing is the bane of every practice that I've ever been in. So, what is Gentum doing and how would it help that? Is it really geared more for the independent small groups or independent physicians?
Omar Khateeb: Yeah. What I would say is, we do help physician groups that are bread and butter today are really physicians that one to five in the practice, maybe up to 10. That's usually getting a little bit big. We can take that on, but especially physicians for like one to five, they really love us because we do so much.
We're kind of a combination of technology and service. So, we do have certified billers and certified revenue cycle managers. The people who love us the most actually are not, the physicians love us, but their staff, their billing team loves us as well. Internal billing team that is just because we do a really good job of not only maximizing how much they're reimbursed and how fast, we stay up to date on what's changing. That's where a lot of physicians will say, "Hey, we figured it out with what costs you", et cetera, that changes in a few months sometimes, maybe a quarter. And so, if you're behind, you just lost out on a certain amount of money, right? And that's how these things happen. So, getting plugged in with us is really, really helpful.
The other unique thing that we do. And I'm very proud of where I work. I only go to companies that really have a shot of doing something transformative. Because we're very data-driven, and a physician will benefit because we're plugged into so many different specialties, we use that data to maximize reimbursement.
The one advice I'd tell physicians, and I didn't realize this. When you're starting to expand your practice, let's say like my father, he opened a vein clinic. Don't go to the bank and take a loan. Do not do that. Banks do not understand your business. They do not care about it. They're just more than happy to give you money and then essentially, charging high interest for it.
With Genten because of our data, we're able to evaluate the risk of a claim. And so anytime a physician wants, let's say they want to invest more on a new device and they need the money, they can press a button in our portal and we do what's called "Genten Advance". It's essentially a cash advance. So immediately we advanced about 85% of the claims. So, if it's a $1,000 procedure, we advance about $850 of it. You do whatever you want with it. Then we go and collect the remaining percentage and then redistribute that to you as well. We charge a very, very low percentage. It's under 5% right now. It's a pretty low percentage for that compared to a bank.
And the reason why this is valuable is that you are now essentially taking cash based on your business. You're not going and borrowing money from somebody. And a great success story, the webinar I mentioned with Dr. Obinna Nwobi, the vein clinic one, he used Gentum Advance last year on a variety of procedures to essentially build up cash. And he went and acquired a $2 million surgical practice and just expanded it like that. Didn't go get a loan from a bank, nothing, purely through our advanced payments.
And so, I think that's the future when it comes to medicine is using technology and having different financial products so you can strategically, as a physician decide how are we going to maximize profit? How are we going to advance into certain procedures, or maybe start getting cash advances to buy something? Instead of doing what we've been doing for who knows how many decades. Going and dealing, no offence to business people and lawyers who do not understand medicine. And because physicians don't understand business, these people are more than happy to give us that money, to give us those contracts at a very high interest. And then over time we ended up screwing ourselves. So, we get rid of all of that.
John: Oh, that's awesome. I'm just trying to think through this, like how this would apply, but basically, I see any tool that we can have for physicians to maintain that level of independence is awesome. We're competing with these big systems, they got CFOs, they got finance directors, they got accountants, how do you deal with that or compete? But at the same time, that's a lot of overhead that they invest in. I can tell you from being in a hospital system, there's a huge finance department and nothing in a hospital has done efficiently by any means. If this kind of technology can just help the individual physician to kind of bypass all that and have access to some cash that they otherwise wouldn't have, just from a time standpoint, that's really helpful, the cash flow.
All right, well, I think our listeners should go watch some of the videos you have, and then if they do have any need for these kinds of services, billing and revenue cycle and so forth, it doesn't sound like it would be that difficult to find out more about it. So, they would just go to gentem.com?
Omar Khateeb: That's right. Go to genten.com. I'll provide a special link just for your listeners and they can click on it in the show notes. They can go and not only get a demo, but we also do a bit of a billing and revenue analysis kind of for free. So, I recommend doing the demo because even if you don't go with us, you're going to learn a lot about your business just by talking to our team.
John: Awesome. That'd be great. Okay, I'll put that in there for sure. If they want to get a hold of you, they could probably go through Gentem or they can look for you on LinkedIn.
Omar Khateeb: They can look for me everywhere. Omar Khateeb, I'll give you some links to put in the show notes. They can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat. I'm everywhere. I'm not on TikTok though. I'm pretty much everywhere else.
John: All right. Well, this has been really fun. I think we're going a little over now. So, I guess I am going to just say thanks a lot for being here today, Omar. It's been great. And hopefully, I'll talk to you again in the future. Maybe we'll talk to your CEO about coming on to the program sometime because he is a physician. It might be interesting to get his perspective. And I guess with that, I'll say so long.
Omar Khateeb: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
John: You're welcome.
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