In today's episode, John offers his opinions on email marketing. And he describes a particular email strategy he has been using. He explains why email is a great marketing tool, and why starting early in your business is important. 

Email marketing should be a fundamental part of most small business marketing programs from the beginning.

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What is Email Marketing?

Sending a commercial message via email, often to a group of people, is known as email marketing. Every email that is sent to a current or prospective customer is part of your overall email marketing strategy. Using email appropriately enables the small business owner to build authority and trust that generates sales at a very low cost compared to other marketing methods

However, it significantly differs from social media marketing since it focuses on bringing in fresh prospects and defining a business brand. And email marketing emphasizes and develops ties with devoted clients

The Advantages of Email Marketing

1. You own your list. It is not subject to manipulation or being “de-platformed” the way social media is.
2. It can be automated to a great extent, with the ability to create sequences of emails in advance and target specific segments of an email list with different customized messages.

[See Below for a Special Offer for Podcast Listeners]

Unique Email Strategy

John describes a unique email strategy that he has been using. After implementing it, his open and click rates improved dramatically. These parameters generally reflect the degree of engagement, trust, and likelihood to buy.

This strategy incorporates the following features:

• higher frequency, up to 5 to 7 days each week,
• shorter, taking less than 1 or 2 minutes to read,
• includes an amusing or thought-provoking personal story,
• ties the story to your product or service, and
• eliminate “dead weight” from the list (those that never open or click your emails).

Summary

Using this approach leads to much higher engagement, as demonstrated by higher open and click rates. This enables those online marketers with even small lists to build an engaged audience that buys more products and services.

You can learn more about this approach to email by purchasing access to this course from the League of Email Marketing Heroes.

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

EXCLUSIVE: Get a daily dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.

Links for Today's Episode:

• Stop Making These Business Email Mistakes

  EMAIL MARKETING HEROES’ Bottomless Email Strategy Course (I am an affiliate partner for this course)

• NewScr!pt

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 284

Why Adopt This Email Strategy in Your New Business?

John: I just want to tell you a short story today before we get into the main content, but it's apropo. About a year or so ago, I started looking at a new way to work with my emails. And I was doing what we normally do. I was doing weekly or biweekly newsletters, mentioning what's going on in my business, or things I've talked about on the podcast. I usually send out an email every week to announce my latest podcast episode and that kind of thing.

But I came across a couple of partners that were teaching a different email strategy, and I started to use that strategy. Now, my email list, it got up to about 1,400 - 1,500 just to put everything on the table. I don't have a big massive list of 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000 people. But the engagement seemed to be quite small. It seemed like the open rate was low. The click rate was low. And I could tell that there were probably hundreds of those listeners, or followers rather subscribers who really never even opened an email.

I looked at their approach and I adopted that, and I started doing emails much more frequently. And as a result, my open rate increased. Well, actually more than doubled. My click rate improved quite a bit, and it seemed like there was a lot more engagement. People were responding to my email.

I want to share with you what I know about using email as a marketing method and what I've been doing for the last year or so, how it's different from what I did before, and why you might consider using this very same technique.

For those that are watching on YouTube, you'll notice I'm using slides today. It doesn't really matter to the podcast listeners here. You're not missing anything because I don't really have any content on my slides that I'm not talking about. But for the YouTubers, it provides some variation. You get to see the slides and breaks things up a little bit when you're watching a video instead of just watching a talking head. The objectives I'm following today are the following. What is email marketing? Why is it important? When should you start? How do you set it up? And what are the metrics to follow? Those are kind of the general areas that I want to cover today.

So, what is email marketing? Well, I'm not going to go through a long history of where email came from, but as you know, email when it first came out, we probably didn't think about it as a marketing tool. I'm sure there were businesses that did, but we saw it as a way where we could communicate with people in an asynchronous fashion electronically. We could send notes out at will. They arrived instantaneously, and it enabled us to connect with friends and family on a regular basis. It was essentially free of cost after we got through the first year or so. AOL and others have very low costs. Some are free. Yahoo I think is free because they sell other things on the service. But it was just an interesting and brand-new technology. And now we take it for granted.

Well, early in the process of adopting email across the world, people saw, "Wow, we can use this as a marketing tool. We can send notes to clients, to customers, to followers, to readers, and we connect with them. We can actually sell things through our email." And so, a marketing approach started to develop. You'll remember in the past when we first had Google and the internet and emails, everything had a lot of flashing brightly colored symbols and giant letters, and it was pretty gross. It's become more and more sophisticated over time and we came to find out that we shouldn't be crazy with our email. Let's just connect and communicate with people.

What happened as email is being used more and more is there were more and more features that were added to email providers. Most basic email providers like AOL, which still exists actually, I still have my AOL account. It's probably an antique now. I have a Gmail account too. And then there's Yahoo, and then there's a bunch of other email marketing. You'll see them after the ads. There's iCloud and even if you have a website today, you'll have probably an email type of program associated with it. It's usually at even a more basic level than just your AOLs and your Gmails.

But anyway, it's a way to communicate with customers, readers, listeners, followers and develop some rapport with them. The thing is, it's become much more easy to use because the tools we're using now where they're emails, unlike what you can do with Gmail and AOL and so forth, is you can start to automate some of the functions and streamline some of the functions. Now, you can also keep track of multiple audiences and you can do other things that I think I'll be talking about in a minute here. I just wanted to give an overall description of what email is and what email marketing is.

Email marketing is using your emails to sell ultimately, to market and sell. But it's not that simple and there's lots of ways to optimize it. Why is it important? There are several reasons here. I think it's super important. When you use email, it has advantages over other types of marketing approaches. It's often compared, for example, to social media. Can you do similar things on social media? Yes. Can you do things on Facebook where you post things like sending an email? Yes. Can you sell on social media? Yes. Can you do advertisements on social media? Yes.

But let's look at some of the advantages of email. In fact, I think these advantages make it like the foundation of your marketing. Probably email should be the basic first thing you try for marketing before you try paid ads or other ways to promote your services. There's nothing wrong with let's say promoting yourself on LinkedIn for free but there are limitations, and that is the following two that are the bigger ones.

First, social media can be manipulated in the sense that they can be changed over time. They can change the rules, they can make it difficult for you to succeed. You adopt one set of rules, they change the rules. People that have monetized social media have been demonetized. People that have depended on social media for major amounts of income have been taken off that social media site. Unlike that, because you own your email program, you own your email list, it can't be taken away from you and it can't be manipulated in that way, and it can't be shut down. Those are two big reasons. The rules don't change really over time, except some of the different government entities put some regulations on it. But other than that, the rules stay the same. It becomes easier to use over time as the technology improves and it's not subject to being shut down or taken away.

Can you imagine if you had 100,000 followers in a Facebook group and Facebook just canceled the idea of a Facebook group? Pages used to be very popular in the past, then the pages went away. Now the groups are better. But every day you're getting more and more features on, for example, Facebook that make it more and more difficult to use. And in fact, while someone's in your Facebook group, they're looking at competing ads constantly, which are thrown up on the site by Facebook. And the same is true of other social media sites. That's the first thing. It's part of your basic marketing strategy, and it's a foundational part in part because you can't be stripped away from you.

Now, what does email do for you? Well, with the emails you're sending to your list on a consistent basis, whether it's your entire list or subsets of your list that we can call segments. It gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your authority in whatever it is you're teaching. You can do it on social media. I can do posts. I used to do posts all the time on Facebook or on LinkedIn talking about I'm starting a small business, nonclinical careers, how to become a CMO, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you can do exactly the same thing in your emails and over time, that helps you build your authority in whatever business you are trying to promote.

Now remember too, this applies even to a brick-and-mortar business. I went to a bakery the other day to buy a cake for my wife's birthday. They were beautiful. And after eating it, the one that we had was delicious. And I thought, this place has got to have an email strategy because people are coming and going every day, and they may not think to come back next week or next month, or six months or a year from now.

And I'm going to talk to you about a process where the way you use your email would have those customers coming back on a regular basis, probably double, triple, quadruple their sales in a very short period of time. Anyway, that's because it enables us to demonstrate our authority, whether a coach, a consultant, whether we're selling some service, or even online products or brick-and-mortar types of products, because you can communicate on a regular basis. You have to do it the right way though.

And so, then what that does is it creates a warm audience or a warm customer. When you go out and do ads, let's say on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, whatever it might be, Pinterest, you pretty much have a cold audience there. You're just picking an audience, you're defining it, you're paying a bunch of money and you're sending ads out, and a tiny percent will respond to those ads.

And usually, and when you're doing those ads, you're actually not selling the product directly. You're bringing them into a so-called funnel. And it's to get them to sign up for your website, for your podcast, for your email list. Then you can start teaching them, supporting them, encouraging them and inspiring them. And that's where you are nurturing this warm audience. It's an audience that knows you, loves you, and is already primed to buy, which you can actually enhance by using your email in certain ways. And the cost is almost free.

Obviously, you're paying for a service to enable you to manipulate, monitor and write these emails, but it's a lot lower than paying for advertising on social media like LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, any of those things. It has a lot of obvious advantages over the social media and other forms of marketing. That's why it should be sort of the first thing that you really start doing other than maybe word of mouth.

All right. When should I start my email list? I'm thinking about a business, maybe I've just started a business, or I've got a business. Where in that path, where in that transition, should I start using email? Well, from the very beginning. It's like when should you plant a tree? Well, 10 years ago, because you want the tree to be mature. It doesn't start giving you shade until it's grown for 10 or 15 years. The same thing with email. You're not going to get a result with it quickly. You have to build something first.

And part of the whole thing about starting your email is not only what you should use as an email service provider or a CRM or how it should look and all that. It's when should I start and do I plan at the beginning and what do I do with it? There are some things you have to think about, but the thing is, it should be integrated into your marketing plan from day one.

And if you're selling online services or if that's where most of your activity is, let's say you have online courses or you're doing coaching, which can be done remotely or something like that, then you should start from the very beginning. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about how to build an email list, but let's just suffice it to say that you need to use some kind of reward for people jumping on your list. That usually means you're giving away some kind of what we call a lead magnet or an opt-in bonus or something.

Let's say you're trying to build your business. You find that it aligns with somebody's podcast. You go on the podcast as a guest, and at the end they allow you to promote your business. And you say, look, if you go to my website and click on this button, I'll send you a free list of something they're interested in. And in exchange, they give you their email list. And by doing that in different venues, you can do it on social media, you can do it on these podcasts, you can do it on blogs, you can do it on your website. You get people to sign up for your email list, but they're going to drop off quickly unless they get something worth reading. And we'll talk about that in a minute. That's why you have to start early because it's probably going to take you six months to a year to recruit, to develop a decent size email list that you can then begin to nurture, and then later we'll get to actually selling through email. When to start? As soon as possible.

All right. Well, how do you set it up? I'm not going to go through a long litany of how to set up an email program, email marketing plan. The basic thing to tell you is there are tools for creating your email market and marketing program. How do you set it up? What I mentioned earlier was a CRM, which is a customer relationship management system. Now there's really sophisticated CRMs which are integrated across all kinds of things from selling and billing and just keeping vast records. But the basic ones are designed to help a small business owner stay in communication with their customers and potential customers. And it automates a lot of things in a way that you can't really do on your usual email platform.

If I go into Gmail, I guess I can create different groups and I can send mass mailings out, but it's not really designed to manage that and to track all kinds of metrics on who's opening, who's clicking, who's responding, our sales attached to that email. That's why these other systems were created. One of the early ones, and I've still used it to this day, is Mailchimp. It was fairly rudimentary when I signed up with it five or six years ago. But it really has all the features you need, pretty much ConvertKit and Keap, which I think used to be Infusionsoft. A little more sophisticated. ConvertKit is actually newer, but it was designed specifically to work for those people that use online businesses and has a lot of automation.

Keap Infusionsoft is really a much more expensive program. It's been around a lot longer, but it is very sophisticated and you can create all kinds of protocols for sequences and if then statements in your marketing. If the customer does this, you go this way. If it does this other thing, you send this email and so forth.

But I've been happy with Mailchimp. You can just go to Mailchimp.com to check it out. Also convertkit.com to check it out. It's one that's been supported and I think is on the board is Pat Flynn, some online expert you might know. And Keap who used to be Infusionsoft is more expensive. Actually, Mailchip and Convert Kit both come in a free version until 300 to 500 members or subscribers. And then you have to start paying a fee. Also, it only has certain features. Keap is a two-week trial that's free, but after that you do have to pay significant dollars. It's kind of hard to justify when you only have a few email subscribers. So, you want to build it up very quickly to justify the cost.

So, that's how you set it up. You just find one of these CRMs. There are others, but if you find one of those, I will recommend Mailchimp.com. I don't get any payment or I'm not an affiliate for Mailchimp, but it seems to be working for me. So, that's why I mentioned it.

Now, once you have that system, it allows you to track metrics, which I'll mention in more detail in a second. It also allows you to add tags, create segments so you can segment your list. It allows you to keep all kinds of metrics and follow. Most of them will allow you to do A/B testing where you create one email, change it in some way, and you've got A, you've got B, some have more. You can then send both of those out simultaneously and compare which one has a higher click rate, for example. And then that'll tell you, "Oh, this factor should be used in future emails."

A good example would be, let's say you have two emails, exactly the same, 10 paragraphs, a hundred words, and one has subject line A and the other has subject line B and that's it. They go out and you find subject line A works a lot better than subject line B. Well, then next time you can go ahead and use that one if you're going to use it again or some version of it.

The other thing that these do, they also automate the process where you can take let's say a third of your audience send out A and B. And then after three, four hours, whatever length of time you want to use, the system automatically tracks the open rate or the click rate and whichever one's higher, the rest of your list, the other two thirds are sent to that one. So, it actually optimizes the process of sending an email out while it's being sent out.

The only problem I didn't like with that was that the timing would change. Maybe you think the optimum time is to send at 08:00 in the morning. Well, into this scenario, then you would send it at 08:00 but the next batch wouldn't go out till let's say noon. If the day of the week or the timing doesn't make a difference, it can work fine. You can send the test email out in the morning today and then 24 hours send the next batch to the winner.

But the metrics you should follow. I've kind of alluded to the open rate, the click rate, the sales that come from it, which you cannot usually run measure directly, although in ConvertKit you can do that and probably in Keap as well. And then the AB metrics where you can compare so you can measure that. That's kind of four basic things. I usually look at open rates and click rates. However, I will say this. Open rates are notoriously inaccurate. Some email providers like the AOLs and the Gmails and others of the world, Yahoo and so forth, if the email that you send goes into their inbox, it's counted as being read even though it's not been opened.

In other cases, they may count everything that's in your email box as unread for some reason. So, they're very unreliable. The only thing they're good for is looking over time or comparing as long as within your system, two different emails, then if one had an open rate of 30% and the other 40%, you could say, okay, the second one definitely did better. But whether that was really 30% and 40% or 20% and 25% you really don't know because there's other reasons why those things are not consistently applied to every email that you send out. That part is inaccurate.

Click rate on the other hand is fairly accurate, close to 100% accurate. Let's say in the past I've had open rates of 20% and I had a click rate of 1%, and then I make some changes. My open rate goes up to 30%, but my click rate goes up to 2% or 3%. That's a big difference. And I'd be more interested in that change in the click rate than in the open rate because again, the click rate is much more accurate. So, when I get up to let's say a 2% or above click rate, that's extremely high for me. It's one thing for someone to open an email, but to actually go in and click on something, they've got to take action. That's a good thing. That's what you want. And so, those are the metrics that you should measure.

Then you can do the A/B testing later when you get much more sophisticated. And it probably doesn't even make sense to do that unless you're up over 2,000 email subscribers. Because again, you're comparing, let's see what did I say, it was one third and split those in half. So, you're taking 500 compared to another 500 or even less in my case when I've only got a thousand email subscribers. So, there's no sense getting into that.

And then as far as sales, right now, the only way I can tell is I can just look and see how the timing is. Most things are going to be sold out an email within a day or two after it's sent, obviously, because after that it just kind of disappears into the ether as new emails come in. All right, those are the metrics I recommend you follow.

Now, email marketing philosophy. This is the crux of what I want to talk to you about today. I was talking about why adopt this strategy in your new business. Like I said, people send out newsletters. It's not uncommon for people to only send out emails when they have something to announce. It's not uncommon for people to build and build and build their email list and only use it when they have a product to sell or some kind of course to promote. And that could be very infrequently to the point where it's not uncommon for people to be on your list, my list, who haven't opened one of our emails in over a year or two. That's completely dysfunctional. It's completely a waste of time and you're missing a huge opportunity.

So, what is the alternative? Well, let's look at it in a new way. What we want to do now these days, and it's been shown to be very successful, and I'll give you some more examples in a minute, is that we want to have regular frequent connections with our audience. In other words, we don't want to be a stranger to them. We want them to know us, feel comfortable with us, and look forward to reading our emails. Oh, is that possible?

And at the same time, as we're doing that, as part of that, and maybe before starting that process with intensity, we should get rid of those that are already unengaged, although we need to do something to maybe allow them a chance to become reengaged. I'm not going to go into detail on this, but basically what we need to do is get rid of the flack, the dead weight, but we have to give them a chance to show that they really aren't dead weight, that they're out there waiting to hear something.

So, here's what you do. This is an abbreviated version of how to do this without going into every step. Most email providers or I'll say CRMs like Mailchimp can tell you how engaged your readers are, and they will look at open rates and click rates and they'll look at how many, what percentage they've responded to and when was the last time they actually opened one, when was the last time they actually clicked on one. Was it a month ago? Was it within the last two days? Was it six months ago? Has it been over a year since they've opened one or clicked one? Again, given the constraints of open rates, and they will tell you ranking.

In Mailchimp you get a five star, four, three, two, one. One is like get rid of them. A two is pretty, pretty unengaged. And they'll define what that means. They call each email a campaign in Mailchimp, but how many campaigns have they opened?

So, what I did before I started this new way of doing a more frequent email approach was, I didn't just use the system that Mailchimp has, but I defined what it was. It was three to six months. They hadn't clicked on a single email, but I didn't just get rid of them or put them aside in sort of suspension. I sent them a series of emails that said, "Hey, I see you have not clicked on any of my emails in six months. It doesn't appear that you are interested in what's going on here. I'm getting ready to kick you off my list. Before I do that though, I have a link here to a free download that has 70 nonclinical jobs on it." It's the same download I use for my lead magnet to build the email list. And I give them an opportunity to click. If they click, they automatically are off that list. There's a group that doesn't click any of those. So, let's say it's 20% of my list. Actually, for me it was almost 35% of my list that hadn't done anything in like a year.

So, I sent them that first email. The next email I sent was kind of a different approach or different comments. I said "You know what? I see you haven't been opening my emails in a long time, you haven't been clicking on them, but I have this free course in my academy. And if you do this course, it could have been anything, but I would say I would teach you about how to become a medical writer." And then I would send it out. If they click and open that again, it's free. They don't have to give me their email address because I already have it. So, it's a pretty low barrier. Then they get off the list.

Maybe the last one was, "I've got a webinar that I recorded for you, and it'll tell you the five myths of nonclinical careers and why you should not believe those myths or those myths are being dispelled. It's a 25-minute video, click here, you'll get the free video, you can watch it whenever you like." I go through that. Of those 35% that had not responded in a year, maybe half of them will click on one of those, then they're off. The remaining 17.5% or whatever that is I just eliminated them. Boom, cleaned them up.

Now that by the way is automatically going to increase your open rate and your click rate because you basically have removed many other people that never opened and never click. But it also focuses down on a group of people that are interested. And again, on my podcast, I usually say what I want to do, I want to inspire you, I want to encourage you and I want to teach you. So, these are people that want to be encouraged, inspired, and taught by what I talk about, which is nonclinical careers.

When I did that, I pretty much brought my list down to a thousand ultimately, after I went through that process a couple of times. But the open rate is currently run above 50%. Now, they were running about 20% back then. And my click rates are consistently somewhere between 0.6-0.7 all the way up to 1.9-2.0. Sometimes depending if some special things will get as high as 2% or 3%.

When I send my Tuesday emails out there mostly about my podcast, sometimes 3.5% of people will click those either because they want to click to go to the podcast or they're clicking on something I'm talking about or promoting, or a freebie or one of the links. There are so many links in my emails for my podcast to other episodes that the click rate is much higher. Now that's an engaged audience, but that's only part of it.

Once you find the audience that does want to hear from you, now remember, if you're only sending an email out once a month or so, the fact that they even click on that once a month is pretty amazing because you're so much out of their mind. The big part of this strategy is sending more frequent, shorter, funny or interesting or inspiring emails. You want to do all those things at the same time. All right, I'm going to give you a resource in a minute on that.

Here's how I do it. I try to send an email almost every day. Actually, my goal is to send five emails a week. Now, one of those is automatically a Tuesday email about my podcast. Now I only have to prepare four emails. But the emails are much shorter, they're funny, they're to the point I sent and they come from my life. There's always a story in there pretty much every time about something in my life. Something happened when I was a kid. Someplace I've visited, I've traveled a lot, so I have a lot of stories about travel.

I did a lot of things in my 40s and 50s. For whatever reason I went on kind of a binge of trying new things from golf to scuba diving, to rock climbing, to traveling, to you name it. International travel. I went to Jerusalem twice. I went to Nepal and track in the Himalayas. Anyway, a lot of stories that we can use and everybody has those stories. It's not unique to me. But I tried to do an email every single day during the week. Five a week. One was for my podcast, the other four were new. And I would do them on weekends. Sometimes I'd skip a day and then I'd do one on a weekend instead.

Emails like these can be prepared all at once, batched five in a row or five at a time, 10 at a time if you want. Because they're not really related to timing unless you're talking about something in the news. But I would do that. They would be shorter and I would try not to spend too much time developing them. And I would jot down ideas for emails as they came to me. I might be brainstorming sometime or doing something and all of a sudden, I've had a good cup of coffee or two and I came up with ideas for three or four or five different emails. Things that happened before I went to med school, things when I had roommates. Just all kinds of ideas. And I would always tie them back in some way with something that was informative or inspirational or encouraging. Things I have experienced like they have.

At the top right of the email, I put in that it's going to take less than one to two minutes to read. And the other thing is, it usually has some clickable links in it because you can't really measure the success unless you have something to click. Now those clicks might really not go anywhere except like I said to a podcast episode, a blog post, me being interviewed by somebody else's podcast host. It's all kinds of things you can do, but it's more frequent and it's shorter. It's to the point.

The other part of this philosophy is not a lot of pictures or a lot of colors. It's basically like a short note you're writing to somebody that can be read quickly, digested quickly, and usually get a little chuckle, a little insight, something like that.

Like I said, my metrics just doubled in terms of the open rates and the click rates. I really started seeing more engagement. I recommend you do that. And the idea here is they're getting to know you. Now as a podcaster, it's funny because people listen to my podcast consistently. They know me because my voice is in their head just like it is right now if you're listening to this, which you obviously are or watching it on YouTube.

But you may not have a podcast. Maybe all your engagement is on a website or maybe you do some videos, YouTube videos, another way to do it. But if you're doing this email thing, you are going to really start to connect with those people and you will see that those rates will be quite high. And if you're a really good writer, and again, don't use that as an excuse, but I do say when I do write the emails that I go back a couple, two or three times, sometimes I sent them aside for an hour or two or even the next morning if I'm writing them the day before and I go through them and I really try and get rid of all the unnecessary language, all the extra words.

Get it down to the core message, the story, and then whatever call to action you want them to take, if any. Ask them just to reply to the email with comments or suggestions or requests. And that's it. You'll find over time that that is about as warm an audience as you'll ever get when it's time to start selling. Basically, that's what I want to talk about today as far as a new approach to email marketing strategy.

I usually like to put resources in. I would say Mailchimp is the one I would just recommend you check out because you can try it for free for months at a time until you reach a certain level. And even after that, it remains very reasonably priced.

The only other resource I would give you is the nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy. That's a link. And if you go there, you can buy the course that I learned this approach to with the League of Email Marketing Heroes. If you go there to my link, nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy, it'll take you there. And for $39 you can buy their course on how to implement this. And it goes in a lot of detail about everything I've talked about and then a whole lot more. That's the one resource I would mention today.

Thanks for joining me today. You can find links for today's episode at nonclinicalphysicians.com/adopt-this-email-strategy. And there you'll find the link that I just mentioned as a resource. And again, that link is nonclinicalphysicians.com/emailstrategy where for only $39 you'll learn exactly how to implement the bottomless email strategy is what that's called. It's the approach I use in the product that teaches a tried-and-true email framework that helps business owners create psychological connections. That's what it does. It helps create that psychological connection that their lists are looking for. That's basically it today.

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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. 

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.

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:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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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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The post How Persuasive Branding and Marketing Can Save Private Practice – 194 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.