summit Archives - NonClinical Physicians

Find Your Great First Nonclinical MSL Job

John Jurica — Tue, 14 May 2024 11:57:14 +0000

Presentation by Dr. Maria Abunto – 352

Today's episode presents an excerpt from Dr. Maria Abunto's masterclass on securing your first nonclinical MSL job from the 2023 Nonclinical Career Summit.

Dr. Maria Abunto, a senior manager of medical science liaisons (MSLs) at Exact Sciences, shares her journey and insights into the MSL role. Dr. Abunto's insights focus on relationship-building, continuous learning, and strategic networking. Whether you are considering a career change or seeking to understand the MSL role better, this post offers valuable guidance and inspiration.

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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.

Our Episode Sponsor

Dr. Debra Blaine is a physician like many of you, and her greatest challenge was fear. The whole concept of leaving clinical medicine was terrifying. But she is so much happier now as a professional writer and a coach. According to Debra, “It’s like someone turned the oxygen back on.” If fear is part of your struggle, too, she would like to help you push through those emotional barriers to go after the life you really want. Click this link to schedule a free chat. Or check out her website at allthingswriting.com/resilience-coaching.

From Academia to Industry: Dr. Maria Abunto's Journey

Dr. Maria Abunto transitioned from academia to industry, bringing experience from the NIH, Stryker, and now Exact Sciences. Her journey began with a master's degree in public health, where she developed a passion for public service. Driven to make a broader impact, she ventured into the world of medical science liaisons (MSLs).

Dr. Abunto shares her personal story, highlighting the importance of investing in oneself and continuously seeking opportunities to learn and grow. Her transition underscores the value of networking and finding mentors who can guide and support one's career path.

The MSL Role: Responsibilities and Rewards

The MSL role established over 50 years ago is vital in the biopharma industry. MSLs are responsible for building relationships with key opinion leaders (KOLs) and educating them on the science and advancements in treatment related to a company's product. This communication-focused role requires a strong scientific background, typically a doctorate, and excellent interpersonal skills.

Dr. Abunto explains that MSLs work remotely, managing their schedules and traveling to meet with KOLs. The role offers significant rewards, including high compensation, flexible work arrangements, and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact in healthcare.

Finding Your First Nonclinical MSL Job: Tips and Strategies

Breaking into the MSL role can be challenging but achievable with the right preparation and strategy. Dr. Abunto advises aspiring MSLs to focus on matching their skills and experiences with specific therapeutic areas and companies.

Networking is crucial. Attending industry conferences, joining professional organizations like the MSL Society, and connecting with key MSL leaders can open doors to opportunities. Additionally, enrolling in relevant training programs can enhance one's qualifications. Dr. Abunto also emphasizes the importance of building quality professional contacts and researching target companies to stand out in the competitive MSL job market.

Summary

To learn more you should explore the MSL Society website, which offers information and training opportunities for aspiring Medical Science Liaisons. To connect with Maria check out her profile on LinkedIn, where she is likely active and engaging with the medical and scientific community. For detailed presentations and insights from the 2023 Nonclinical Careers Summit, including Dr. Abunto's complete talk, visit the 2023 Summit’s Official Page.

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

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 352

Find Your Great First Nonclinical MSL Job

- Interview with Dr. Maria Abunto

John: Dr. Maria Abunto is the senior manager of medical science liaisons at ExactSciences, a molecular diagnostics company specializing in the detection of early-stage cancers. Before she worked there, she was global medical science liaison for Stryker. And she previously worked as an epidemiologist and investigator for the NIH and as a medical scientific expert on the IRB at a large children's hospital. She holds a master's degree in public health from the University of Pittsburgh and she completed a medical degree at the University of the East in Manila, Philippines. All right.

Today's podcast episode is the first half of her presentation from the 2023 Non-Clinical Career Summit in which she describes the MSL biopharma role, why it is a popular non-clinical career, and how to land your first MSL job. So let's jump in as she describes how she landed her first role as an MSL.

Dr. Maria Bunto: I'm Maria Bunto and I'll give a talk about coming from academia to industry or going from the ivory tower to the dark side. So the purpose of my presentation is to educate you on what is a medical science liaison or MSL. And if there's one thing I'd like for you to remember about being an MSL, it's not really bad at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's one of the best jobs in the world and I'm fortunate to have transitioned to a non-clinical career that I love. And hopefully my talk will resonate with some of you.

So this is my disclaimer and the views and opinions are my own and do not reflect that of exact sciences, my employer, and I have no financial relationships to disclose.

So here's an outline of what I'll be talking about today. I'll start with a background about myself and my journey of how I transitioned. Then I'll talk about the MSL role, who MSLs are, and what compensation looks like, and then highlight the pros and cons of being an MSL. Then I'll take a deeper dive into how to become an MSL and briefly talk about the different career paths. I'll provide some information about the MSL society, their training and other resources.

So I'm just gonna go ahead and go into my why. This is my story and I'd like to spend just a few minutes and take you through my journey. Everyone has their unique experiences. So I think it's really important to connect with all of you, the audience out there who's interested and just figuring out what your why is. and why you want to transition. So as a physician, I have had previous experiences as a medical director, supervising operations for a busy family medicine practice. And during that time, I saw countless health disparities and underserved populations without any support or insurance. And so chronic disease is being passed down from generation to generation. And it's just one day that I just had an epiphany at a health fair and we were conducting where I realized I didn't wanna do this anymore, but rather just really focusing on understanding really what's going on here and what's happening upstream in a lot of these marginalized populations and how can we prevent that domino effect downstream?

So I always knew that I wanted to be more than just a medical director. I really wanted to affect populations on a greater level and really make that difference on even a more broader impact. while continuing to develop myself professionally. So identified public health problems, but I also realized the solution really starts with me. So the decision, this became my why. But how I was going to do this was the big question is how was I going to reinvent myself? So I knew my strengths were in public service and building connections and relationships. But I also realized during the soul searching that in order to do this, I needed to up my game and invest in myself. So my journey really begins in 2016 when I went back to graduate school and obtained my master in public health at the University of Pittsburgh. So this was a really great decision and wise investment because I needed to focus and reinvent myself. So I really worked hard to increase my knowledge and skillset, and I discovered that I absolutely loved learning as an adult student, but I didn't know what I would be doing after graduation, but I kept going and I didn't stop and I kept looking for opportunities.

It's in academia where I found an opportunity to expand my network. build my meaningful connections and relationships. So at the bottom right of the corner of the screen here, I'm pictured at graduation with my program director and long time mentor, Dr. David Feingold and the former Dean of Public Health, Dr. Donald Burke. And like I mentioned, I knew my strengths were not only in relationship building, but in public service. So at the top right is where I immersed myself in the Center for Health Equity Initiatives, such as Take the Health Professional to the People Day. So that's where I would conduct blood pressure screenings at barbershops and salons and inner cities around Pittsburgh. And you see, after all these years, I'm still volunteering in a community and giving back. It's been about a decade now. And these are opportunities like creating these long-term relationships with mentors. I also had an awesome mentor during grad school, who after graduation, I joined him at his lab at the National Institutes of Health and Population Sciences is at the NIH. And that's me pictured there on the left-hand corner. at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. That's really how I got into research because not only my connections, but my public health experience.

So it was at the NIH where I said, I mentioned that I conducted colorectal cancer research and that I became an epidemiologist there, attended all conferences and network like crazy. And I think that's where in 2017, I joined the MSL Society and became really active. And I attended the three-day live MSL communication and presentation skills training. There I learned as much as I could about being an MSL because I didn't really know I've heard about it, but it was really when I learned more about it that it appealed to me. And it was at the MSL Society Women's Conference in 2018 where I met a physician MSL. She introduced me to her career coach. And I immediately consulted that coach. So I wanted to realize that coach was also a physician. I wanted to really understand, is this a good fit for me? How hard is it to break into the role? She really helped me after 10 months. I landed my first job in industry. It was because of a connection she had, another physician who was hiring at a medical device company. And I know that after working there my first week, I just knew that I loved it and it was such a good fit. So in a nutshell, That was my career path and I'd have to say, I continue to solidify these relationships in the roles with MSLs and MSL leaders who continuously inspire me.

So now let's talk about the MSL role. The MSL was first established in 1967 by the Upjohn company and has existed for more than 50 years. And it continues to evolve in line with the changing diseases, treatment landscapes and healthcare trends. So MSLs were created in response to the need for a professionally trained staff to build rapport with influential physicians known in the pharma industry as key opinion leaders or KOLs and then thought leaders in various therapeutic areas of research. So MSLs became a part of medical affairs department where their activities revolve around building relationships with KOLs, but it's important to note that in the US the MSL is not a commercial role. or a promotional one. It's also not a science role, but rather a communication role through science, where discussions revolve around the research and the data behind the drug or product. So in the past, an advanced clinical degree was not required. However, in the late 1980s and 90s, a number of companies began to require MSLs to hold a doctorate degree, such as an MD, PharmD, or PhD, and now even Doctorate of Nursing, or DNP. As the MSL role grew over the years, the doctorate degrees became the new standard. Many companies require these credentials because MSLs are often viewed as more credible and it helps really establish those peer-to-peer relationships with doctors who you will be working with. And it's a growing field, which is a good sign. It's growing at a rate of about 10% a year with at least one out of four MSLs being hired without previous MSL experience. So over the years, companies have used various titles for the role and Medical Science Liaison or MSL is not the only name, it is called, for example, Pfizer calls MSL's field medical directors or FMDs and Amgen refers to them as regional leaders. So I'd also like to point out that obtaining a master degree may not likely make you a better applicant unless that degree really strengthens your match to the specific MSL role. But we have seen, and also on our team, we've had people that had master degrees and go on to also get a PhD while they're working for an industry company. So what is the purpose of the MSO role? The primary purpose is to be a scientific or disease state expert in the therapeutic area of the company product or pipeline.

So what is an MSL? Well, an MSL is one who holds a clinical degree in the life sciences with extensive experience in clinical medicine and or research. A doctor degree is preferred, but I've seen, as I mentioned, MSLs with master degree break into the role. There are more PhDs and PharmDs or MDs. And lately we've seen a lot of DERS practitioners and also physician assistants transitioning to become MSLs. So an MSL is employed by a pharma, biotech or medical device company. And He or she is a subject matter expert in a particular therapeutic area, such as oncology, hematology, and immunology. Now oncology and immunology, they lead the way with growth rates of about 31% and 28% respectively. And MSL's primary function is to educate on the science and advances in the treatment of the drug or product in a fair and balanced manner.

So it's a remote job where one works from home, one has a home office, and arranges meetings with KOLs or healthcare providers, either in person or virtually. So this diagram is event diagram and really illustrates what the role of the MSL encompasses. So the circle on the left contains all of the people with the science degrees, which is the PharmD, MD, PhDs. And these are people like yourself who have the proven science skills and have spent hours and hours conducting research or practicing science. Now the circle on the right This contains the people with communication relationship driven skills. So these are the soft skills. And that includes emotional intelligence and self-awareness. The circle on the left is necessary but not sufficient to land an MSL role. However, the circle on the right is full of people you want to be with, but is no good without the technical science skills found on the left. The silver middle, the sliver in the middle is where the two circles intersect and that's why the MSL talent is so hard to come by. However, as mastering the science and having degree is found in every candidate, what's often overlooked are the soft skills and the communication skills, as I mentioned, which actually may even be more important here. So MSLs are excellent communicators and this quality is really what is what makes one stand out. It's one thing to know the science and it's quite another to communicate the science. And if you think of the communication rolled through science, that's what makes an awesome MSL.

What are some of the responsibilities of an MSL? The primary responsibility is to establish and maintain relationships with KOLs who are influential doctors or healthcare providers. So since MSLs are subject matter experts of the science behind the products, engagements with KOLs involve discussions about the disease state and can involve education through presentations. An MSL first starts by KOL mapping in their territory and identifying who the key influencers are. and who are important players to get in front of as they begin strategizing and building relationships. A typical day involves proactively reaching out to a list of KOLs, and the MSL will introduce himself or herself through an email or a phone call. And then introductions can also happen at conferences or through your commercial sales force. The goal is to be able to schedule a one-on-one meeting, engage in conversation, and begin to build those relationships. And then from these conversations, may find that the KOL is interested in conducting a clinical trial that aligns with the pharma company or the KOL may request more education on the pivotal study about a company product recently launched. And whatever the outcome, collecting insights are important information to bring back to the company because insights are considered currency to the overall business, especially competitive intelligence insights. And sometimes these meetings are in-person and require travel. And so travel days are an average about two to three days per week. and are structured around the KOL schedule. But you can also modify your schedule, really makes sense to you. If you think according to the metrics of the company or of your team, if you can actually meet those metrics in two to three meetings, half virtual, half in person, minimal travel, that can be accomplished too. So it's really about you being the CEO or you managing and being the manager of your territory.

So here's a survey that was conducted by the MSL Society in 2020 and showing the many different activities that MSLs participate in and can be found on the website, which is free for all members. And also, I think there's also free resources for non-members. And as you can see, majority of the MSLs, over 98%, they manage KOL relationships. And approximately 90% of MSL surveyed said that they attend medical conferences and also provide education through scientific presentations. MSLs focus on meetings with those who are experts and thought leaders because they are influencing how others practice or conduct research using the product or the drug treatment. And an MSL would do that through a peer-to-peer scientific exchange. And the scientific exchange has two aspects to it. The first aspect of the role is a therapeutic area subject matter expert. So disease state awareness and the knowledge of the competitive landscape and the company specific products and pipeline. The second aspect is bringing value that the KOL wants. And sometimes they don't need the MSL scientific acumen. So sometimes what they want are opportunities. For instance, opportunities like a grant for an investigator led study or clinical trial. And sometimes KOLs are not looking for that scientific information, but looking to the MSL to be that conduit to the company's resources to help their career or institutions like being on an advisory board or speaker on podium or an author of a publication. So as an MSL, you will have to know the KOL very well to find out what it is that you can bring value to them. Is it the scientific presentations or is it the career opportunities? And the key is to meet the KOLs where they're at. So now let's shift a little bit and talk about who MSLs are and what compensation looks like. I think this is a really nice set of slides from the MSL Society data that shows an infograph of the makeup of the MSL surveyed by the MSL Society in 2020. 2023 results are very similar. So they surveyed over 2000 MSL professionals and the results in the US showed there was an overwhelming number of women MSLs compared to men, more than half were women and about 41% were men. 31% of MSLs work in the oncology space while 15% of MSLs work in Majority of MSL surveyed were white who had a PhD degree at 39%, followed by 27% for PharmDs. So only 8% of MSLs had a medical degree. The top three places where MSLs work are in large, medium, and small pharma or biotech companies. And then the survey also breaks it down by years of experience.

So MSL-based salaries can vary significantly depending on the therapeutic area, geographic region, years of experience. educational background, and then size of the company, as well as a company's product and pipeline life cycle. So this is a comparison of the average base salary of MSLs from around the globe. The MSL Society hired an external research firm to collect and analyze the data from over 2000 participants from 60 countries around the world. So this is 2022 data. And keep in mind that the MSL role may be defined differently around the world. They may take on other responsibilities similar to commercial sales or marketing. So from those that participated in the 2021 salary survey, the majority of managers or directors of MSLs based in the US use the report as their primary salary benchmark data. I know we use this for our, not only just the MSL society data, but other data that we use as benchmark for our hire for this year. And so as you can see, there is a wide range of salaries and the MSL pay trends on the higher side in the US and then it increases annually, about 3%.

This is a snapshot of the 2022 average base salary of MSLs in the US according to years of experience. And as you can see on the left, the average starting salary is about 160,000. That's not including benefits, which makes it a very attractive compensation, even with less than one year of experience. The salary increases about 3% every year, as I mentioned. However, this is underestimating how much MSLs make because it doesn't include the long-term benefits which could be another 30 to $50,000. For example, some of those benefits are health insurance, 401k, stock options, a company car, and an expense account, which are added on top of your base salary. Now on the right is the average starting salary for an MSL manager or director. It usually starts above $200,000, but varies according to the years of experience. So if you see though that the difference here from managers compared to the MSL's salary is that it varies and it doesn't necessarily mean a trend up as one gains more experience. The years of experience of being a manager or director doesn't always translate to higher pay. And sometimes they do take a pay cut to move up into a company.

So when I was doing my research and deciding on whether the MSL job was right for me, I thought it was important to write down the pros and cons of being an MSL. And I... And I suggest you do the same transitioning, if you're transitioning from clinical to non-clinical. So please note that this is not a comprehensive list and it's very subjective. So for the pros, I showed on the previous slide that MSLs in the US are well compensated with a high base salary. Remote work is a plus, especially during the pandemic when I started. But working from home may not be suitable for some people. Having a flexible schedule includes making your own work schedule, arranging your own meetings and then. healthcare providers, meetings, as well as booking work travel. And there is at least 50% within your region or territory. And travel may be a deal breaker for some, but for me, it suits my lifestyle. And also there are great benefits that I explained. Some of the cons. So for industry is highly regulated and there is a lot of compliance and rules to follow. There is some loss of autonomy there. It's a transition from being a discoverer, for instance, like in academia, to being a knower. You know, you will not have a lot of patient interaction if you were a clinician and moving into becoming an MSL. And will certainly not be a scientist, but rather more of a communicator of science. And then you're going to be part of a larger team that is metrics driven and performance driven. So for example, you're measured on the number of healthcare provider. Outreach and interactions, insights and presentations, those are part of your metrics. Access to healthcare providers and scheduling face-to-face meetings. They were very difficult during the pandemic. But then we made it work through a hybrid kind of meetings where we had virtual and also in-person once they started opening up to vendors and to industry. So it's about really finding creative ways of gaining access.

The MSL role is very competitive. You will be competing against experienced MSLs for every single role you apply for. Breaking in is not easy, but it's not impossible. And most companies will require having MSL experience. It does take a lot of hard work and the right match to find that ideal job. And now I just, I'm going to pause here for a minute and just talk about one thing that I did not touch on. And that is that negative impression or that bias about working in industry. And you know, I came from academia came from practice as well. And I specifically titled my talk, going from academia to the dark side to illustrate this bias. But as someone who has worked on both sides, I believe education and having an open mind are key in tackling these biases and assumptions when considering transitioning to industry. And this section is going to be talking about how to become an MSL. I can be whole another presentation and discussion, but I'll just take a few minutes to talk about some steps and strategies that has worked for me and others. And the bottom line is preparation is key.

So remember that there are no general MSL roles. There are all disease state or therapeutic area focus. The first step is to really identify your therapeutic area or TA. For example, you could be conducting research in Alzheimer's and your disease state focuses neurology or neuroscience. or if you are conducting sickle cell anemia research, your TA will be hematology. If you want to exponentially increase your chances of breaking into your first MSL role, I'd say the three most important things are really to match, match. Match and find those target companies, target roles, and only apply to those once you have done your research and preparation. Next, research the role in the company you'd like to work for. I'd say do that now, follow the company on social media or even on Twitter, on LinkedIn, know everything you can about the company because when it does come time to interview, what I did is I told the company, I said, I've been following you for years, which is, it's a good sign that you actually are very knowledgeable about them. It also allows you more opportunities that help you get in front of people as you network and then get your foot in the door. There are also, for example, internships or fellowships offered because these can count as experience. translatable experience. And so too, you wanna look at and see if there's companies that have internships and apply for those opportunities. Attend industry-wide conferences and events and really build your network. Let them know you, your face and really introduce yourself and be proactive. A focus on quality professional contacts that are directly related to the MSL community. and identify key MSL leaders in medical affairs at companies that are of interest to you. So this is the most effective and easiest way to connect with a hiring manager and other key decision-makers. So the more relevant connections you make, the greater chance you will be successful in breaking in. So become an active member of MSL relevant groups, like the MSL Society, and there's others out there, cheeky scientists. This will allow you to really increase the network your circle of influence with those MSLs in industry, but also in the companies that you are interested in. It's really challenging to achieve on your own your circle of influence without the help of your network. So I highly encourage you to expand your reach and get out of your comfort zone and connect with others.

It's also really challenging to achieve becoming an MSL on your own without proper preparation and guidance. You will need to really stand apart from the competition. So there's also MSL trainings offered for aspiring MSLs, especially if you have no MSL experience. That's a great way to upscale, build your skills. If you lack industry experience or research experience, you know, we wanna keep pace with the changing demands of the profession. And if you need to enroll in online courses to learn about clinical trials or regulatory compliance, I'll provide a list of resources too with websites at the end of this talk.

John: Physicians are uniquely positioned to enter the biopharma industry. They obviously use the products produced by biopharma and are very comfortable discussing the research, development, and deployment of new pharmaceuticals, diagnostic tests, and medical devices. In today's presentation, Maria provided a nice review of the pros and cons of the MSL job, the likely salary to expect, and sound advice to help you transition into the role. If you'd like to hear the rest of our presentation and the other 11 topics presented at the 2023 Non-Clinical Careers Summit, you can check that out at nonc forward slash two zero two three summit. That's nonc forward slash twenty three summit. That's all one word, no hyphens.

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The post Find Your Great First Nonclinical MSL Job appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

7 Important Zoom Settings When Presenting Your First Summit – 301

John Jurica — Wed, 24 May 2023 14:00:21 +0000

Zoom Settings to Know

In today's episode, we share John's firsthand experience with Zoom to apply when presenting your first summit. Discover the valuable insights and lessons he gained while preparing for this event.

From meticulous preparation to seamless execution, John shares his valuable insights, tips, and lessons learned during this groundbreaking virtual event. With an unwavering commitment to delivering an exceptional summit, he applied overlooked settings in Zoom's basic meeting version that were critical to its resounding success.

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.

Newscript Summit Success Story

Planning and hosting a large meeting requires careful consideration of major subtasks. There are generally more than a dozen major planning steps. And it's critical to properly use the Zoom settings when presenting your first summit.

Here is the list of major tasks during the planning and delivery of the Summit:

Draft the Summit design with topics, proposed faculty, schedule, intended audience, etc.;
Develop the marketing plan, including logos, email, social media, affiliate marketing, and podcast appearances;
Create a new website with a sales page, registrations, payment handling, and a place to post recordings and bonuses;
Select the method of holding the Summit (e.g., Zoom meeting, webinar, or other software);
Communicate with presenters (titles, objectives, times, and dates);
Enlist and advise affiliate promoters;
Create marketing materials, including emails, social media content, and images;
Fill orders for free attendance;
Plan the Summit delivery with a daily checklist to smoothly present and record 4 lectures and Q&A each evening;
Edit the videos and audio recordings and post them to the new website;
Collect and post the bonuses to the website;
Pay affiliate partners for their sales;
Send links to All Access Pass holders; and,
Address technical difficulties and assist customers to access the recordings when needed.

When it came to choosing a webinar platform for the NewScript Summit, Zoom proved to be the perfect choice. It has widespread familiarity. And since many course creators already own a license, there is no need to invest in a new platform.

Useful Zoom Settings When Presenting Your First Summit

Here are the 7 important settings to use when using a basic Zoom One Pro meeting plan:

All participants should be automatically muted on arrival.
Select the “Optimize for video clip” option when sharing my screen to play a prerecorded video (already opened on the desktop).
The 2 cohosts should record every session so there is a backup if one loses their connection.
It's best to assign two cohosts: one to run the meeting, and the other to manage the Q&A via the Chat function.
Assign the speaker the third cohost so they can easily open slides and share their screen if needed.
Use the “Spotlight” function to “spotlight” the moderator and the speaker, then “un-spotlight” the moderator during the talk, and “un-spotlight” the speaker when the Q&A was over.
At the beginning of the presentations turn off waiting room notifications.

Exclusive Summit Offers Await!

Take advantage of our exclusive offers today! Access the complete Summit Recordings with bonuses (the All Access Pass) for just $249.00. Learn more about that by going to the Nonclinical Career Summit.

Better yet, if you're not already a NewScript member, if you join NewScript now you can receive a 15% discount when registering for the All Access Pass. Hurry and secure your spot at NewScript.app before the Summer price increase in 2 weeks.

Summary

The NewScript Summit stands as a testament to the power of community, collaboration, and strategic event planning. Through the efforts of the NewScript team and the invaluable feedback of its members, this live event became a transformative experience for clinicians seeking nontraditional career paths.

By harnessing the collective wisdom of mentors, fostering engaging presentations, and incorporating interactive Q&A sessions, the Summit accelerated clinicians on their professional journey. As NewScript continues to evolve, it remains a source of inspiration, fostering a supportive community, and empowering clinicians to embrace new possibilities in their careers. And by implementing these tips when presenting your first summit you will deliver a smooth, problem-free event for your audience.

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:

Download This Episode:

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

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 301

7 Important Zoom Settings When Presenting Your First Summit

John: NewScript had been up and running for almost two years, and we had hundreds of members looking for information and advice about pursuing non-traditional jobs for a variety of clinicians, because NewScript is open not just to physicians, but to nurses and podiatrists and dentists and oral surgeons and therapists and anybody else who's a licensed professional in healthcare who's been going through similar things that we all have, that we address in NewScript, and as a side effect of that, or a normal consequence of careers to help get out of that milieu that's killing us and move on to something that's more satisfying and fulfilling.

We also talk about inside NewScript nonclinical careers and non-traditional clinical careers like telemedicine, locum tenens, med spas, and other non-traditional clinical activities. And so, that's whose in NewScript. It also has free webinars and podcast episodes. It has a few complete courses. It has links to other paid resources. Once you're a member, everything in NewScript, except for those few paid resources, are free. And of course, you can also access mentors in NewScripts. So, that's another benefit that we've built in, and we've got other things coming even as we speak.

So things were going well, and Tom Davis and I had a brainstorm about six months ago. We thought, "Why not organize a summit for our members?" We could invite mentors to be presenters. We could create a free version, and then we could sell recordings afterwards as an all access pass to help support NewScript. Because there are a lot of expenses in keeping NewScript going and getting it up and running. So, it does help if we can produce some kind of income.

We decided to move forward, but to help start the planning process, we needed more information. We sent out a survey to NewScript members, and also to my email subscribers, many of which who weren't in NewScript yet. And to find out how we could structure the summit, how our followers, how our members would prefer to get the information that we're talking about providing.

The results of this survey led us to develop a live event rather than recorded lectures or interviews, and presented over three week nights. On the survey, there was definitely a preference for live event. There was a preference for making it free, presenting it in the evenings, in the middle of the week rather than on the weekend, rather than a live event. And it also supported us doing live Q&A. That was one of the reasons why they wanted it to be live. So not only would the speakers be live, but then there could be a Q&A afterwards. After getting the surveys and looking back through those, that's what we decided to do.

Now, at first, I thought this would take a few months to plan, so I was kind of trying to squeeze it into the end of the year in 2022. But luckily, Tom convinced me that a five to six month planning timeframe would be much better. Even with the extended timetable that we decided to adopt, it seemed like we were always behind schedule for the tasks that were required to get this done. It was just a lot to do.

Now, luckily, I had done a lot of project planning when I was working as a hospital chief medical officer, and I was able to use those skills to develop a timetable for planning the summit, like I said, which was held a few weeks ago. I thought I'd start today.

My main purpose today is to try and talk about how we were able to use Zoom meetings as the platform to hold the event. But I thought in case you're thinking of doing something similar, I'd like to talk about the major sub-tasks that we needed to get from a decision to hold the summit to get everything posted and bonuses available for the all access pass after the fact. There obviously was a lot of planning in between that had to happen.

What I want to do now is just go through the 13 or 14 steps that, at least in my mind, the way I thought about them, that we had to go through to get this thing off the ground and implement it. So, here's a list of the sub-tasks that we had to do, and this actually comes from the giant Gantt chart. If you don't know what a Gantt chart is, it's just like a spreadsheet with different tasks and timeframes and when to get them done. And then as you go through and get things done, you can mark them off or you can check them, whatever.

This came from that. Now, that one had my Gantt chart on this. The project plan had about 45 different discreet things on it, but really well down to these 13 or 14 items. So I'm going to go through these pretty quickly.

First thing was, number one, figuring out what the summit design was going to be. The topics, the faculty, the schedule, the intended audience and all that. Just kind of put it in perspective. And so, Tom and I worked on that. And once we had that in mind and we can envision what the endpoint would be, well, then we could start working back and filling in all the gaps as to what had to be done, because the endpoint for that to happen, certain other things had to happen right before the endpoint.

And for those things that happen, there were certain other things that had to happen right before that pre endpoint and so on. And so, you work backwards really to the present day. Sometimes we get distracted because we like to do certain things. And so, we jump into those. Let's say one of us really likes to do a lot of marketing or emailing. Well, we want to get into that right away, but in fact, you have to plan this thing out from the beginning to the very end. You have to delegate some things. You might have to hire a consultant to do certain things, but let me again, get to the major things.

Conceptualize the overall design. And by the way, these are not in order from beginning to end, but these are things that some of which had to be done concurrently anyway. We had to figure out a marketing plan. What were we going to do? Were we going to create new logos? What kind of email marketing were we going to do? Were we going to use social media? Were we going to use podcasts? Well, yes, we were, not only my podcast to let us get the word out, but also being guests on other podcasts. And were we going to use affiliate marketing? Which we decide to do, which means engaging other people, sharing it with their audience, but paying those people a percentage of whatever funds are brought in.

Now remember, this was a free seminar, free summit. We were involved live. If you came and attended live, it was completely free. But if you wanted the recordings, you could purchase an all access pass. And so we had to have a way to track that. But again, this is at the beginning, just setting up what will the marketing plan involve.

Number three was, originally I was going to use Teachable to host everything, to serve as the affiliate site, to put the recordings after the fact. But honestly, I don't think Teachable is a good channel or good platform to do that. So, we had to create a new website. That was an entire process in and of itself with its own sales page, ability to register for the free and the paid sessions, had to collect payments for the all access pass. And we had to be able to change the payment, which we did over time. At the beginning it was $19 and it went up to $39, and it went up to $79, and now it's $249, which will be the evergreen price, at least for the time being.

And then we had to figure out number four, how to hold the summit, where we are going to use Zoom meetings, Basic Zoom. I think I have a Zoom Pro. And what it is, it's for meetings. And many of us have done meetings with 2, 3, 4, even up to 10 or 15 people. I'm on meetings all the time with different boards. There are often 10 or 12, 15 people on those.

But that's different than holding a meeting for let's say 300 or 400 people. So, then you have to decide, are you going to use a Zoom meeting? Are you going to go with the Zoom webinar, which is a different level, different cost, or maybe even some other platform? For example, I happen to own WebinarJam. Sometimes I'll put my webinars on WebinarJam. I'll hold them live there, and then I'll replay them. We had to make that decision, and we chose to use Zoom, and I'm going to spend the second half of today's presentation talking about that.

Then we had to figure out about communicating with our presenters. We had to identify them, which we did maybe in phase one, where we're just kind of conceptualizing the whole thing. We were going to use as many of our mentors as it made sense and as we're available, but we'd have to use other non-mentor as faculty. And we had several of those. And Tom and I both have many connections. And so we reached out, but we had to figure out how are we going to talk with them. How are we going to communicate with them? Do we have them sign a form, consent, or do we have them become affiliates? Do we have them market it, which we planned on doing? And so, how to communicate with them, keep them involved, and figure out during that communication, who was going to decide on the title of their presentation, the objectives, the time and date. If we were doing three evenings, four presentations per evening, how are we going to fill that schedule? That was step five, step six. And again, these aren't in particular order.

Identifying and communicating with affiliate marketers. Some of whom would be presenters, if they had an audience, if they had a following and they wanted to do that, that'd be great. But why not invite other people that we know? I've had people on my podcast, some of which have been on two or three times, they have a large audience. And so, then I would reach out to them. Tom has some contacts as well. And so, we had to have a whole separate process for communicating with and deciding how we were going to interact with our affiliate marketers, which also led to another phase of which was part of the marketing plan, but was creating everything that would go into the marketing, particularly to support the affiliates, which is actually step eight on my list.

But that concludes all the emails. I wrote 25 emails I think that people could use during the process. They would customize it and send it to their list and then I would send the same ones to my list. Some of them were my stories, but people could use that. They call them swipe files. So they're email, social media, content, images and then how to deliver that.

So, what I have down as step seven, let me go back one is that we had to spend some time identifying other podcasters as part of the marketing plan and get Tom and me scheduled on their podcasts early enough so that we could get on there, present something of interest and value, and also mention the fact that we had the summit coming up as part of our marketing process.

Okay, now, jumping back to number nine, when people decided to attend, we didn't just send out the link and say, "Hey, anybody that wants to come, just show up." Now we had to have them register even though they were going to attend for free, so that we would know that they were registered, then we had to send them out the link. And I did that two or three times just to make sure everybody had the link. And then there were people that didn't get the link, didn't get the emails, the link wasn't working. So, that takes time as well. But we had to communicate with our, I'll say registrants. Many of those were NewScript people. Many of those were followers of mine and Toms and the other affiliates who weren't in NewScript. And so, we did that.

Then to really put together the plan for running the summit with a daily checklist so we could smoothly present four lectures and Q&A each evening and record everything, we had two of those 12 presentations involved presenting a video of the presentation. One had a video, and then a live Q&A. One had a video, which included a recorded Q&A. It wasn't always consistent.

And then some of our speakers wanted to show their slides during their presentation. Some of them used the slides, I would say, as an outline to follow, but they weren't actually presenting them, they were just talking to the camera. And then there was a whole lot of other things I had to do while the event was going on, which I can talk a little bit about in a minute, running something like this on Zoom.

And then let's say we were all done. We had recorded everything. We had downloaded the video. Zoom does that automatically, but you've got to then pull them from the download files and organize them and title them and all that. That was the planning and the checklist Tom and I both used as we were going through the process was number 10. Number 11 was then making sure that we had the ability to edit all the video and audio recordings and get them posted to the new website, which had already been created so that the people could sign up.

But then all these recordings would go onto that website on another page, which was behind a paywall, I guess is what you would say. And then we had to figure out how to get all the bonuses and post them in a way that people could access them if they paid for the bonuses without us having to manually send them their bonuses. They could just go and download them. And then that was number 12.

Number 13 was figuring out how to pay the affiliate partners and then actually paying them. I took a little work on my part on that. And then the last one that I wrote down here as far as steps in the planning and producing the summit was to send everyone that had paid for the all access pass, the links so that they would be able to get into behind the paywall into where the bonuses and the recordings were. So they could either download them or access them, watch them, listen to the audio and access the bonuses. And there were a couple of glitches in that. It really wasn't all that bad. It worked fairly seamlessly. And I'll put a plugin for Tom Adams who is the guy that does my websites. He's really an SEO guru. His company is called Buzz Your Brand.

He put that whole website together and put all the plugins to manage all of this that I've kind of covered in terms of having a place to pay, having a sales page, having a page for the content, and then actually posting all of that. That was a high level, all the things we had to go through to get that off. And it came off pretty darn well and I learned a lot. And one of the things I really learned about was Zoom. I'm going to get that in a minute. But we could spend the rest of this show talking about the specifics of the planning. I could go into each of those and explain that. Maybe I'll do parts of that at another time if you'd like me to. But I want to shift gears then, and describe. I think I have about seven features of Zoom that I used that I didn't know about necessarily beforehand, and that were critical to doing a meeting like this.

One of the surprises to me was when it got to this point because we weren't sure we were going to use Zoom at the beginning because we weren't sure we had the type of Zoom that was able to handle something like this. We were thinking we could have up to 300 to 400 or 500 people on the free version of this. We didn't get that many. We had somewhat over 200 sign up for that. That's still a lot.

So when you have a meeting with over 200, there's certain things you've got to decide. And we did a little research and Tom and I talked. For example, do you allow people when you get to the Q&A to unmute themselves and then ask their question? And we decided no. We decided that we were going to remind people to put their questions in the chat, during let's say the last five or 10 minutes of the let's say 30 minute presentation. Because we did a 30 minute presentation, 15 to 20 minutes of Q&A. And we thought we just had to manage it that way.

I had looked at some things online from other people that have managed large meetings. They said, no, rarely would you want to have them unmute. The thing about not being unmuted. If you have 200 or 300 people in a meeting and you have more than really the speaker and the moderator unmuted, you're going to get background noise and you can never identify where it's coming from because you have so many. There's a process you should go through to make sure that nobody's unmuted. That's one thing we had to decide. We decided to do that, Q&A comes through the chat only.

I wanted to say that the advantage of using Zoom besides that we already had a version of Zoom that we could use, or I had my own version that I used. Tom has his. Most everybody in this field does have their own Zoom. But I had the most basic version of Zoom, and I did have to add an extra kind of add-on so that I could accept up to 500 people because I'd never run a meeting that had more than let's say 40 or 50 because I have done a number of webinars. Anyway, the advantage of Zoom too besides using some other platform is that everybody's familiar with it. The very few people that you ask to join your meeting will get confused about how to join a Zoom meeting.

Now, the first time you go on a Microsoft meeting or whatever their version is, or a go-to meeting or some other thing a lot of corporations use, sometimes is a little confusing. You need a special link, you need to download the software. Well, most people have been on Zoom meetings. That was another reason we wanted to use it. And I got that advice from one of the gurus in online sales and emails that I follow. And they had held a summit like this about six months ago, and they're very successful. They have very large meetings and they have decided to continue to use Zoom and to do their events live and then use the chat for the Q&A.

Some of the things though that I found out, when you are going from a moderately small or ever size meeting to a large meeting, potentially, there's certain things that you should do. That's really what I want to spend the next five minutes talking about. I would say unless you are going to be posting a meeting that has over 400 or 500 participants, unless you really need to have some sophisticated management of that meeting, maybe you want to market during the meeting, maybe you want to have different rooms. Then you would probably need to do a Zoom webinar. There's other software that I've seen, but to really just have a very large meeting, Zoom is fine.

But here's seven things that I had to change or at least learn a little bit about. Some were pretty new and some were not quite that new that I had maybe heard of but never used. But these are the seven, these are just hints. If you want to hold a large meeting and you don't want to buy some fancy software, here's what I would do. And some of these are pretty basic. Seven things to implement.

Number one, just go ahead and set the settings to automatically mute all the participants. That's it. When they come in, now I use a waiting room rather than trying to use a passcode. I've never done the experiment using the passcode. Now, according to what I'm reading in Zoom, if they come in using the link that you send them, the passcode is already incorporated into that. But I don't know, I got in the habit of using a waiting room as a way to a gateway to hold people off until it's time to start the meeting and to verify in part that's done for reasons of security by Zoom. So I left that.

But what I did was number one, make sure that the setting was, that when they came in, when they were let into the room, they were automatically muted and they could not unmute themselves. That's how it works in Zoom. Once you automatically mute at least the settings I was using, then they would have to ask, they would've to raise their hand to be unmuted, and then a moderator can then unmute them if you like. We could have had one or two ask questions during the Q&A, but it just wouldn't go quickly enough. By doing it with the chat, we just ran through them and the speaker could just answer the question and then if it needed clarification and the person could then ask a second question, it would scroll up through the chat.

And number two was since we had two pre-recorded lectures. One was because of the scheduling issue and the other was that Chelsea Turgeon was actually traveling in Europe. She was on an eight hour time difference. And so she really wanted to record hers. We hadn't planned to record any of the lectures, but we thought, "Well, better we do that."

What you do is you put the video on your desktop. So it's sitting there at the beginning, obviously it's not on, it's just sitting there. And it's in a window on your screen. Then you share your screen, you select that window with the video, and then you make sure you click the button on the bottom, the little box that says "Optimize for video clip." Now, I had forgotten to do that during one of our dry runs. Now we did at least three dry runs beforehand so I can make sure that things were recording properly, that the videos would play well. That was one of the things I played the video the first time we had a dry run and nobody could hear it.

When you click the "Optimize for video clip", it does some things to optimize the actual video file. But then it also makes sure that the sound coming from the video is shared with everybody that's on the meeting. That's number two. Make sure when you share your screen, click the button that says "Optimize for video clip" if you're going to be showing a video. That worked like a charm. We had two of those and they worked beautifully. That was great.

The other thing, it's just a tip really more than some special setting, and that was Tom and I both recorded every presentation. I've done a lot of podcast interviews, I've had a lot of meetings, I've recorded a lot, and it's been pretty consistently working. But actually I lost my connection in the middle of lecture on the third day. And so, thankfully Tom had his version, he sent it to me and it was a backup and it included the Q&A, the part that I had missed. My recorder had gone off completely and I actually had to reboot my computer and everything. So, that was the third tip I guess I would call it, is to have another person record every session if you're going to be using the recordings later, of course.

The other thing is when you're on there, you definitely need to assign someone as another moderator. It's called a co-host, I think. Every day, every hour, every minute that we were on there, I was running the meeting because it was my Zoom that we were using, we left it on for the full four hours. We didn't turn it off. And I guess meetings can go almost, I don't know if there's even a limit on them, but we did three days of four hours each. And at the end, when you close it down, all the recordings will download to a file on your desktop or in iCloud, or in the Cloud.

Anyway, Tom and I were always both co-host because that way he could look at the chat, he can manipulate the chat, he could respond to the chat. And then when he was doing his presentation, I could do the same thing. He can mute and unmute people. I could mute and unmute people. We could let people in. Both of us could let people into the meeting from the waiting room. Again, just besides both recordings, make sure you have a co-host and who's really a co-moderator.

Basically the other thing that verifies in that and ensures is that I wouldn't have had a backup, if it hadn't been for Tom being a co-host, because I don't think the recording is quite the same and they don't have the same permissions unless you're a co-host. But once you're a co-host, you can do anything the main host can do, essentially. And basically when the host goes offline, then the meeting just keeps going. When I went offline, nobody else even noticed except that they didn't see that I was participating and they couldn't see that I was on the list of participants.

If you make someone the co-host, which is kind of my fifth point, that allows them to open their slides and share their screen, which they can't otherwise. That means you should make your speaker a co-host too. When we opened the meeting before we let anybody in, I made Tom a co-host and we were both hosting at that point. And then as soon as we added the speaker, we made that speaker a co-host so that they could freely pull up their slides, run their slides, show and then close that down.

The other thing, and this is number six, this is the first time I ever used a spotlight. The spotlight is a way of assigning someone to show up at the screen. Let's say that you have 50 people on there and you can set it to gallery, you can set it to speaker, but the thing is, if anybody's unmuted and there's noise, it'll pop to that as the speaker. And so, it can switch back and forth.

And by spotlighting the moderator, at first, then you as a moderator, when you're talking and giving instructions, you'll be on the screen. Then you can spotlight the speaker who's already a moderator, and then you'll both be on the screen for everybody. Then you unspot yourself. So now you have the speaker on there, they do their 30 minute talk and 15 minute Q&A.

And the Q&A was read by Tom who was not on the spotlight. So he was just a voice. And the speaker is just on the screen answering the questions. And then as soon as the Q&A is over, then you unspotlight the moderator and take them off as a co-host and then they can stay and listen and otherwise participate. But they're no longer the focus. Then we would close and have a short break.

And then the other thing I wanted to mention, the number seven, which sometimes it was easy to forget, but this is why we had a checklist for the meeting itself. And that was the beginning of the presentations, we turned off the waiting room notification. Normally you'll recall that when you're in a Zoom meeting, let's say you're on time for the meeting, everybody else is on time except there's two or three stragglers. And then as they as the stragglers come in, you can not only see that someone's in the waiting room because you get an announcement, a visual announcement, but then you get that little ring tone or ding dong or whatever it is like a doorbell. And so, we made sure that when the meeting had actually started and somebody was speaking, even when we were introducing the speaker, we had turned off that notification.

I think you do that by going into either the chat room, or the part that says chat, or it says presenters, one of the other. I think it's chat. There is a button there at the bottom on the right, you can click it and it gives you that option of turning off the notification. Those were the seven things that I used in Zoom and let me go through them really quickly. I muted everybody. I made sure to optimize for video clip when I played those videos. Tom and I would both record videos, actually record the meeting. We had backups.

I automatically made Tom a co-host. He and I were both co-hosts from the very beginning. I made the speaker a co-host before they started speaking so they could open their slides and share their screen if needed. And then I also used the spotlight for myself or Tom or the speaker and then unspotlighted them when their turn was done. And then the last thing was turning off the notifications that someone had entered the waiting room.

Doing that made things go very smoothly and the meeting went without a hitch. Other than me getting kicked off for less than two minutes, we recorded everything. I was able to patch everything together that I needed to send it, edit it, and post it within... I could have done it probably in less than a week, but it took me about a week because of other things I was doing.

I think we met our objectives presenting the summit. We provided free and low cost options, which will help clinicians both in NewScript and outside of NewScript now and in the future through, because the recordings will continue to be made available to our customers, listeners, followers, and clients. Tom and I learned a lot while putting on this conference.

Our mentors benefited by demonstrating their authority, getting exposure to a larger audience. I think several of them had people that joined their lists and downloaded their bonuses and a few of them earned commissions as affiliate promoters. We kept the cost really low the way we did this thing and brought in some income to help support NewScript and NewScript attracted some new members, I think at least a hundred or more. I didn't count exactly, but we got a lot of new members in NewScript and my email group because I was doing my own emails as well as the NewScript emails. And so, that's what I wanted to tell you.

Now, I want to make you two offers today that are related to this topic. First, we are running a promotion for access to the summit recordings. All the recordings are loaded and all the bonuses are included. And we've even added a couple new bonuses, just lists and things that are very useful for people looking for a nonclinical career. We've added those since the summit was held since we originally loaded up the recordings. You can get all of that right now for $249 by going to nonclinicalcareersummit.com and checking that out.

Now, if you're a member of NewScript, and I talked to Tom about this today, we'll give you a 15% discount off that price. You just look in NewScripts, since you're already a member. You'll probably get a notification, but we're going to be promoting that inside NewScript for the next week or so that you'll get a 15% discount off the price, which is about the equivalent currently a four months of membership in NewScripts. It's kind of a nice bonus for NewScript members.

And if you're not a member, join now and you'll get the same 15% discount, which like I said, is worth about four months of NewScript membership at the current price, which should be $7.99 something like that. It's a little less than $8 per month.

The other thing to consider though, in this whole conversation is again, this is being released in the third week of May, basically, and in June we're raising the monthly price for NewScript.

I think it's going to be around $9 or $9.97, something like that. So it's going to go up. Another reason to A) sign up with NewScript and B) get the all access pass and the bonuses and all the recordings that we have. They're really good recordings with a lot of information there.

Now, how do you become a NewScript member? You go to newscript.app and you can sign up. But most people sign up through their iPhone. If you have a different type of phone, you can also sign up that way as well. And again, get the savings on the recordings and avoid the increased monthly price for NewScript. And then the next time we do something like this, of course, you'll be ready to go. You'll get access to the free version right away. I'm not sure when we'll do this again, it might be a year from now. But again, we're promoting this year's and there's a lot of value in those videos, I tell you. They're just fantastic.

If you'd rather not join NewScript, but you want the recordings, just go right to nonclinicalcareersummit.com, buy the all access pass for $249 and you'll be able to go through all 12 recordings or download the audio or listen to the audio and the bonuses and so forth. And hopefully that'll help you get on your path to a new career or do some other things that we mentioned and talk about during the summit, including whether to get an advanced degree, whether you should get success coaching, what you think should do to maintain your relationships while you're through a stressful situation like this. There's a lot of good stuff in there.

Anyway, it's hard to remember these things. I have the links mentioned a minute ago and links to related content at nonclinicalphysicians.com/importantzoomsettings.

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The post 7 Important Zoom Settings When Presenting Your First Summit – 301 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Behind the Scenes Look at Planning the First Nonclinical Career Summit – 294

John Jurica — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 19:23:18 +0000

The First NewScript Summit is Ready to Roll

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

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

Our Sponsor

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

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

What is NewScript?

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

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

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

What Is the Summit Agenda?

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

Below are the speakers and topics being covered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUMMARY

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

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

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

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 294

Behind the Scenes Look at Planning the First Nonclinical Career Summit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The post Behind the Scenes Look at Planning the First Nonclinical Career Summit – 294 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.