Cold Start practices have unique opportunities and challenges to face when it comes to marketing to new patients. PECAA's Marketing Business Advisor, Shelby Wade, helps us address these opportunities and challenges. 

Key Takeaways:

1. As a cold start, you have more time to focus on your business and your marketing. Don't be afraid to try new things and learn from the successes and failures.
2. Make the most of your budget. Start your marketing plan with low-cost options - social media, your website, and word of mouth marketing. Post as many updates throughout your opening process to your website and social media, well before you open. In adding, form partnerships with your business neighbors and attend community events!
3. The Five "T's" of Word of Mouth Marketing
   1. Talkers - Find the people who will talk about you
   2. Topics - Five people a reason to talk about you, your differentiator
   3. Tools - Help the message spread through your community
   4. Taking Part - Join in the conversation
   5. Track - Understand whether or not a strategy was effective. Track what they're saying and what they want. 
4. Key Marketing Milestones
   1. Designing your logo
   2. Website creation - this is where your patient experience begins
   3. Start your social media and build your Google business page
   4. Host a grand opening
5. Don't focus too much on the ROI. A lot of Cold Start marketing focuses on planting the seed for future patients. You want them talking at the beginning and to remember you when they need eye care. 

Shelby's book recommendation:

• Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz

For the eyecare industry to grow, it relies on a strong independent network of ECPs. This is why PECAA exists and why we've created the PECAA Max program. Dr. Lance Anderson helps us understand this further. 

Key Takeaways:

1. One out of every 4 eye exams occurs within a PECAA practice and 1 of every $5 spent on optical goods happens in a PECAA practice. 
2. At PECAA, we are passionate more than anything about supporting the power of independence. 
3. Great clinical patient care is great business and great, profitable business is great patient care. 
4. PECAA Max is the industry's only, monthly membership fee model that allows access to a comprehensive buying group, consolidated billing, deep alliance vendor deals, and business services and advising that helps our members grow and thrive. Consolidated billing saves at least one team member and at least 2-3 days of time at the end of each month to reconciling each vendor bill. 
5. Success goes well beyond discounts and savings. You cannot save your way to prosperity. 

On this episode, I sit down with one of the foremost experts on sales in eyecare, Robert Bell, founder of EyeCoach. In this episode, we discuss how we really should look at sales and strategies for improving the sales experience within your practice. 

Key Takeaways:

1. True sales is not persuading or convincing someone else to buy your product or service. Sales really should be seen as the process of helping someone get what they want and/or need.
2. "No" is not a bad word to hear in the sales process. The faster you can get to the "no", the easier and faster it will be to get to the solution that creates a win-win for the patient and practice. Don't let the word "no" be taken personally.
3. Stop using the word "recommend." Start using "I'm prescribing."
4. Only educate patients on the features and benefits after you've received the patient's permission and only share the features and benefits that directly connect to the patient's problems and needs.

What Robert is reading:

• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely 
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac

On today's episode, I sit down with Masoud Nafey, OD, MBA, FAAO and Khizer Khaderi, MD, MPH, founders of Monokul, to discuss the future of eye care. As more and more Gen Z'ers join the metaverse, meeting our patients where they are means having a Web 3 presence. 

Key Takeaways:

1. Performance lenswear has the potential to provide greater visual performance for patients on a more customized level.
2. The metaverse provides a new opportunity to market to and communicate with potential patients. The metaverse is the convergence of physical and virtual realities, creating a new immersive experience for individuals. Business are getting involved in order to create these experiences with their own brand.
3. As more and more individuals join the metaverse, visual experiences provide significant opportunities to meet new needs and solve new problems with our patients.
4. Virtual stores and NFTs have the potential to expand in eye care, driving greater brand loyalty and connecting a physical experience to their virtual experience. NFT's could be leveraged within a practice to more advanced, white glove services or special experiences your practice provides. 

What Khizer is reading:

• Sapiens by Yuval Harari
• The Second Mountain by David Brooks

In this episode, I sit down with Shelby Wade, HEA+PECAA's Marketing Member Business Advisor to discuss keys to a successful marketing strategy within your practice. 

Key Takeaways

1. Marketing isn't just about growing sales. It's about helping patients feel connected to your practice before they step foot and after they leave.
2. 9 Key Tasks to Marketing Success
   1. Google Advertising
   2. Social Media
   3. Email Marketing
   4. Digital Ads
   5. SEO & Keywords
   6. Youtube/ Short Video Content
   7. Blog and Online Content
   8. Events & Trunk Shows
   9. Direct Marketing
3. Four Questions to Ask About Your Marketing Plan:
   1. What is your current revenue/ gross profit for the past twelve months?
   2. What are your current demographics/ patient personas?
   3. How are you currently spending your marketing dollars?
   4. What is your max capacity of patients?

What Shelby is reading:

• Verity by Colleen Hoover

On today’s episode, I sit down with Tom O’Neill, President and CEO of Cognivue, a cognitive screening startup dramatically impacting independent ECP offices. In this episode, we discuss practice culture, people management, and preventing the effects of the Great Resignation within your practice. 

Key Takeaways

1. Creating a great culture where employees can provide feedback and have their voices heard encourages them to be more engaged in their roles. More real time feedback is desired by many of your employees.
2. Employee engagement is not just the fun and activities, but the ability to connect their work to the mission of your practice.
3. Hiring well means finding the people who are great fits for your practice. Define what a great fit looks like and use the interview to determine whether or not they are.
4. Leverage your employees in the screening and interviews. As the owner/ doctor, be the vision caster even in the interview process.
5. Compensation and benefits aren’t just salary and healthcare. You must pay well enough, but recognize what it is important to your employees and provide that as a benefit.

What Tom is reading:

• The System by Joth Ricci

Our guest today is Dr. Riley Uglum, co-author of the book The E-Myth Optometrist and business owner of Eye Care Associates of New Hampton. In this episode, Dr. Uglum shows us how to break out of the entrepreneurial myth so we can run our practices as the businesses they are. 

Key Takeaways:

1. Each business owner has within them a Technician, Manager, and Entrepreneur. Many small businesses are overrun by the Technician, leaving significant lacks in people management and entrepreneurial growth and ideation.
2. The goal of every owner should be to create a business in which they can leave for vacation without interrupting the flow of the business, patient care, or revenue flow.
3. Creating systems for each key part of the practice and hire great people to run with those systems. Delegate everything that does not require an OD license.
4. Your systems allow you to parachute in for patient care when you want and pull out to focus on the business or take time off when you want.

What Riley is reading:

• Redeeming Your Time by Jordan Raynor
• Tools of the Titans by Tim Ferriss

On this episode, Bart Foster, founder of BusinessOutside, shares his insight into how taking your business outside its four walls fosters stronger relationships, happier people, and drives greater success. Get started now!

Key Takeaways:

1. To foster happier, healthier people in your business, you need to create an environment for authentic conversations. Being outside your business and in nature helps facilitate better conversations.
2. Consider doing your one on ones as Walkie-Talkies. Taking a walk through the park, on a trail, or just around the block.
3. Get started by listening to understand, not just to respond. Utilize empathy and assume good intent. Get deeper to the emotion of how both you and your team member feels. Great questions to use:
   1. What's giving or taking energy from you now?
   2. What brings you joy?
4. 4:3:2:1
   1. Four stories
   2. Three facts
   3. Two quotes
   4. One question
5. Implement Fresh-Air Fridays (or any day of the week) when you host your weekly staff meeting. Get your team outside to discuss the strategy and needs of the business.

What Bart is reading:

• The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz

On this episode, Dr. Derrick Artis rejoins the PracticeAdvantage podcast to discuss the value of alliance groups, buying groups, and the roles they play in your business success. 

Key Takeaways

1. Buying Groups were born in the 80s as a response to retailers entering the eye care space. The broad vendor discounts and consolidated billing allowed independent eye care professionals to compete with the retailers on a different level. 
2. Alliance Groups were born in the 90s and early 2000s as a response continued change in the market. Not only did independents need volume-based discounts, but business resources, education, and more sophisticated business solutions. 
3. Now, practices are facing additional challenges from e-commerce and managed vision care. The groups of the future need to address these. 
4. In order to face the future of independent eye care practices, owners need to leverage the size and strength of a combined buying group and alliance group together. 

What Derrick is Reading:

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari
• A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade

Bryan Hoban, EVP for Member Business Advisors is back for another episode, this time focusing on Key Production Indicators and how best to leverage them in your practice as you look to 2022. 

Key Takeaways:

1. Always look at data with the goal of hearing the whole story. Numbers are only so important - the context surrounding the numbers is what is most important.
2. Tracking and following your metrics regularly allows you to make small course corrections to stay on track. Smaller, easier decisions are far simpler and less stressful than having to solve bigger problems that could have been prevented.
3. As you plan for 2022, leverage your KPI's to identify areas of weakness and opportunity for you to set next year's goals for improvement. Review them at least quarterly (ideally monthly or more frequently) to track progress. 
4. Key metrics to track:
   1. Revenue Per Patient
   2. Frame Capture Rate
   3. Other Capture Rates - Retinal Imaging, Contact Lens, Annual Supply, A/R
   4. Revenue Per Contact Lens Fit
   5. Daily CL %
   6. Sphere, Toric, MF, Specialty Breakdown
5. Do not be afraid to share KPI numbers with your team. Use the numbers to encourage their success and your practice's success.