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How This Former Wall Street Analyst Became a Multi-millionaire Selling Cookbooks with Ron Douglas

I love entrepreneurial success stories! Today I’ll be interviewing my friend Ron Douglas who found a cooking niche that was all but untapped.  And he’s not a trained chef by any means!

You’ll discover how he came up with this brilliant idea and wrote “America’s Most Wanted Recipes” which started as an eBook and became a New York Times Best Seller, selling 1.5 million copies to date.  But he didn’t just rest on his laurels – he developed an entire community around his love of cooking which brings in 7 figures annually.

And he now hosts an annual training conference called WebinarCon, the premier networking and educational event for online presentations,  which brings together the top online marketers and entrepreneurs in the industry, which has become another million dollar business for him.  Prepare to be inspired!

WebinarCon 2022 – Save $1500 with Early Bird Registration

https://www.webinarcon.com/early

Ron Douglas’ Website

https://www.rondouglas.com

Transcript:

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD. I’m super excited to have on the call. What I consider one of the OGs or involved in internet marketing back in the day. And we’ve been friends for often our many years. We would see each other at different conferences. And I said, Ron, I need to get you on.

This call because you have such an inspirational story. He’s a former wall street, financial analyst who got an MBA. And before realizing he was miserable in the corporate world. And one more time to spend with his family. He started becoming started doing entrepreneur stuff back in the late nineties, started marketing products as early as 2001.

Because he found a niche that he was really, he found a niche that people would want the information that this niche provided. And that was in the recipe arena in, into cooking. And he self published a cookbook called America’s most wanted recipes that became a New York times best seller.

Since then, he’s done such an enormous amount of things from creating information, products and courses. And now he has. A seminar, a program called webinar con we’re gonna find out more about it. That’s coming at the, in the fall of this year. So I’d like to welcome to the program. Ron Douglas, Ron, how are you doing?

Ron Douglas: Doing great. Thank you, Dr. Mike, it’s always great to be with you. Thank you.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I consider you the OGs because we go to these different conferences and we see these let’s say, younger marketers, younger millennials, and they. What I’ve found at least some of the ones that I go to is they’re not necessarily entrepreneurial they’re working for a company or, getting involved in the tech space.

And I think there’s something really maybe I’m romanticizing it a bit about, but those days when we had, we were creating products and courses and just life caution to the wind sometimes and launching the, these big projects. I want to take it back to the late nineties. We talked about it in your bio.

You were in wall street. And then tell me about how you were disenchanted by the corporate world. Because on our program, we have a lot of doctors and healthcare professionals. They’re making good money, but they’re not necessarily excited about the job. And they’re looking for other ways to generate revenue.

One of them in particular is developing your own online business. So let’s talk about it. How did you get started?

Ron Douglas: Yeah, man, the old days back in the late nineties, early two thousands, man, I missed those days too. There was no social media. There was no easy way to find customers. There was no Google.

There was no YouTube and, and we just really had each other, we had online communities like the warrior forum and we had places where our audience would hang out and we’d be able to tap into those audiences. But the good thing, like traffic was a lot cheap. Back then. And then you had people that had traffic already that you could get to be affiliates of yours and promote your product.

And it’s just a matter, it was just a matter of finding a product that sold, but the numbers back then were a lot less. Like I look at the the NBA. I know you’re a fellow NBA fan. You look at some of the salaries that these players are getting in 50 million a year to, come off the bench seems to miss a lot of shot Russell, Westbrook’s getting 47 million and he can’t, he’s shooting 18% from three.

So it’s like Westbrook . Yeah. Westbrook. Yeah. You don’t let him hear you say that. So it’s… the numbers like back then, we were just trying to get… if we can get just $10,000 a month, like I remember Jeff Walker, his claim, the fame he’s like known for the product launch formula. But prior to that, his claim, the fame was, he was Jeff six and seven.

So he had did six figures and seven days, and that blew everybody away. And that was his kind of tagline. So the numbers were a lot less the opportunity was a lot less and than it is now. So someone getting in the game now. You have a huge opportunity and it’s easy to find your marketplace. They’re all hanging out on Facebook or on, on YouTube or on Twitter or on these different places.

So you could target right into that marketplace. There’s so many communities and so many people, the opportunities are so much bigger now, but yeah, I got started, I was started out just selling. How to make money online products. And I wasn’t really making a whole lot of money online and that didn’t work out too well.

So I was really looking for something. I was an affiliate on this network called Click Bank. Click Bank is a marketplace where you could find different products to promote, or you could list your product for sale and affiliates that want to promote, wanna find a product to promote, can find you and get what’s called an affiliate link.

Where they can get a commission for promoting your product. And it’s mostly digital products on there, some supplements, but some of these products are doing $40,000 a day. Like these guys are a huge billion dollar network. So I was a click bank affiliate promoting other people’s products. And I was just looking for something to promote.

So I was interested in cooking. So I was like, what can I promote outside of make money online? What can I do? So I did some research and I started to find out that people were always looking for these recipes for their favorite restaurant dishes, like chain restaurants, the popular ones, red lobster, olive garden, cheesecake factory, KFC, all these places.

And then I started doing additional research and a lot of people had published their version of different recipes. And then I did even more research and I found that there’s no real copy. On recipes. You could take, literally take a recipe, try it out, change, switch up some ingredients, and then it becomes your recipe or change the wording.

And, as long as you, you could put your own spin on it and not use someone’s word for word recipe, then recipe is no copyright. So started doing research and I said, okay, this will be a great little niche to create a little ebook about and sell it on ClickBank. And that’s what I did. And I was working at JP Morgan chase at the time.

And one day I just logged in and then it was like, looked at my email account. It was like sale sell. I’m like, oh my God, people are buying this thing. And it was awful. It was… Mike. When I tell you it was awful, it was God awful. It had the sales page had Microsoft clip art on it. As graphics, it was done in front page.

The ebook cover looked real like ghetto the whole thing. And I had no idea, but I was charging $20 for this thing. And people were buying it because it was the angle. It was the offer. People wanted to know how to make secret restaurant recipes. And I had a book with 19 recipes in it for 20 books and it just started selling and then other sites were promoting.

Sending me traffic and I was getting sales and I’m like, wow, I’m onto something. A light bulb went off. And I just started focusing on my time on building that up. I create turned it into a real self-published cookbook, started selling it on Amazon, added like a hundred recipes to it and, hired some outside chefs, to come in.

I started building an email list off of that, built this big community. And by 2004, I was making more from that than I was making from my job. And then I start now, I was always like heavy networking with different marketers, trying to learn what they were doing. And then Tom bill, a fellow friend of ours, he exposed me to the idea that he put the seed.

He planted the seed to say, this is much bigger. And little eBooks on ClickBank are selling this on Amazon. You can actually get some, get publicity from this. At the time he was working with Jim Kelly, the former football player, and he was helping him get marketing and publicity and stuff.

And he told me that and light bulb went off and I’m like, wow. So I hired a publicist. The publicist went out, the publicist introduced me to a literary agent, ended up getting my first. TV interview on Fox business. And this was in 2000. I remember that. Yeah, 2008. And they ran with the story former wall street guy.

By that time I got laid off. I got laid off in 2007, I guess they figured out I had another gig or whatever. And they said former wall street guy leaves his job on wall street to pursue his passion of cooking. And I wasn’t a cook or anything. I was a, just an online,

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I was gonna ask you what you’re passionate about.

Ron Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. So I had started taking cooking lessons just so I wouldn’t embarrass myself on television. So I got that TV interview and we parlayed that into a book proposal. I hire a literary agent, ended up getting a book deal with Simon and shoes to do two books, six figure advance from that. And long story short that took off, I’ve done six books with Simon Schuster got two more book deals from them.

And collectively we sold over 1.5 million copies. Of that wow. Book series. And then from there, naturally people wanted to know like, how did you do this? So I started actually teaching what I did, teaching people how to self-publish teaching people how to get publicity, teaching people, how to build an audience online.

And then I started doing webinars and actually made more teaching what I know and coaching people than from actually doing it. And I made, a lot of money doing, I still get royalty checks from that. So that’s the short version of long story.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I love that. One thing you mentioned is you weren’t a cook. You were. Passionate about it. So how did you how did you get your first recipes? Were you, did you find stuff online and then had your own take on it? Were you experimenting at home and try to figure out the Colonel Sanders secrets?

Ron Douglas: Yeah, the Colonel Sanders one really took off. Yeah. That was the one I spent the most time on.

I had bunch of different versions of it and. As I mentioned, people were researching these and publishing their results online and these like little message boards and whatnot. So I would just take their results as a base and then say, okay, maybe it needs more of this, less of that.

Me and my wife were just in the kitchen doing that, but not all the recipes we did, we’ve published hundreds of recipes. So not all of them were that process. Some of them would just, research and having some chefs help us out test it out for us and things like that.

When you decided to… You had a conversation with Tom, be I’m curious as to how you decided to go legit because back in the day, I came from the Frank Kern school of creating these little niches. I created these eBooks and a whole bunch of different markets specif specifically in the dog training area.

But I never went and even thought about, going on Fox Business or CNN or wherever, what made you decide? Was it just that one conversation with Tom or did you feel that, You legitimize what you were doing in some way what triggered it? Because most people wouldn’t take it to that arena.

Yeah. Yeah. I was also at that event, I was friends with Mike and he introduced me to his publicist and the publicist was the one that convinced me, like I can get cuz he had, a lot of connections in New York city. I was living in on long island at the time and he convinced me like the media would love this story.

So I just took a blind leap of faith, paid him, let him do his thing. And he started giving me all these interviews. So just a matter of knowing it was possible. And then when the opportunity arose saying yes to it, and then just, sometimes when you’re ex in the room with people doing things that you want to do, opportunities like that come up and it just expands your mind.

That’s why I do my own events now. Like people come to my events. Find different opportunities and make deals and their mind get exp expand minds, get expanded to what’s possible and just creates an environment where, forest is a certain amount of success afterwards. So someone who’s listening to this program, they’re saying, Hey, that sounds great, Ron you stumbled onto a niche.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: You were lucky because you found them something that’s untapped and today there’s so many niches that, that are already exhausted and they’re already being fulfilled. What would you say to someone like that?

Ron Douglas: I would say that you’re not really understanding how big the marketplace is and how big the opportunity is.

They’re a lot of niches, but they’re not, it can’t be enough sellers to saturate it. Cause here’s the thing, if you say you want, you’re an expert in something, and you’re looking at all these other experts and they’re selling their products. Once you start putting your expertise out there, first of all, there are a lot of people that never seen those guys or just didn’t, they didn’t resonate with those folks, but they might like you and your personality and like your, what you’re offering and you’re offering how you’re positioning things in your brand.

So you could build your own tribe of people that are connected. With you no matter who else is out there selling, and it’s never enough sellers to fulfill this huge trend of people, looking for online education, looking for products, looking for an expert to help them achieve their goals, looking for solutions to their problems.

So the other thing I would say is most people are afraid to put their product out there, put themselves out there, put their information out there to stake their claim as an expert in something. So that just gives you an advantage. If it’s wide open, if you’re willing to do it because most people won’t, right.

It creates a natural barrier of entry for people doing that. So if you really believe, and really I got someone once told me, like you, if you have something that can help people. Every day that you don’t put it out, you’re being selfish. You owe it to those people to offer that help, to put your stuff out there, to make a difference in people’s lives.

If you genuinely have a solution that can help people. So it’s the way I look at it and it’s just, put it out there and the people that like you will like you and buy your products!

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And like it yourself. I like to say if you. If you wanna go into this niche, you should be comfortable getting on stage, and talking about that niche, and then you took it to the nth degree you got on, for millions of people can see you, but even then you had some kind of reservations. You said you took some cooking lessons why don’t you you expand on that? Yeah. Yeah.

Ron Douglas: Yeah. They told me I had a live cooking demonstration on Wendy Williams. Yeah. and I was like, oh my God, I’m gonna get embarrassed if I don’t have my stuff together. So I just, prepared. I had the opportunity. I said yes, but I made sure I prepared for it, by taking some cooking lessons by practicing ahead of time, things like that. So you don’t wanna just go in there blind, you wanna say yes, but give yourself an opportunity to prepare.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So tell me, what’s a typical day. You don’t have you don’t working for anybody else.

You’re your own boss? Sometimes I hate my boss because I love my boss. Cause I’m my own boss. How does that work for you? And you had mentioned that this business help put your kids through college and living the lifestyle that you’re leading.

Ron Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. Typical day is I usually generally work from maybe 8 to about 3 or 4. And I just try to focus on working, offer a to-do list of things I need to get done. I have several different companies going on. One is a startup right now that I’m trying to get off the ground.

So that’s taking up some of my time. Another one is the webinar con event. Where I mentioned alluded to earlier where all the webinar people come and that, that really heats up as we get closer to the event, date November, but right now we’re selling sponsorships. So I have my partners on that and, it takes a certain amount of discipline and you really have to be focused on, setting a goal and saying, I’m gonna take these steps to get it.

I’m gonna work through this checklist. I usually try to make a checklist the night before of what I want to get done. I try to knock it out and then I go reward myself. I go for a run or I go to the gym or go get some food or go get, hang out with my wife or something like that. But it’s a lot different than working in a corporate type of environment or working in a nine to five where, you have that accountability there, like having your own boss, you have to be accountable to yourself.

So I’m also, I have some assistants that work with me and I’m always Making sure that I have them doing something. So I’m not just paying them for nothing. So that keeps me, with something on the, to do list that needs to get done as well.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I’ve been there and done that with an assistant. So they’re like, okay, now what else can I get her to do? \

Ron Douglas: And having partners works too, like having partners that you keep each other accountable and focused on certain. And I like what I do. It’s just, it’s fun. I’m building stuff. I’m my own boss.

And, it’s a fun thing. It’s like kind of building a Treehouse, when you’re building a Treehouse, you’re not really counting the hours, you’re just looking at it. And at the end of it, you see this thing you created and it’s just a good feeling. So I do that over and over again.

I’m building, treehouses, I’m building, different products. I’m doing online events, like summits and different things like that. So it. It’s, it’s always something new and exciting and webinars too. Give me a certain amount of, doing a webinar online, having an audience that’s there to listen to you and being able to give value and sell something right in front of that audience, where they vote, they vote to say, I like you, they vote with their wallets, right? At the end of that presentation, you see a bunch of people buying and, it feels great to be able to just create something out of thin air, like create an information product just off of the knowledge that you have and record videos and put it in a members area and selling people, access, selling logins to it.

And then they like your presentation and like what you’re selling and see how it can help. See, they see how it can help them. And then they buy. It’s wow that worked. I just created something from nothing. So it’s a good feeling always to do.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So let’s talk about a webinar as a sales tool. I’ve been involved in business for a long time. We’re using webinars, at the beginning early, I would say, 2008, 2009, 2010 doing really well with webinars and then. My perception or maybe other perceptions, other people’s perception, webinars was dead. People say you can no long lo longer do them. What is the status of webinars today?

Obviously you have an event called Webinar Concierge. You’re obviously, still feel that it’s an important tool. Talk about that.

Ron Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. The people that were saying webinars were dead, were doing webinars over and over again, and more and more webinars were coming on the market being presented to the same people.

So we’re people were still making money with it, but not as much money as before cuz these folks, the same little pocket of customers were getting saturated with seeing the same type of sales presentations. And originally they thought a webinar was gonna be this. Where they were gonna learn X, Y, Z.

And it was gonna be transformative and all that stuff. And then they were like all of these webinars, they’re teaching a little bit, but then they’re pitching their offers. So that audience got jaded, but the Internet’s a big place, and there’s people out there now, like webinars are still doing well because there’s people out there like my partner with webinar called Onyx, Andal just bringing new blood into the marketplace, running a tremendous amount of ads, mass market, just bringing new people in.

So there’s more people than ever. And, webinar is just a meeting room, a online meeting room. So people saying webinars are dead. That would be just like saying, selling from the stage is dead. Like it’s not, it’s just a tool for delivering your message and your offer.

It’s nothing more than that. So a webinar can never be dead. Webinar is just a tool to get people in a room to listen to you. What’s always gonna be alive, is The message that the people that you’re targeting the offer, how you can help people, people are still buying information products like the e-learning market.

For instance, I think it’s already a scheduled to be a billion dollar a day market. So it’s huge out there. So I don’t think webinar is a debtor. I don’t think they can be dead. It’s just a matter. What are you selling? How are you positioning it? How you are you actually helping people and do people have a good experience on your webinar if they do they’ll come back.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So you’ve got webinar con coming in November. Tell us what was the Genesis of this this seminar and what can we hope to expect if we would like to attend to this.

Ron Douglas: Yeah. So webinar con actually bought the domain webinar con.com in 2017 and sat on the idea. I was becoming a webinar expert that was like my wheelhouse doing webinars.

And webinars were an easy way to get people to promote you, right? Because people are willing to promote a presentation because they can position it to their audiences, not just another sales pitch. This is a presentation with these experts coming on to teach you X, Y, Z. So it’s much easier to get someone to promote your webinar usually than to say, just send your customers to my sales page and, we’ll make money that way.

So it’s webinars a scene still seeing as a content event, if you do it right. And if you market it… that was one of my things. I would get people to promote my webinar and I would give them a commission and I became good at doing that. And I would take some of that money reinvested into ads, YouTube ads, Facebook ads, and, I had, what’s called an evergreen webinar that would play just in time, every 15 or 30 minutes, and people could watch the on-dem presentation.

And that was like my sales system that was going on and I got pretty good at. And I started teaching people how to do it, started doing like little mastermind events. So we would piggyback off of other events, like the big event in San Diego, Traffic And Conversion summit, their event would be like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

We would come in, do a weekend prior to that, like the weekend before and have our mastermind event because we knew a lot of people were gonna be there and they could come to our mastermind event. So we would piggyback off of big events and do it that way. And I was teaching webinars and traffic. And then they made a post one day. He has this big thing called the learn center in Maryland 26,000 square foot facility where I’ve been there. yeah, but in an event room it’s huge. He could fit like 125 people in this event room. So he made a post saying that asking if anyone wanted to rent out his event room.

To do an event. And I was just getting no on it, getting in good with him. And I said, sure, I’d love to do an event there. And he’s what kind of event? And I was like I do these masterminds, weekend masterminds, teaching people, webinars. He’s oh, I love webinars. I made a lot of money with webinars, you.

And he said Andy has song also approached me with that potential idea of doing a webinar. And Andy was brokering webinars. So he was the guy that would match people up. Like you promote his webinar, he’ll promote your webinar. You both make money. I’ll take, he takes a commission, like a referral fee from both sides.

So usually 10% from both sides. So that was his business. So I approached Andy and I was friends with Andy because he had brokered a few of my webinars and I said, Hey, you wanna partner up and do this. He was like, sure. Let’s do it. So we approached on with the idea. How much is it two nights at your place?

Two days he was like… 25 grand or something like, whoa, dude. so it was more than we were looking to pay. So we were like, we’re all friends here, but honestly that was more than we were looking to pay. He was like here’s what I’ll do. I like it so much. I’ll partner with you guys on it.

And that became, and I was like let’s name it… webinarcon already have the domain. And they loved it. And that became the first webinar con. So we were able to do that event six days before the building shut down, like literally 20, 26 days before the building shut down for the pandemic. And we squeezed it in and it was a great success.

We had a whole lot of cause. The topic of webinars, it attracts high level people. Because most people, like I mentioned are afraid to put the, put themselves out there to speak to a group of people, to come on a webinar and present, or to speak from a stage it’s like a huge fear that people have.

But the people that do that are usually high level people. So we started getting all these high level people signing up for webinar con. They came to the event and it became the event for webinar marketers and the event that you go to, where there’s all high level people like you don’t have to, worry about.

Finding the people you wanna talk to, they’re all there for you. And they’re all interested in doing deals and webinars and topics. And we have great speakers. It’s no, it’s a no pitch event, just all content. And it’s a $5,000 event, but we have people that come there and make deals and product launches off of those deals.

And, make Joel Peterson’s a fellow friend of. You can ask Joel, he’s like literally made a million over a million dollars off of the people that the contacts he met at webinar con we have several stories like that. And we have scores of people that have made hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There’s people that are making more off the event than we do. And it feels good to bring them together like that. So that’s webinar con it’s an event where you learn about webinars. It’s an event where we have some facilitated networking components to it, where we can match you up with the people you want to meet.

You can do deals. If you’re an agency, you run an agency like an ad agency, you can come find clients, different things like that. So everybody has a benefit from it and it makes the, amount that they pay for the ticket. And it’s all, it’s a small event. It’s like a hundred to 150. We’re respecting 150 people this year.

We keep it intimate and we keep it just high level people.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And what are the dates and where do they go and find out more information.

Ron Douglas: It’s November 18th through the 20th. If you’re watching this, I don’t know when you’ll be watching this, but right now we actually have an early bird page set up. If you go to webinarcon.com, you can just put your name on the waiting list, but if you want to get the early bird offer, it’s actually $1,500 off. You can go to webinarcon.com and you could see all the details and get your early bird ticket for $1,500 off.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: That’s obviously it sounds like it’s great. It’s for it’s for high end marketers, right? Is that would be the best candidate for someone to come like this.

Ron Douglas: Yeah.High end marketers, anyone, looking to learn webinars on a high level, like we’re just looking for high level people. You don’t necessarily have to be a marketer.

You could actually find someone there that’s a marketer that maybe you wanna partner with to do your marketing. There’s people like that, agencies like that there, just someone that just looking to get themselves out there to reach a market of people to build their tribe, to, help people on a higher level.

People that are professionals would be great, have something to share. We don’t frown on anybody, but those are the type of people that usually come to webinar.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And do you have to be a Celtic fan or a Laker fan? .

Ron Douglas: You gotta be a Knicks fan that narrows a like thousand unfortunate people.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: That’s wonderful. Thanks Ron. Again also, you’ve got your website too. Ron douglas.com, where they can find out more information about your courses. You do a lot in terms of tell me about other stuff that you teach. You. You talk a lot about information products, correct?

Ron Douglas: Yeah. Yeah. We teach how to do online courses, how to put that together.

That’s like we do these private trainings for that. If anybody’s interested, you could reach out to me. We do coaching for that as well. I’m actually rolling out a new program called course agents. So course agents is gonna be the call center for people who sell courses. So we’re gonna have people that do live chat, people that pick up the phone and take orders right over the phone.

Most people. Or just selling online and missing out on a huge opportunity. Cuz some folks just wanna talk to somebody over the phone and some folks that they see a phone number and it legitimizes what you’re doing. So we’re offering these type of call center and VA services specifically for the course market at the course agents that’s actually launching in another two weeks or so.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So I’m looking forward to that. All right. You’re here to hear first. Thanks Ron. I know you’re busy. You got lot of. Lot of lot of businesses. You gotta ride lot of fingers in lots of different jars. Thank you again. Is there any last minute thoughts before we end the call?

Ron Douglas: I just wanna say thank you. And guys watching this, you should be encouraged. You guys are following Dr. Mike, this guy’s a legend. I know he is very humble, but Mike, Dr. Mike was one of the people I followed when I first got started. He was one of the big gurus. And he’s found his niche with you guys now and helping you guys.

So you guys are doing the right thing and just stick with it. The market is huge. It’s bigger than you think it is. And if you want to get involved just one step at a time. If you put three things on a list and knock those things out every day, that’s 90 things done every month and you’re on your way.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Ron, thank you so much. Thanks everybody for listening. As Ron says, you have ups and downs as an entrepreneur, you’ll have great days and you’ll have kind of sucky days, but as long as you do something, get your goals accomplished and keep moving forward.

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How This Doctor Developed a Six Figure Coaching Practice By Solving a Common Problem with Junaid Niazi, MD

Many doctors want to get started in coaching but feels they’re not ready, or its more of a labor of love and it won’t generate enough income.  Not the case with this doctor!

Dr. Junaid Niazi is a board-certified internist and pediatrician who stumbled onto a niche which wasn’t being met:  Helping doctors become more productive in their charting.  You’ll learn his journey and how he regularly sells out his group coaching program called Charting Conquered that helps physicians complete their charting at work and to date has helped over 100 physicians reclaim their time at home for themselves.  

Dr. Niazi is also a physician life coach and an entrepreneur via his business Prosperous Life MD, where he blogs and coaches physicians on all things wellness, productivity, finances, and careers.  This was a fun interview and I think you’ll get a lot out of it!

Dr. Junaid Niazi’s website – Prosperous Life MD
https://wwww.prosperouslifemd.com

Dr. Junaid Niazi’s Physician Coaches Profile:
https://www.physiciancoaches.com/coaching-category/junaid-niazi

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Transcript:

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another addition of Bootstrap MD. I have been hunting this band for the last, I would say three to six months. And I finally got him on the program and someone I wanted to interview for quite some time. I have a site called Physician Coaches.com, and he is part of the of the Physician Coaches program. I’ve been able to work with him and I his coaching business his grown leaps and bounds. He’s a board certified internist and pediatrician who works as a primary care physician for a large healthcare organization in the upper Midwest. He part of his time, he spent as an information services, medical director, we’re on optimizing the electronic medical record.

And we’ll see why that’s important as we talk about what his expertise is. He does this to help for patient care. And for physicians did his undergrad at rice university, me school at Baylor and residency at the University of Minnesota. He’s married to a pediatrician and has two rambunctious toddlers in addition to those roles, which I think you’ll get me very interested in.

He’s a physician life coach and an entrepreneur. Via his business, The Prosperous Life MD, where he blogs and coaches, physicians on all things of wellness, productivity, finances, and careers, but you may know him best because he has a group coaching program called charting conquer that helps physicians complete their charting at work.

And to date has helped over a hundred doctors reclaim their time at home for themselves. So I like to welcome to the program, Dr. Junaid Niazi. Junaid, how you doing my friend?

Junaid Niazi MD: I’m doing very well, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Thanks. Thanks. It’s summertime right now at the time of recording in Minneapolis is where you’re from.

Junaid Niazi MD: Yep.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I’ve been there a few times, but surprisingly it gets a little hot in humid, right?

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah, it is. It has been high eighties to low triple digits at times. And the humidity has been killing us the last couple of weeks.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, but then in a few months you’ll all go underground and we don’t see it for the next several months, right?

Yes. Yes. We hibernate. We hibernate.

So Junaid, it’s true. I’ve been hunting you down because you’ve got a great story that I think could be very inspirational. You’ve been very successful. I’ve seen, and it, maybe we can talk about, what you’re doing and what learned to look like it’s up to you, but first of all you, you graduated you became an internist and you got involved in the system. What led you to think about other sources of income or other career choices? What led you down that path?

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah, no great question. So during residency I got caught up with the physician finance blog sphere and, the one of the big things that came out of that was the financial independence retire early movement.

I just figured I’ll make a good income as a physician even if in primary care. And as long as I do, if I’m wise with my money and do the right things, I’ll be able to retire earlier and be able to, do all the things that I want to do, but it became pretty apparent after I finished my training and got into the real world and my first attending job.

I was starting to burn out and mostly from the systems issues involving medicine cuz as we’re gonna touch upon a little bit later, I figured out the charting and clinic workflow stuff. So that wasn’t necessarily burning me out. It was all those other things, all the other barriers to being able to care for the patient in front of me, be it insurance companies or pharmacy benefit managers or any number of third party intermediaries. And that was starting to wear on me and was very draining. I started questioning the length of duration of a career in practicing medicine, full time. Now thankfully I was able to offset part of it pretty early on with a role in my, within my organization as one of the outpatient what are called information services, medical directors, as you mentioned in, in the intro.

And basically we use that at my organization and we try to help make epic work a little better for end users, including physicians as well as drive better, safer patient care. Now I men, I referenced the physician financial blogosphere, a couple of key folks there, namely Dr. Peter Kim, and Dr. Bonnie who really started talking a lot about mindset and coaching and that kind of, peaked my interest. And I started looking into that a little bit more. I subsequently stumbled across the life coach school podcast by a coach Brooke Castillo. And I started to undertake some self coaching.

And what that means is you’re really trying to write down your, what your thoughts are in that moment and start to see. There are things that I’m writing down that I’m not actively bringing into my mind and reflecting on. And why is that? And a lot of our thoughts are automatic…

and a lot of our automatic thoughts that happen in the background are negatively tinged. Our brains are very negatively oriented, unfortunately. I was working on this, trying to pull these negative thoughts, pull these other thoughts and the underlying principle here.

Your thoughts end up creating your results. And if you’re having all these negative thoughts, it might be hindering you from creating the results you want in life or living the life that you want. I had some limited success with self coaching, but I was sold on the idea. And then this was early 2020, and then, COVID pandemic struck.

And I started hearing about Physician Coaches. That’s around the time I learned about you I learned about Dr. Sunny Smith. And I actually was able to join her group coaching program through, through another venue. It’s four women physicians. She let two guys in that summer. I was one of those.

And in the setting of being coached by physician coaches, surrounded by peers, that transformation of mine ex exploded. And what was really striking to me was that I felt so much better. Nothing had really changed in my life. But at that point in time, I was still feeling so much better.

And mind you, this was mid 2020. So we’re talking, we’re still in the early throes of the pandemic. Lots of uncertainty. My wife and I didn’t know if we would have jobs or month to month. We were seeing a lot of physicians lose their jobs. George Floyd was murdered about 10 blocks away from where we live. There was civil unrest. There was the government response, the civil unrest unfolding around us and to boot we had a baby in the mid midst of all that as well, or baby number two. And despite all that going on, I was doing okay and probably better than I was doing at the beginning of 2020.

So the only explanation I had is this coaching stuff is working. For me having gone through that group coaching program with Dr. Sunny Smith, I thought the next best step was to actually train as a coach. And that was again, really mostly for myself. I figured I would best learn the tools if I did the training, I could apply those to myself and yeah, I might do something with that later on, but.

As I went through the training there’s there were a lot of physicians joining me in the training. And, I’d always had a little bit of a entrepreneurial itch. You may recall in sometime in 2020, you and I had corresponded a little bit about me working as a I think it was a personal finance coach in some capacity.

And you were just trying, I remember you were challenging with some really good questions about how would I differentiate myself and things like that, which I, I actually really appreciate it at the time. And, as I was watching my colleagues get transformed by this and I was too, I was like, man, I really need to bring coaching to my colleagues, cuz this is like a burnout busting tool.

And there are very limited resources and tools for actually combating burnout. Save, time away from your, no, from the noxious stimuli that are driving your brain. Yeah. That’s what really drove me to go get certified through the life coach school.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, so interesting. You didn’t really, you just did this for yourself.

Sounds and when did you start thinking? Maybe I can create, a revenue source from this.

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah. It, it was. Sh shortly after I had started the coach training, cuz part of the, you do the initial part of coach training is learning all the tools, practicing it regularly. And the second half you can go into a track which focuses on how can you.

Build a business around it. So when we had to start selecting our tracks, I was like, oh yeah, maybe I could consider doing this. Especially if I think this is a useful thing to to bring to my colleagues. In, in the late or fall of 2020, I, Filed the paperwork, got a business checking account, did all the things I had to do and launched a prosperous life MD to silence, cuz I hadn’t done any marketing or anything, but I had a website.

So I had my little corner of the internet staked out.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Okay. So let’s talk about it. You got the website in, you’re all excited. You got probably your business entity, all that set up, you’re probably set up like your PayPal or your all that and nothing. So then what did what did you do.

Junaid Niazi MD: I probably cursed Kevin Costner under my breath because I built it and they did not in fact build a dream no I’d been interfacing again with a lot of these other coaches. We were all just really excited that we had found this tool. We were doing this work. You’re probably familiar with Dr.

Jimmy Turner. Sure physician philosopher. So he was launching his alpha coaching experience which is a physician coaching program it’s still going on actually. And he tapped me to be one of the one-on-one coaches for that. So that was my first sort of paid coaching experience. And it was through working.

With his clients and, doing some one-on-ones, but also mostly on the group coaching calls. I noticed I kept chiming in every time there was something about charting or a clinic workflow. And Jimmy actually called me out and said, you know what, Jane, you just need to do a presentation to our group.

Run a little workshop on charting efficiency. So I said, oh, okay. And that’s where my niche came from. Sometimes others can see what we’re good at. When we might not be able to recognize that as something that we can offer to others. I did that workshop the folks that attended that, some of them had some great outcomes from that.

There was a transplant and nephrologist through the next day shaved four hours off for Workday and was like, emailed me just ecstatic. And I was like, oh man maybe this is something I could do for others.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now, this is very fascinating. So you worked with Jimmy and sounds like a paid relationship, but also probably a mentor mentee relationship to some extent You were talking a lot about charting.

Now there’s some people who will say, I would like to do something like that. I need to get some credentialing or maybe I need to work for Epic for five years. What kind of background did you have that you felt that you could adequately teach on the subject?

Junaid Niazi MD: Honestly, it was just on the ground, in the trenches charting as a care physician. That was it. My, my role as a information services, medical director sounds very formal. And I get to do some really cool work, get to see how some of the things, how some of the decisions are made from epic and how organizations implement epic.

But, even having not had that experience, I had figured. The workflows and the efficiencies that I’ve done. And obviously mine are shaped by the fact I work at an organization that uses epic a lot of it are just, is just common sense skills and, working within a team, learning to delegate things like that, that are really EHR agnostic.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And the reason why I brought that up, because as is I work with coaches is that’s is often one of their stopping points. They’ll say, I can coach, but I just don’t feel ready enough. Either I need to spend, years in getting some type of certification or I need to study all the 10 top EMRs and go through their system.

And then when you find out they never launched a business. So what was that within you? There must have been something within you. Just say, you know what, I’m just gonna do it. And I’m just gonna, did you charge money at the beginning? Did you wait to see if you could get some testimonials and do some free work?

How did how did you set that up?

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah. I did charge money from the beginning. I launched a beta program prior to that. I’d been releasing weekly content twice a week. I would do a blog post and then I would do a weekly update and I still I’m in people’s inboxes twice a week still, so that consistency helped.

But, I there’s a quote that Brooke Castillo the master coach under whom I trained has that says discomfort is the currency of your dreams. And it’s really stepping into that discomfort, knowing you don’t have all the answers, you don’t know how to do it. But you will figure it out.

And if you’re willing to sit with that discomfort, go through trial and tribulation on the other side of. Is something potentially amazing. And, I hear the same thing from physicians as well. Like we’re so concerned that we need to have some formal degree or credential. I know this comes up for you a lot when you’re talking to others, should I get an MBA?

Should I, if I wanna be an administrator or things like that. And I think we’re just trained to get degrees we’re like degree farming. Machines will. If there’s something else we can add after our name, we will do it. But for entrepreneurship, that’s by definition, the name of the game is, there is no necessar necessarily a there’s no manual for this.

It’s just, you go out we are inherently problem solvers and often the same thinking. That led to the problem is not gonna solve it. So we have to think a little bit out of the box. So I just said, you know what, I’m gonna offer this program. I’m gonna throw up some Facebook ads and we’ll see.

And, I think I had a niche that really hit a pain point and in some degrees, Or to some degree, I should say. I think if you can identify a pain point, speak to that pain point, sincerely, since I was again in the trenches and offer a solution and I’d offered a lot of blog post free advice, things like that previously.

So I think I’d established myself as an authority is why I was able to succeed after the beta launch that I did. I got testimonials, I got some raving fans who were able to spread the word. And then, on, on subsequent launches, there’s, there’ve been people who’ve been waiting for me to open the doors again.

So it’s, you just gotta take that first step. And that’s what I would say to all those people who say I’m not quite ready. When will you be ready? Because you’re the only one standing in the way of your own success. So let’s talk about it. So you did one on one coaching through Jimmy is that correct? Or was it also group coaching as one on one. Yeah.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: One on one. Okay. Now for your charting course did you, do, did you just go straight to doing a group coaching or did you do some one on one first?

Junaid Niazi MD: I had a couple of one-on-one clients. That were mine not through the alpha coaching program.

And then I launched the group coaching program and now, I have a handful of one on one clients. Some of them are legacy clients. Otherwise. Just time constraints. It’s the group coaching.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So why did you prefer to do that? You mentioned time constraints. What else did you lend yourself to doing a group coaching or maybe there’s something in charting that it, maybe it is best taught as a group?

Junaid Niazi MD: One thing I came to notice in a lot of my clients was the, the shame they had, that they were struggling with charting and that what it meant about them as a physician and as a person. And one thing that I thought might be a good way to combat that is just to show them there’s others that are in your are in the same boat.

They’re in the same, they’re in the same shoes. And honestly, still to date, even, on my most recent call last week. People are like, I can’t believe others are going through this. This is exactly me. It’s just so validating that others are struggling with this. And I think, especially if you’re struggling with charting and you’re putting all those extra hours into work, you’re even, you’re probably even more isolated than someone who finishes their work on time or in a more timely fashion.

And so you think there’s something inherently wrong with you and just seeing that there’s other physicians in a group setting. In which you can participate as much or as little as you want, it’s on a zoom webinar style, so you can remain hidden in the back and not say a peep and still benefit from seeing others get coached.

You can pipe up in the chatter, you can come on and be coached. And I think just that, that shared experience of there’s not something wrong with me. There might be some systems issues at play. Is incredibly validating to a lot of physicians. So tested that with the group coaching initially right out of the gate.

And it I think it’s one of the, one of the best aspects of it to be honest.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So let’s talk about charting for a bit and the importance of being efficient in your charting. For someone who struggles with this, when you were looking to, just to create a program, where do doctors go for this? What did you find any other competitors or other solutions? What else was, is out there?

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah. I think if you go looking if you looked a couple of years ago, I think all you would’ve found were maybe some resources on coding specifically and things like that. And maybe there might have been some practice development folks out there more, more like consultants as far as folks who have started exploring this in terms of coaching, I know there’s a coach who trained through.

Through the life coach school who she’s Canadian and she has a program in Canada that also serves a lot of us based physicians. There’s I think Dr. Phil Boucher, I dunno if know him , he’s a pediatrician in Nebraska. He has a clinic work for workflow type program.

And then there’s a couple others coming through the pipeline that I know of that are interested in launching similar programs because none of us are gonna be able to help. All the physicians out there that need help. We all have our own unique styles and personalities. And, for physicians to have some options is only a good thing.

I think.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Oh, that’s actually pretty commendable for you. Most people wouldn’t tell you about possible competition. That’s coming out and I love that you’ve got that feeling of abundance, but so let’s so let’s talk about it. We’ve got people on the call or, gonna be watching or listening this who are, maybe wanna be a coach or are a coach.

And, we touched on how many people you’ve trained. Maybe you could share some of the numbers. How many times have you, you run… let’s talk about what the course is called, Charting Concord. It’s a how long is it? And Yeah.

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah. It’s all online. Every iteration of the program’s a little different. It started out as an eight week program. And then just based on feedback, I was able to get that down to six weeks. And it used to be, you got coaching during those six weeks. As of this last launch just a couple of weeks ago.

It’s gonna be an ongoing coaching program. Most weeks of the year we have weekly, a weekly group coaching call. So it’s not time limited and that’ll be ongoing access. And there’s six core modules that are released weekly from when you join that, that cover coaching aspects of things, as well as some practical workflows.

And then, send everybody a nice workbook, so they don’t have to print off my apparently printer destroying worksheets here in ink destroying, I should say. Just so people have something tangible they can use and a reference. And, it’s set up through an online portal that’s password protected. They have access to all of that. They can listen to it when they’re driving. Same with the coaching calls. They can catch the replays and all later. Right now it’s gonna be a sort of an ongoing program, because what I realized was some folks were joining.

They were only able to make one or two of the calls and then, they would reach out and say, Hey, can I join other future calls? And I actually would open up any, if you’re, if, once you’re in the community, you always were able to access other coaching calls, but I wanted to just have something more consistent.

So folks have a call, I say every week of the year, but we take a, I’ll take off big holidays. And if I’m on vacation, so most of the weeks of the year that there’s a weekly group coaching.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: How many incarnations has it been now?

Junaid Niazi MD: Like the, just had my fourth launch that wrapped up at the end of June.

And then moving forward, I’ll continue to do some launches cuz I really think there is some strength in having a cohort of people go together. And just learning and growing together like that. But I also have folks that really want to get in between. So I think there’s I’m working on being able to have it available so people can join any time.

And then if they wanna join a cohort, they can wait for the next cohort. And I’ll probably do roughly quarterly launches for that.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now it’s up to you if you wanna share numbers, if not, I will, but it’s safe to say it’s a six figure business. How much has it changed your life in any way? You got the Lamborghini now or the more diapers for the kids , or have been able to reduce your hours?

Junaid Niazi MD: Actually, one of the first things I was able to do just from coaching even just from getting coached before I formed a business, was I cut my hours down at work because I had finally was able to get off that financial independence retire, early treadmill of you.

Make hay while the sun shines and then I’ll be able to punch my ticket later. And before I’d made a dime coaching, I had put in to reduce my FTE by 20%. So I’m 0.8 in total now. So that, that was a big change. And that was a result of getting coaching. If you will. Yeah, I’ve.

You any business, there’s overhead and you reinvest a lot of the money back into the business and, Facebook ads and things like that. But, I’ve been trying to diversify my income stream. So I have my physician income, I have coaching income and I try to shuffle a lot of that income then into real estate syndications just to have a third link to a income stool.

In, in that way it’s been nice and, honestly, If things in medicine goes completely sideways, some would argue that we’re already there. It’s just nice knowing that I’ve a I’ve built up some muscle, if you will, as an entrepreneur that I know I can try things.

I’ve been able to build an online business which itself is just, it makes. It makes showing up to work a little bit different. So there’s not that I need to show up to work. It’s I am choosing to show up to work. I am choosing to continue serving my patients, working with my colleagues and taking care of people. And I think it gives you a different perspective on medicine entirely.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: What have you learned? You pretty much hit a home run. I’m gonna be honest with you because there are people who get their wrong in business for whatever reason they, they can’t get it started. It sounds like you pretty much hit a home run or at least got to second or third base on your first try.

But were there any challenges or anything that maybe surprised you when you launched your business?

Junaid Niazi MD: Oh, there have been a ton of challenges. That would be a fun podcast episode. I don’t wanna discourage anybody like I said, that, that quote I gave earlier discomfort is the currency of your dreams launching a program can be a lot of work.

And I figured out the delegation aspect on the clinical side of things, the delegation aspect with something that I consider almost more, my baby is a lot more challenging for me. And I think probably my biggest hold up and why I think maybe I’m not even more successful? If I only got a, if I only hit a infield shot to second base, instead of a home run, would be

Just that, that easing up and really being able to delegate work and focusing on my zone of genius, which would be creating the content, figuring out new ways of marketing and help just helping physicians in general.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So where is Charting Concord? What’s the plan coming out, you got anything coming exciting that five year plan, anything like that? Or just go with the flow.

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah. I think my, my overall coaching platform is prosperous life MD. And I say that I like to help physicians live their most prosperous life. And people think that just means sort of money and finances and it really isn’t. I think, yeah, for me, a prosperous life is more on the…. do you have all your ducks in a row and not just financial, but your mindset, your wellbeing, your relationships, and long term? I think I, I have a lot of. Quirky knowledge on all kind, not maybe not quirky, but just on, on a lot of topics even contracts, personal finance, all kinds of stuff.

So somehow paring that into, either even just blog posts or other resources available for physicians is where I see things headed. I’m also, I’ve had success like you’ve said, launching an online business for physicians. And I think part of me is intrigued by the idea of… If I don’t have time for this at this moment, but in the future helping other physicians maybe launch their coaching businesses or things like that. So it might be programs that run in parallel with the charting program.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I have a feeling after this podcast is launched, you might get a few inquiries on your website.

Where’s the best place if somebody wanted to reach out for you, either through your charting course or your life coach, what’s the best place to, to get ahold of you?

Junaid Niazi MD: The best place is my main website for Prosperous Life MD. So that’s prosperouslifemd.com. There’s a contact form there.

You can reach out with a question. Shoots me an email. I get back to you. The nice thing about that is at the top of that page, there’s a you can take a quiz about what your charting personality is. So it’s a fun quiz to take. And at the end of it, I’ll share with you some resources that are pertain to your charting personality.

At the very least you might get a kick out of it. And you might even, you get some tips that are actionable for you to improve your clinic workflow and your efficiency.

So that website again is prosperouslifemd.com. Just

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: can you imagine would you been successful, do you think if you launched this business without the coaching, without the self coaching?

Junaid Niazi MD: I honestly don’t because, for me, Coaching really tapped into an abundance mindset that you referenced a little bit earlier, too, on, on this call and coming from a place of abundance, you’re willing to make mistakes.

You are willing to put yourself out there. You’re willing to help others without expecting anything in return. And another quote we go off of is you’ll either find success or you’ll get the lesson you need. And. If something, I try doesn’t work. I’ll iterate. And I’ll try again. If that doesn’t work.

It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing as a scientific process, right? You put out a hypothesis, you test it. If it doesn’t work, you don’t just scrap the whole thing and say, ah, science is well, some people might, but as physicians, we don’t do that. We keep iterating.

We keep trying things, push new medications, new therapy modalities, no new procedures. I think without coaching, I wouldn’t have had that mindset foundation to where I’d accept failure as part and parcel of the process. And if in fact, if you’re not failing you’re probably doing something wrong or you’re probably handcuffing yourself in some way.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I think you have to fail if you want to grow. Yeah. And I see this we were physician coaching. We had a little mastermind group that we were, and you were a part of it. And what I gather from you is you’re a tester. You like to test different things to see what works and what other people have tried, because, kinda like Edison was back in the day of developing the light bulb.

He tried. You tried a hundred ways to develop the light bulb and people thought you failed 99 times. It just those are 99 ways that I’m just one step closer to success. So exactly Junaid. Thank you again. Thank you for for sharing us and, thank you for sharing your successes. And I think you’d be very inspiring to other doctors who either are coaches or wanna get into the field any last minute thoughts before we go?

Junaid Niazi MD: Yeah. A couple of things first I’ll just, if that’s all right, I’ll say, coaching right now is proliferating at an incredible rate specifically physician coaching. And in some ways it’s becoming a victim of its own success. I see on online communities, people liking it to multi-level marketing or.

Sort of scams or pyramid schemes or things like that. And, I think there are some there’s in anything there’s gonna be some bad players. Maybe they start sending you, direct messages or things like that are unsolicited. And, as coaches we talk about that, how we universally frown upon those types of practices.

So I would say don’t write off poaching just based on what other people have said online, or if other people are skeptic. Always healthy to have a healthy dose of skepticism with anything. But I think what you, what everyone’s gonna start seeing is coaching is gonna become more widespread at the at your employer and institutional level.

And, I have colleagues that are getting tapped to to help coach at very large institutions. And I think some of you guys are gonna start experiencing that from your own employers, offering coaching to you. And if it’s offered to you. If that’s how you first experience it, then I would encourage you to take it on.

And the last thing I just wanted say, Mike is thank you for creating this space. You’re like the OG coach and entrepreneur, you think, I forget how many years you’ve been doing this? Thanks for laying the groundwork so that and offering resources and opportunities for us to also grow and showcase our work well.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you, Junaid. Thank you for sharing your story. Again, I found it very inspiring. Again, the website is prosperouslifemd.com. If you’re interested in learning more about that or his charting courses, please go out there.

He’s had, you can see all the testimonials he’s had. He’s had some great success stories and. Again, Junaid, thanks again for taking the time on your busy schedule to join us today. All right. Thank you so much, Mike. Thanks everybody. And as always if this, if you’re interested in coaching or getting coaching yourself, why not reach out to, to contact somebody, either ate or someone else, if you’re struggling, don’t just try to do it alone.

Find out someone who’s been there and done that and keep moving forward.

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Should You Get a Business Partner?

There are a few things to consider before deciding whether or not to have a business partner. On one hand, having a business partner can give you access to more resources and help you grow your business faster. On the other hand, it can also complicate decision-making and lead to conflict if you don’t see eye-to-eye on business matters. Before you decide to take on a business partner, I help you weigh the pros and cons carefully to determine if it’s the right decision for your business.

Transcript:

Should you get a business partner for your business? I’ve run the gamut with business partners. I’ve had multiple partners, single partners. Of course, I’ve had businesses on my own and I’ve had some of the greatest experiences working with business partners and I’ve had some other experiences that let’s just say weren’t perfect.

I’ll discuss the pros and cons as well as my own experiences of having a business partner. On this episode of Bootstrap MD.

Hey guys, welcome to another addition of Bootstrap MD. My name is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. I’ve been a physician entrepreneur for over 20 years and I’ve had multiple partners for my business. Of course, I’ve also done businesses. On my own. And what I’d wanna do today is discuss whether or not you need to have a business partner and some questions that you can ask to yourself or your potential business partner.

I’m currently in a situation right now. I’m considering having a business partner for one of my businesses, as well as a recently have a, new partner for my business. And I’ll tell you how that’s going as well. So when considering business partners, the first question, obviously you need to ask yourself “Do I need a business partner and why?” Maybe since I’m dealing with a lot of doctors on this podcast, maybe you’re just busy right now. Maybe you’re working full time and you just don’t have the time to be working on the business. Then that might be question of whether or not you need to actually start a business at that time.

But perhaps you’re looking for a business partner who can work behind the scenes on the day to day that you can’t. Maybe you have an idea. You wanna see that come to your fruition and that’s the best way other times. Maybe it’s just simply financial. Maybe you are, you wanna build a seven, eight figure business, but to do you’ll need a lot of capitals to start with.

And you’re looking for other partners who hopefully will have the same vision you do that can be involved in investing in the business. Another reason why you might wanna find a business partner is perhaps. You don’t have much business experience and you’re looking for a mentor or someone who’s got some business acumen in either marketing or sales that perhaps you just don’t have.

That’s also a great idea to get a business partner in my own experience. I think it’s best when you find a. People who compliment your weaknesses and vice versa. So you have strengths where they have weaknesses and vice versa. So I have had a software, a couple of software businesses where I had a few ideas, but I didn’t know anything about coding or any technical aspects.

So we found each other, my business partner and he had experience in coding and he experienced with working with programmers. On my background. I had a lot of the connections we needed in this industry, as well as I had marketing experience, perhaps more sales experience than he did, although he also had some marketing experience and it worked well.

We had a business for over seven years as I’m describing business partnerships to you, it’s almost similar to, as I would describe a marriage, cuz that’s what really it is. It is a marriage. And just as in marriages, partnerships can go wrong. Usually what it comes down to is communication.

You might be that you didn’t communicate things to begin with. In my situation, we had situations where at the time of the business, we really felt we had different goals that we wanted for the business. I thought there’s some areas that we could explore that would cost money. And he didn’t, I’m not saying one is right, and one, one is wrong.

We just, our goals were, misaligned. We had some communication issues. He was managing technical support. While I had a team managing customer support in the states, there was a lot of business traveling that was involved. And although that sounds fun overall, it got really tired to me. and to my family.

So we left on good terms and we’re still friends these days, but I think there were issues that we could have addressed earlier that maybe would’ve extended the business a little bit longer. And another experience I had was also with a software company. And again, it was very successful, just like the other one, a seven figure business.

But after a few years, It was the same situation, except he wanted to create more products. I wanted to focus on the original product and just make that product better. Again, we both found that there’s a time where we work great together, but we also had some communication issues in dealing with customer support.

And again, I’m not saying one was right and one was wrong. It was just different. The way that we handled things. I’m friends with both of those former partners, which has been great. I’ve also been in businesses where I’ve had partners in creating products and for a time it would work. But then we found out that we both have different financial and time commitments.

This person had a lot of time to work on products. And I, at the time I didn’t have much bandwidth or much time at all to work, on it. And that was on me. And he also had some financial commitments that he needed to take care of, which would take him away. And he was really hoping that this would product would replace income that he was doing, which unfortunately it didn’t.

So again, I’m friends with him as well, but it’s important that you looking back, that you talk about those things before actually getting into a partnership. And that’s what I wanna share with you today. Now I’m currently in this situation where I’ve recently invested in a business where I have a business partner, I’m a minority owner.

I have a medical niche marketing company, and I purposely wanted to be a minority owner. I was not ready to do the day to day. And in this situation, he had the experience in this particular niche. On my behalf, I had experienced the marketing and some of the connections that he wanted to enter this market.

Now I did have an opportunity to purchase the whole business if I wanted to, but I really wanted to keep this partner around because he also had past clients. He had relationships with, it would allow us to create new business opportunities as well as he was gonna manage the customer support, which currently I didn’t wanna get involved with.

Now so far, it’s gone. Great. And I think it’s because I’ve learned the lessons of past business relationships of which I wanna share with you guys today. I’m also in a situation currently where I might be taking on a new business partner, but I’m still not sure if that’s the direction I wanna go. So here are some questions that you need to ask yourself before deciding to bring on a business partner.

The first question is why, do you want a business partner? Is it because you just don’t have the time? You don’t have the experience and you’re looking for a partner who has both those, maybe you don’t wanna deal with the customer support, and you’re looking for partner to handle that for you. It’s also important though, to also look at it from their end.

What is their expectation of you? Are you just there to have the idea? And then they ha are the ones responsible for. Executing on the India. It’s important that also that you have divvy up the work equally and that can be involved you. And if the business partner is doing 90% of the work, and maybe you’re doing 10%, even though you’re really busy, they might have resentment.

The way that you can avoid that is to talk with a partner before you decide to form a relationship. So again, first question, ask yourself, why do I want a business partner? Starting a business is not easy. As I’ve said several times on this podcast, you’ve gotta be able to wear different hats.

You’ve got to be able to know a little bit about everything about your business. And to be honest, no, one’s gonna work harder on your business than you.

The second question you need to ask yourself is, are you comfortable sharing the decision making or are you someone who you’re the end all be all? If that’s true and you don’t like it, partnership may not be good for you.

Another question you need to ask yourself is, are you willing to take on liability or are you gonna share liability? Businesses have risks. As I said, you could get sued depending on what you’re going into. Are you comfortable with that? It’s important that you discuss those things with your potential partner.

So here are some questions that you need to ask with your potential partner, really have a heart to heart. Number one is what do you both hope to get out of the business? Why are you going into this business? What solution is this business? Suic? Make sure that you have aligned mutual goals. Is this like a side gig for you, but perhaps with your partner, this might be the only way that he’s gonna be able to bring home money.

That’s a lot to ask. Number two is how much time do you have? What is each person’s role going to be? Let’s say you’re a busy doctor. And as I said, maybe you can only devote 10% and the business partner is gonna evolve 90%. As I mentioned, if your business partner is performing 90% of the work, they might be expecting 90% of the money instead of 50%.

So again, expectations need to be managed before entering any relationship.

How will you be communicating is another question you need to ask. Currently my business partner is in Asia and I’m in America. We have to schedule a Zoom call once a week, and that’s our primary communication along with Skype and email, who will be making the decisions. My partner is involved in the customer support.

I’m not involved, I’m involved in bigger things and that’s what we hashed out. And these questions that I’m sharing with you are really the questions I talked with my potential business partner at the time now business partner that we hashed out over the series of several months.

Next question you need to ask is who’s involved with the finances. There should be a shared bank account. It’s important that both of you be able to track where the money is going. Money is number one in terms of problems, peop problems that a business has. And if only one partner has aspect to the finances you’re looking for trouble, it’s also imported on a side note to determine how much is each partner gonna be investing into the business.

In my share, I basically bought into the business. He was not contributing any capital.

It’s also important that you have an exit relationship involved what’s gonna happen when you dissolve the business who gets what? And then what are the percentage of finances that each partner is gonna get?

Another question you need to ask is… And you don’t like to think about it. What happens if one of the partner passes away or is incapacitated, who gets the business? Is it your spouse? You may need to have a clause written where if the partner perishes that the spouse would not inherit part of the business.

And I’ve seen situations where that wasn’t told and the spouse who didn’t have any, really any knowledge about the business suddenly became a partner. ANd that could cause a lot of issues as well. It’s also important to talk about when you’re gonna receive profits. Are you going to leave the money in the bank? Are you gonna take a salary? All those questions need to be identified.

Now, if it sounds like I’m going the direction that you to hire an attorney to help form your business partnership. You’re absolutely right. All of the questions I’ve discuss. Need to be in the contract. I’ve done handshake contracts before, and that’s where you get in trouble.

You really need to find an attorney who can make sure that your expectations and his or her expectations are met and that’s the best way to go about it.

Another question we need to ask with the help of attorney is to determine what type of business structure you wanna have. Is it gonna be a partnership? Is it gonna be a corporation? Is it gonna be a limited liability company?

So to sum everything up, it’s important that you have a business partner who can compliment your goals, your skills, you have weaknesses where they have strengths and vice versa. That’ll give you your best chance for a successful business.

Make sure that you have open communication, you manage expectations at the beginning. So there are no hurt feelings at the. it’s gonna be important that your values and your goals align with your business partners, that you have similar problem solving abilities, and be able to come to consensus when determining the big issues.

And when it’s time to end the business that you identify an exit strategy for each of the partners, having a business partner can be tremendous, but managing those expectations are moi importante to allow you to have a successful business and to keep moving forward.

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How to Get Instant Traffic to Your Website through Media Ad Buying with Chad Hamzeh

Want to get more traffic to your website offers and campaigns? Most high level entrepreneurs often turn to media ad buying to get fast and effective results.  On this episode, you’ll meet formerly broke MMA fighter turned traffic expert, Chad Hamzeh, who is the founder of DSV2 media, a wildly successful online direct response agency. Media ad buying is the process of purchasing advertising space in media outlets, such as branded email lists, TV, and even social media. The goal of media ad buying is to reach a target audience with a message that is both relevant and persuasive.  

On this interview, Chad will discuss the do’s and don’t on media ad buying and how even beginners, can learn to acquire new customers and grow sales very quickly with online traffic.

DSV2 Media

https://www.dsv2.com/

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PhysicianCoaches.com
The #1 Doctor Directory for Physician Coaches, Consultants, and Mentors

https://www.PhysicianCoaches.com

Transcript:

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike. welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD, the podcast for physician and healthcare entrepreneurs. I know a lot of you have had questions about how to get more traffic to my website, whether it’s You’re a coach and you want to get more prospects to be turned into clients, or maybe you have your own practice right now.

And you don’t know how to get through all of the noise in terms of SEO and social media. And maybe you want to attract more patients. I found an expert and he gladly has accepted to be on this. If someone did, I just met recently at a business conference and I think you’re going to get a lot added if you’re looking for traffic, then don’t go away. They’ll definitely want to pay attention to this interview. This gentlemen was a former professional MMA fighter who started his entrepreneurial journey as an online affiliate marketer and media buyer back in 2009. Since that first time he’s founded seven, eight figure startups, as well as scaled several client offers and these endeavors generated over 150 million in revenue and over 1 billion that’s billion with a “B” visits online currently operates its own e-commerce brands as well as agency, which is known as DSV two media, please welcome to the program, not doctor, but Chad Hemzeh. Chad, how you doing?

Chad Hamzeh: Great man. Happy to be here!

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I’m used to interviewing a lot of doctors *laughs*

Chad Hamzeh: Maybe that’s next for me!

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: It could be! You’ve done so much tremendous things in your life, and I don’t want to keep you busy. You’re an MMA fighter and I’m sure you could kick my butt, so I’m going to make sure I respect your time. But in person just a few months ago, we were at a crypto business conference of all things that I’ve heard her name for quite a while in this internet marketing internet business, a world that we, live in and I dip my toes in every now and then, but I want to hear your story because it’s very interesting.

I’ve I’ve read bout, you and listened to you on some podcasts, but I think our viewers would definitely want to know more about how you got started, because I think it can be very inspiring.

Chad Hamzeh: Thank you. Yeah, so it’s, pretty interesting. I I used to be a business analyst. I lived in Canada since I was born for the most part. And I was a business analyst from about 2005 to 2009 and I was fighting and training all that time and that’s really what I wanted to do with my life and that sort of stuff. And I spoke with my wife and I was like where can we go where it’s affordable, we’d be able to train full time so we didn’t have to really work. And that basically took off a lot of spots in the west and the world, but it allowed us to go to Thailand. So we went to Thailand pretty we were pretty broke at the time and all that. We had a bit of money saved up to do this trip. And fighting training full-time for a year.

It was a great. or About a year into it. My dad got sick, he had stomach cancer. And I had moved back to Canada essentially to take care of them, help take care of them. And I just had a year of like freedom, right? So the last thing I wanted to do as a work and plus I needed to be around the house.

So I literally just typed in how to make money online. It was basically how I did it. And you can imagine just the rabbit hole of deception that I went down.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I’m sure the first listing was completely legitimate, right?

Chad Hamzeh: Correct. Yeah. Back then less compliance on Google. So the first 10 or so are probably not very legitimate.

And so a lot of it was just like reading, studying. I was in forums. I joined a forum called PBC Coach, which I learned pay-per-click marketing. So that was good. I came across that and a lot of good affiliates actually came out of that forum way back in the day. And then I just started testing.

I was already in debt, so I figured it out. But more debt on my credit card too. Yeah. It was the worst business plan ever, but yeah. And then I had I had my first six figure month, about four months into it. And I was like, gross revenue, not profit. And so I was like, “wow, there’s something to this.”

And I just kept going and kept testing and all that. And the rest is history. I’ve had different startups along the way. Some massive successes not so much, but that’s the game. And yeah it’s, been great. And it’s allowed me to live a lifestyle that I like freedom and all that. So I’ll get to train still every day.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: ‘s definitely inspiring and I talked to clients and people who want to start their own business and I see some who just okay, I’ll do it on the side and then they never get anything done.

And what I tell folks is “if you really want to have a business, hire people and then be responsible for their payroll. And, even if yourself, you said you’re broke, so you had to make it work. And so putting it on credit cards is it’s like rolling a dice, but if I wanted to get this accomplished I need to do this. How much of a motivation was that for you to make sure your business was successful?

Chad Hamzeh: Oh it was! My wife was pregnant at the time. I had a baby on the way, I had a mortgage, my dad was sick. So there was a lot of things that were stacked where I’m like, I have to make this work because my wife was working.

And I knew that she’s going to have to stop working soon and I didn’t feel it was fair on her. And so I just had to it was. It was essential that I made at work. Like I just didn’t really have many, much of an option. So I was working 14 to 16 hour days in the beginning, just trying to learn it mostly on my own.

I never really had mentors, especially back then other than just being in the forum and whatnot. So yeah, it was a hundred percent essential. You know what I tell people like if they’re working a full-time job and that sort of thing one thing I often tell them is your full-time job is from, let’s say nine to five.

If you don’t have the the capital or whatever to hire people, then your second job, which is your business is going to be from like six to midnight or whatever it is. It’s just the way it is. Now, if you’re coming with some capital and you said that’s you just have to learn the operational aspect and learn how to audit. So learn what’s good or what’s bad. And then hire people to actually do that legwork during the day. That’s the best scenario. If somebody’s got some cash and I got a business or a job, but they want to transition out, that’s usually the best scenario because it gives you the end goal that most of us want anyway, which is just being, working on the business instead of inside of it.

So I always say I started working inside of it. So even to this day it’s a tricky thing where if I think I can just get something done faster myself, I’ll do it because I have those skills and that’s not really what we want to do longterm when we’re trying to break for you working.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. But, sometimes you have to, I am going to, it’s funny. Cause I haven’t ever practiced up here. We’re both from San Diego. North County San Diego he’s in that I think that, that ghetto known as La Jolla, but it’s pretty rough these days.

Pretty, rough. But yeah. So while I talked to one of my, nurses and said, “oh, we haven’t seen you in a while. You’re hardly seen, how are you seeing patients? You’re hardly apply that I’m hardly working. It’s I’m always working. I’m always working okay. Even as entrepreneurs, we’re still hustling when we’re still making things work.

So let’s fast forward to now, to today, you’ve got so many different businesses. What’s occupying your time now tell us about your business and all the different things that you’re doing… Entrepreneurial work.

Chad Hamzeh: Yeah, for sure. Right now I have only two main businesses, which is actually less for me historically, but I’m now considering launching an NFT and doing all this other stuff. So I don’t wanna get in trouble there, but I do have a car care brand. It’s e-commerce, it’s called The Last Coat. We started in 2018. It’s been one of the fastest growing car care brands out there. So that’s been pretty cool. It’s been fun. And then I still have my my agency, which is like an affiliate business.

We’re just have big email lists and I can talk about what we did for that later. But we essentially take on either clients who rent our lists out that sort of thing. Or we’ll send you traffic as an affiliate. So we’ll just get a commission basically on whatever product we’re promoting.

We also in that business do what’s called identity resolution. So essentially we place a pixel on somebody’s website and then we can match 30% of those visits. To a valid email address even if they don’t opt in or anything. So we can actually generate email emails from people who just come visit our website, which is pretty cool.

We usually get about 30% of those and somebody getting a hundred thousand visits to their site, we can get about 30,000 a month in terms of leads. So that’s pretty cool. But yeah, we do a lot of lead gen and all that sort of stuff as well. We build just a giant list typically with a polls or a survey type strategy.

People like taking quizzes and all that stuff. And then, and from there, we’re able to build those lists up pretty affordably.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now I got started in my internet business journey by actually buying a list. It was a big step, to take where I bought a list, it was an internet marketing list from a guru who was actually my mentor.

And I bought it… well I don’t want to give how much I actually bought it for her, but I’ve made a hundred times over that, I paid for it. So how did you get started with lists? Did you buy them? Did you build them from scratch? How did you get started?

Chad Hamzeh: Yeah. I have this whole thesis when I’m building email lists. So if I’m just building. An email list for the purpose of sending out emails, not so much to like to build a buyers list. I want people who are clicking well, like just who are going to click from emails. And so we would go and do media buying, which is basically we’re going to buy traffic, but we do it off of other email lists.

So we wouldn’t own the list. What people do with us… Essentially. they pay us a flat rate. We send an email out for them. So we went and did that. On other people’s lists. That’s how we actually started it. And we used to just advertise as affiliates, trying to make profit on drugs. And then performance was trending down like that and that sort of thing.

So I was like what’s a way that we could own the asset a little bit more. And so we started getting people to subscribe on like hot topic kind of polls and that sort of stuff and surveys. And so that was how we ended up building the list over time. So it was essentially like running ads, we would run the ads on people’s email lists because are subscribers who are used to clicking emails at the end of the day. And the reason for that in our business is we’re not selling a product in that business. We’ll promote offers, but we monetize a lot by sending out just articles and news and that sort of stuff like ad sense on steroids.

So that’s a, that’s how we do it, but so that’s all. Let’s building obviously in the automotive business, the list is our buyers. We’re just generating buyers.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So, let’s talk about that because that’s a subject that we really haven’t talked a lot about, and that is like buying lists.

So I have started to have businesses coming to me and say, “Hey, I want to get in front of doctors” or, and “what’s the best way to do it”. I got this one where he says, “Hey, I found this list on eBay of this list of doctors that I could get.” That’s probably not the best way to get it, but what would you recommend?

Chad Hamzeh: If you’re wanting to go send out a promotion on somebody else’s list the, if it’s a kinda niche, like doctors and that sort of thing, honestly, the way people are approaching you about it that’s the easiest way. Just reaching out and seeing, “Hey, what would it cost to do a dropout.”

Now a lot of times, unless the person that you’re asking does this thing regularly, they don’t really know how, to price it. So I can speak to that a bit. So the way that we buy our traffic, there’s a couple of different ways. When we’re buying off emails, the first one is just a normal CPC, like a cost per.

Alright, this usually takes, this is gonna sound funny. It either takes a really savvy person on the other end to agree to that or someone who’s not very experienced at all. And, the reason being is because… Buying on a CPC doesn’t guarantee them any money. So they’re going to be sending the list, but unless they really know the promotion and that sort of thing, they might just agree to it.

You might say, Hey I’ll, pay a dollar per click to a lot of people that are like, oh man, that’s awesome. But they don’t necessarily, they could actually get more if they rented the list out to you on a CPM. The CPM is the way we normally buy. And basically all that means for every thousand emails that are sent… So let’s say somebody has a list of a hundred thousand emails or, 10,000 emails. We’ll pay a, fixed fee. Per every thousand emails sent, but it’s pretty easy for them to see it. They’ll tell you. Yeah. My list is 50,000. Okay. So at a $1 CPM 50, that it’s 50 bucks for the drop right now. What’s a fair CPM.

They’ll usually give you that rate if they’re used to buying on that for us. We typically buy at five to $8, but really that’s just a negotiating thing, right? If the person doesn’t have a price and you just want to be like, all right, I’ll send you, I’ll pay you a dollar CPM. I’m like, they might say yes to it cause nobody really nails their list.

So those are the, two main ways that we buy. They’re pretty straightforward. And then the other way to buy is just on an affiliate structure. So they might mail whatever you want to send out as just an affiliate. I tend not to like that. Their motivation, especially if they have a good list that they do send stuff to.

It’s minimal because they’re already renting the list out on us, a CPC or a CPM, so most good list owners who have done this before… They want that guaranteed money. But yeah there’s, it’s really just reaching out, like somebody like yourself, you have a list. There’s other people that might have lists.

They don’t really have to be big if the size of your service let’s say we’re talking doctors and medical services and all that really. You don’t need a ton of volume there, you just need to have that endorsed, that implied endorsement. I like to call it. And I’m really, doesn’t take a lot of patients to make money on that drop for sure.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: What are some questions that first starting out, cause I’ve rented lists and such. And like I said, I’ve had some like super savvy and then I’ve heard that somewhere. You know what I’ll get back to you because they haven’t figured out what’s ever asked him that before and they don’t really know how to price it. What are some things that you can recommend, like what we should be asking to make sure we’re getting value at and what we’re doing for sure.

Chad Hamzeh: The first one would be how frequent do they email? That’s number one for us. Typically, a lot of the people that we buy off of they’re emailing their list at least daily and sometimes two to three times a day.

Like for us, for example, we mail three times a day. Now it’s a little bit different because we send news out . We can send twice a day, it’s trending news and then we’ll send one promotion. But I like to see at least three times a week, if we’re talking about professional services and that sort of thing, a lot of people are hesitant to do that because they feel that there’s.

Burn their list out in the consulting space, the coaching space the advising type of market. Most people will be, they’ll love to hear from someone if you’re actually, if they’re actually giving value to them. So that’s the next thing we look at is okay, you’re mailing once a week, maybe good.

Which isn’t a lot, but what kind of stuff are you typically sending out? If they’re always sending out. Just like a promotion, not even a sale, just like it doesn’t really make much sense. Just Hey, we do this service, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s not going to be as responsive. And then the third thing, which this is a real easy way to just circumvent.

A lot of this is just asking for the stats. Now even if they’re not that experienced of a sender, they should be able to tell you, oh yeah. Our average over the last 30 days is. X open rate X click rate. Now for some up-to-date kind of info, the apple iOS 15 type updates have skewed open rates a little bit.

So for the most part, we look at clicks and essentially the simplest answer is how many clicks on average do you send. To whatever link you’re sending when you send an email, that’s like the simplest question that you can have answered and it tells you that, okay, I’ll have X number of people.

You could start getting into all those other ones oh, okay what, kind of opt-in rates do you get on other people’s lists? But if somebody is not that experience, they’re not going to know that, but they can tell you I have, I can usually generate a hundred clicks.

Okay, great. And then that comes down to your funnel whomever, wherever you’re sending that traffic to grab those people and yeah. Do the conversion process,

I’m sure you don’t do this as much, but I can imagine, like when you first started out, were you like trying to get on their lists just to make sure to see what kind of offers it that they have was it, was their email getting into your, was it going into spam or was it on the list?

Do you do some spy work before you go into. We

still do it. We do that all the time. Yeah. I’m not just myself. There’s probably two to three of us internally that we do. What’s called seeding and we’re basically seeding our emails. We’re putting our emails onto their list. A lot of times the list brokers or night even list brokers, the list owners that we go to they’ll tell us.

Okay. Opt-in. Or we’ll just tell them that. Can you see my list? Cause I want to see what’s being sent out. That’s totally reasonable. If somebody is not really aware of this whole, whole thing, then I would just opt in on their list to prove everything out. And it just becomes a thing where you’re building up over time.

A portfolio of lists that you can hit and you can advertise on. Put, get a throw away, tidy email address one that’s just for tracking the sort of thing. That’s what we do. And just start opting into lists that might be a good fit for the product or service that you’re doing.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: It’s been so long since I’ve examined list buying, but I remember there was a resource. They had a list of all these different associations and emails. Is there still one that’s currently. They have today. I remember going to the library to get this. I can’t remember what it was called, but there was like a list of resources or is it, a lot of that stuff outdated and just not needed?

Chad Hamzeh: There is, there’s some B2B like generating leads in the B2B space. Which is a whole we could have a whole more complex talk about that. One of them’s called Apollo, apollo.io. It’s pretty cheap. So that’s let’s say you want to find a. Doctors or a specific segment of people, you can actually find all those leads and just get all their contact info in terms of in terms of the.

Those types of like listings and that sort of thing typically you just want a simple Google searches of easy listing, like your niche and then easy enlisting that’s. Cause that’s what they tend to call them. It’s called easy, right? Yeah. Like magazines easy.

So they still call them that and you can do the same with. Niche newsletter listings, that sort of stuff. But often it comes down to like finding the bit like the newsletters in your space. Like the research is knowing your competitive Intel, your competitive landscape, that sort of stuff.

And every, business owner should know you can get away in certain markets. We’re just looking for easy and a newsletter Mustangs. And then then it comes down to those guys that are usually listed on those types of sites. They’ll have this. For you and that sort of thing. So those are the ones where you can ask them the questions and fire the questions at that one on.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: And I assume to a point, everything is somewhat negotiate.

Chad Hamzeh: Correct. Yeah. Especially in, so that’s that’s why we like the email stuff is because just everything’s negotiable. There’s certain things that you can do where you can just ask for more traffic and it happens less too.

So let’s say a drop goes out, it doesn’t work that great for a client. Maybe their offer was off of knows and who had deliverability issues is rare, but they’ll just be like, Hey, can I get a make good on that drop? So that means we’ll just give them another. We’ll include it. So they get some more traffic.

So all sorts of things you can negotiate. We like to we’d like to machine make goods for sure. We like to not the type of traffic that we buy, that sometimes they want to charge you a premium. If you’re sending the traffic to a lead capture page or an opt-in page, they just want to turn. Let’s say the email, you said you had sent out, it didn’t do that well for you, right? You didn’t get many opt-ins to make good as just them sending another 1 40 for free. You call make betters, but yeah, they’re typically called that exactly.

They’re typically called make goods and yeah, it’s pretty simple thing. It’s accepted out there. Again, somebody with a list of that they don’t send to very often, they might find that a bit weird, type of thing. But again, that same person probably doesn’t know how much their list is worth, so you could probably get a cheaper rate anyway, So the email world is very, negotiable. That’s what I like a lot about it.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: It. So let’s talk about switch gears enough to talk about the offer. So you do offer, you have your own offers and then you also have offers from your clients. And do you work on their offers for them or are they, or they’ve already tested it or you tweak it to what you think is going to fit well and get the best conversion rate as well?

Chad Hamzeh: Yeah. So typically if the clients that we would take on from media buying traditionally they have an offer that’s converting like they’re already spending maybe 30, 50,000 a month, and then they’re coming to us for us to scale it out. Now somebody is not quite at that level.

We’ll usually like, yeah, like on a consultative basis, we’ll look at their offer, like where they’re sending the traffic and. And we can start. Yeah… We start tweaking it. Cause we just know like the psychology, the layouts, all that sort of stuff. Typically when somebody hasn’t really gone start are just not getting much traction.

It’s almost always because of the offer. Because if you have, an offer that’s pulling and that sort of thing, especially if it’s got a good backend. There’s traffic all over the place, right? That’s usually not the problem. There’s usually a disconnect between the messaging of what they’re saying in the ad or the email ad or Facebook ad or whatever.

And then what the person’s actually seeing on the site. And that’s bridging that gap like. We’ve been in the game for a really long time, so it makes sense to us. Like you can just see it right away, but a lot of people can’t really just see that it takes them a long time to a long time to learn that, bridging that gap.

But that’s the biggest thing that we do because I’m very front-end centric. Because just through my years of being an affiliate, I’m really trying to get the front end of stuff. Very well to get that earnings per click higher right now, a lot of people in coaching, that sort of thing. They often skip that phase because the backend, like what they’re selling on the backend is worth so much that they can be sloppy on the phone.

But when you combine the two, that’s how you scale to like multi eight figures and that sort of thing assuming your niche can sustain that. But but yeah, so that’s usually what we do when people come to us, we’ll just I can really look ahead and that’s usually done on a consultation type basis, right?

Like a retainer type deal. But but it often works really well, especially if they’re not having a lot of traction, that sort of thing. If somebody comes to us with, sorry. If somebody came to us with a really proven. Yeah. Usually if I do any improvements there it’s improvement in the model itself. Like I’ll go through the whole thing and there’s probably monetization points.

It could be like selling their leaves, doing certain types of things that are in the funnel that they’re not seeing. Especially if it’s like a coaching type thing. Cause again, those people might be spending a lot just because their backend can sustain a lot of ad spends so most people can see improvements.

Those starting out obviously.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: So yeah, so message to market match definitely sounds like it’s number one. What are some other areas where you see a lot of mistakes, maybe newbies, or maybe more experienced people that have done on their landing page? Teach us

Chad Hamzeh: for sure. So for for newbies, for beginners number one is not building it for mobile

it may look fine on mobile, but not taking a mobile first type approach not taking a mobile optimized approach because the majority of traffic now is mobile. So a lot of people they’ll judge the way that their site looks and functions and that sort of. Based on how it looks on desktop, especially beginners. And it’s very interesting because not a lot of people think that most of the traffic is on mobile, even though we’re using our phones all day, but it definitely is most traffic’s mobile. I know for us, 60 to 70% of our e-commerce traffic is mobile. Right on. Even on email, people live in their emails and clicking, it’s mostly mobile right now as well.

So that’s where the priority has to be. And then after that The, conversion optimization. The conversion process has to sustain that. So you’ll, have, depending on what somebody is selling it th this could be a whole few podcasts ourselves, but basically if we’re just doing strict lead generation, and there, there doesn’t have to be much of a presale or anything like that. Often having the form above the fold on a phone, on a mobile tablet. So right when you get. There’s like a headline that’s it’s a market match and then goes right into a right into the form. So somebody can start filling out.

Boom boom, pretty easily. As they scroll down, there’s more supportive statements and proof evidence, all that sort of stuff. Either a button to go back to the form or another form at the bottom. Sometimes I’ll just do two forms. So on desktop, I would just say, have people look into it’s called the F layout, F conversion layout.

Basically, our eyes track on desktop from left to right type of thing. And then downward. So essentially the forms you have on the. Headline hero shot, which is basically the end result somebody wants and then done in the coaching consulting space. You tend to have a pre-sale video, right?

Cause that you’re trying to get somebody on the phone and you’re trying to close them, all that sort of stuff. So typically headline that addresses the market, the pain points, all that. And then the videos right there, and that video is what’s doing this. Typically but the sale, this is where I see a lot of people tripped up even more experienced people.

When they’re trying to get somebody on the phone, they’re trying to, they often try to sell their product to a degree inside of that video. And that’s not the way I go around it. It sounds counterintuitive. But what you’re trying to sell is the idea of a system or solution or whatever it is. But you’re trying to sell, getting them on the phone.

Like the whole idea is to get curious, to learn more about it and to get them on the phone because the phone is where in that scenario where the sales going to happen, we have too many people who just start to bring up all this other stuff in the video, and then the person has objections. It shouldn’t be anything like that.

It should just be like, laying it out. How this is an improvement over what the traditional way has been done. And then. It goes to the call, right? That’d that typically a book, a call tight video. Shouldn’t be more than 10 minutes. You might see them up to 20 minutes. I’ve seen one at the 30 believe it or not.

But it was pretty engaging and it was like a lesson and that sort of thing. And then it was just like going into book a call. So

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: That’s great stuff. There’s so much we can talk about it. So I think. Is it, can we say conclusively now, video beats non video, or is there always exceptions?

Chad Hamzeh: There is exceptions. In the high volume type of nutritional, when I say nutritional, I mean like supplements and this sort of stuff, the highest of the highest volume offers I see are they don’t have a, they don’t have a video. It’s just a page. Like with the layout I talked about on desktop, it’s like the form.

There’s on the second page as a checkout process, but those are typically pre-sold, there’s like an advertorial. So like a pre-sell article that, that kind of addresses pain points or it’s from a testimonial type angle or whatever. And then that goes to the, product page, the offer page. But I also do see a lot in the suburban space with video in the coaching consulting type space.

From what I’ve seen video for sure. On. And a lot of that is because there’s a guru, so to speak, there’s a face there and you need that, face. You need that someone talking who are they? What are they done? What’s the evidence they’re proof what are they bringing to the table?

That’s new. Yeah. And those types of cases, for sure. I would say video.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Are you seeing these videos? Are they pretty elaborate, like with expensive sets or is it just a simple pop in your head now

Chad Hamzeh: It’s oftentimes just somebody presenting on a whiteboard, just talking a whiteboard because delivering what appears to be.

Semi instruction, but not giving all the details out to what this new system or that sort of thing can be. We’re seeing a lot of like really creative type funnels, like where people are sending traffic to a Facebook instant message or an SMS type funnel. It’s a little more advanced it’s a little trickier to pull off if you haven’t done it before.

We see some guys sending people just to a Google Doc. Yeah. It just depends how warm that audience is. And in that scenario, you got to have a really strong offer. Getting somebody on the phone, especially when you’re testing your off-road. The reason that I like it, if it’s a higher ticket thing or it’s a coaching thing or whatever else, the reason I like to phone is because if you don’t have your pricing nailed down and your offer nailed down.

You can change all that test that very easily because it’s not in a video, it’s not on the landing page. Now I got to go change this video. Now I got to go test five to no, the video is just to get them on the phone. So when you have them on the phone, You can test all sorts of pricing. You can test offer structures, bundling all that sort of stuff from one call to the next, and you can see what resonates best.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Now are they are they asking for money at the beginning? Like a tripwire, like we do often in e-commerce stuff like a small product or a book your free plus shipping offer or is it just straight to the phone? What have you been seeing?

Chad Hamzeh: I’ve been seeing both quite a bit actually. The one that’s been. I don’t want to say scaling out, but the one that’s been a little bit easier for people in the last few years to get to that profitability point has just been getting them on the phone.

And I think it’s because mainly, especially for beginners, there’s just less moving parts. You really, what is the page? You have an ad wherever it’s running. Goes to a page with a video on it, gets them on the phone and then that’s it. The next one that I’ve seen that tends to work well is like when you say like it’s a free plus shipping, but in this case you don’t really need shipping.

It’s just a cheap book, right? It’s like a book that’s like usually a seven to $10 that can change based on the niche. Sometimes it’s going to $30 for investing, but it’s a cheap book that basically talks about the world. But not necessarily the how of a certain strategy. It may be a little bit it gives some, it gives value.

The person’s yeah, I want to learn more from this person. And then it has like, calls to action to get on a call, to learn more throughout that book. So the book is not quite a sales letter, but it’s not far off from one as well. And then from there, that sort of thing allows you to recoup some ad costs right away.

You can also put them through that traditional funnel. Maybe you have a course that you made a long time ago. They can fit in as a quick upsell, but everything in that funnel is meant to take people to the higher ticket, the call eventually.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I was recently at a business a mastermind and they’ve, said quizzes have been a lot of they’ve had really high conversions introducing a quiz.

Have you seen the same thing?

Chad Hamzeh: Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, a lot of our lists have been built off of surveys, polls, quizzes, that’s typically how we’ve done it for a few years. In our market it’s a little bit different, but the quizzes can, we’ve done it in health. We’ve done it in political type spaces, financial spaces.

Absolutely. There’s been too much talk like in the past 10 years of removing resistance, sorry. Removing friction from a sales process, right? Everyone’s oh no, make it frictionless If that was the case, I would just send somebody right to a product page every time and expect them to buy it doesn’t really work unless.

Add that you’re sending them from is just gangbusters and works well so often, especially in consulting, coaching, that sort of stuff. Having somebody to go through a quiz type process is really, smart because for one, it pre-qualifies the lead that’s going to come through to you that the person might just not qualify for what you have.

And secondly, it has the prospect thing. That the solution that you’re coming to is customized. We’ve, done things in the health space with video sales letters, where we put somebody through a quiz, like a short quiz, five to seven questions, and then based on the answers, the first minute of the video sales letter that they saw after it was different.

So it’d be like, oh your, weight loss type. Hey, and that means blah, blah, blah. It’s all factual, tied to the studies. But then what happens is it makes in the viewers mind, it makes it feel like it’s far more tailored of a solution. Okay. So that, that ties into the ingredients XYZ.

So yeah, for sure. I love quizzes. I love surveys, polls, all that sort of stuff. They’re great engagement devices, for sure.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: This is so fascinating. We’ve got to have you come back you’re you’re this is why I love marketing in the first place and just understanding most. Audience or the general public don’t know the psychology behind a lot of the marketing and, sometimes it can get us in trouble too. I don’t know. I’ll go out with my wife to dinner and they go, you know why they’re doing that for sure I do that.

Chad Hamzeh: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s hard for me to go to a website and not see the banner ads first. That’s the first thing I see. I see ads first

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: Oh man, this has been great.If someone wants to reach out to you, perhaps engage in your services, what’s the best place to go to? Yeah,

Chad Hamzeh: the best place is my agency site. It’s dsv2.com. Like David, Sam, Victor, the number two dot com. I always put that out there so that dsv2.com that’s the best way. Reach me there with a form on the site.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I have to ask you those, your kids are those, your college roommates.

Chad Hamzeh: It’s it’s like a version to the V2 of an old brand that I used to have.

That’s essentially it,

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: I thought those were your opponents that you beat on the ring. Could’ve been that too, nah

Chad Hamzeh: Maybe, I’ll change it to something that’s a little easier for people to, mouth, so

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming: we’ll see. Thank you so much. There was so much that we could go through. I know we’re just scratching the surface, but it just gets us thinking about traffic. There’s different ways to get traffic. It’s one of the best ways to get traffic is to use other people’s lists use their notoriety, use their relationship with the audience so you can get traffic as well. So thanks everybody for listening. Thank you again, Chad, and as always keep moving forward.

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Helping Physicians Master the Money Mindset with Elisa Chiang, MD

What is your relationship with money?  I know that sounds weird, but money is always a touchy subject, and it’s especially so when it comes to doctors. On the one hand, doctors are some of the highest-paid professionals in the country. On the other hand, we also have among the highest levels of student loan debt. And then there’s the fact that, as healers, our primary focus is on helping people, not making money.  It’s a wonder why the relationship can also be dysfunctional!

Here to help us navigate this is Dr. Elisa Chiang, an ophthalmologist, and physician life and money coach and a member of PhysicianCoaches.com. Elisa primarily works with physicians to master their money mindset so they can build wealth and practice medicine on their own terms. Elisa is here to help if you’re someone who needs help overcoming the mind blocks towards investing!

Dr. Elisa Chiang’s Website

www.GrowYourWealthyMindset.com

Dr. Elisa Chiang’s Physician Coaches Profile

https://www.physiciancoaches.com/coaching-category/elisa-chiang

Transcript:

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike. welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD from time to time, we love to highlight physician coaches that are in the trenches, helping our fellow doctors. And our next guest is someone that I got to finally get out, post COVID. I started going to conferences again, and we met at a conference at the white coat investor conference in.

And she’s actually one of our physician coaches and our physiciancoaches.com site. And she’s a really interesting backstory that I wanted to share with you. And I think you’ll be really inspired by her story. She’s a life and money coach. She’s also an ophthalmologist. She is a oculoplastic surgeon and she decided she wanted to become a coach to help physicians. master their money mindset so they can build wealth and practice medicine on their own terms. That will, that’s what we all want. She’s a certified coach through the life coach school and she offers one-on-one coaching on overcoming burnout, achieving new goals, understanding personal finance and overcoming the mind blocks towards investing, which I know there’s a lot of us out there.

We have these blocks that prevent us from investing in things. And you have to be ready to take a leap on those things. And she said, teach her how she was able to. Come that I want to welcome to the program. Dr. Elisa Chiang. How are you doing Elisa?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Thanks for having me. I’m doing great. I’m so happy to be here!,

Mike Woo-Ming: Did I totally butcher your name or did I get it close?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: No, you did a great job.

Mike Woo-Ming: So I’m going to talk about your journey because I think it’s always fascinating. There are some people who are listening to this are coaches already. Most of them are thinking about hiring coaches and some of, just saying maybe coaches is right for me, but they want to know more. So tell us about your story. How did you journey from being an ophthalmologist to becoming a coach and doing both things?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: I was working at a big hospital system, the only level one trauma center in Cleveland, Ohio, and I was on call 24 7 as the only oculoplastic specialist, which I agreed upon when I accepted the job. But the way my That’s supervisor wanted me to take call was not what, something we agreed upon.

So not to get into all the details, but essentially I know discussions that happen before you signed become totally forgotten. Right? Got to get it all in writing. So for me, it wasn’t really about the hours working that gave me burnout. It was really the complete loss of autonomy and, make decisions and just have control over, life.

Like I would spend a day just waiting to go to the, or, and getting. Case after case because something that’s affecting your eye or bed, doesn’t take, a gunshot wouldn’t obviously takes precedence over. No vision. Vision is very important, but life is more important and there’ll be days where I just be waiting to try to go to the oranges, get bummed after case.

And yeah, that was not how I wanted to continue spending my times. The pandemic was actually a blessing because it actually gave me more time off to think and figure out what I really wanted. And it’s also that time probably discovered coaching the leverage and growth summit, Sonny Smiths spoke at it.

And that was hosted by Peter Kim. And I’d been following Peter Kim for a long time. And that was when I first heard about coaching and she Sonny Smith had chained at the life coach school. So I started listening to life, coach school podcast, and really just got hooked. I binged it joined self coaching scholars.

And when the coach certification came up in September, I thought, wow, I’m not traveling, which is probably the biggest use of my income or, my discretionary budget. And, had a lot more time on my hands because I wasn’t getting together with people and doing a lot of social things.

So I went ahead to do the certification in order to just actually built a self-coach myself better. And I had heard other people who did the certification program. And just found a transformational because obviously it’s part of learning and being a coach, you pure coach. And so you get coached a lot and you also coach a lot.

And so you really learn how to coach yourself as well as coach. But I really just found, I love coaching. In a way I think physicians are attracted to coaching because it gives, what we are looking for in that patient doctor, patient relationship. You really also find in the coach client relationship and you can really develop very deep bonds that way and really help people.

And, I think, the idea of helping people is underlying for, most of us, most people who go to medical.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now I got to know you a little bit when we went to Phoenix and from understanding, you came from a pretty academic background, straight into sciences.

And, there were a lot of doctors who come from that, they’re going straight from pre-med to med school, straight into residency, and let’s face it. They view coaching as woo or, way in opposite direction. We learn as doctors. Did you have struggles with that or was that something you embraced?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Pretty quickly, it’s funny, I tried reading quotes health books before, and the practice of gratitude and that really never. Struck a chord with me. I like never finished those books. But when I heard about the model that Brooke Castillo, uses, it really just made a lot of sense to me.

And when I really broke it down and thought about it, I was like, yeah, that really actually works. And it’s essentially a lot of like behavioral cognitive therapy. That’s in that. It wasn’t actually wooed to me the way that it was presented. So I didn’t have that dissonance when. The kind of life coaching, the life coach school does.

Mike Woo-Ming: For those who aren’t familiar with her teaching, maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.

What, in particular, in terms of the cognitive behavioral aspects of it that you could share with us?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Yeah. So there’s something we call the model and basically there are circumstances in the world and these are things we can’t change. And these are actual facts, you can go to a court of law and this would be after.

And then there’s our thoughts about those circumstances and different people are going to have different thoughts about the same circumstance. It’s our thoughts, and actually create how we feel about, all the feelings that we have and how we feel about the world. And from those feelings actually is what pushes us to take whatever actions we take.

And then that gives us the results that you know, that we see that we get. You can’t even take something like… 9/11. Most Americans would say 9/11 was a terrible strategy, but if you’re the Taliban, 9/11 was a great win. So that’s so the circumstance of 9/11, but the thought could be, it was tragic.

People die like horrible loss of life, or it could be like, “oh, this was a big win.” This was sticking it to the Americans. Like just from different views and depending on how you’re thinking about it, that, if you’re thinking like it’s a tragedy, then you might be sad or angry or, but if you’re thinking it’s a big win you’re elated, so that really makes sense.

And our brains are really wired in order to protect us from a primitive standpoint. So basically in general, we want to see pleasure, reduce pain and be as lazy as possible.

Mike Woo-Ming: So when you were in your peer coaching, how did that help you with your career? You said you suffered burnout. How did, how were you able to help turn that around?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Yeah, so it really actually got me out of my burnout. What I realized is, okay, there are circumstances, but how I’m thinking about these things at the time, everything basically went to a thought that just brought frustration. And I learned that. You can actually change your thoughts and it does take work to change those thoughts, but, I can actually modify things to be like, okay how, how can I look at the same situation and make it into something more positive or efficient?

Or what can I, what do I have control over? What can I do for a better outcome? And that really didn’t make a huge.

Mike Woo-Ming: So many of us, we do feel powerless, which is often an ingredient for anxiety and burnout. And if we were able to achieve that power, that’s just one thing that we’re where we have, we can, empower us to accomplish our goals and our dreams.

So you were, you mentioned you were your job was affected by the pandemic. They reduce your hours. How was it affected?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Yeah. So there was a time where we basically shut down and I only saw patients once or twice a week. And it was really just the patients that were deemed urgent to see.

And luckily, because I was on call 24/7. I was technically working all the time, so I didn’t get furloughed or have to use up my vacation and sick time, which other people did have to use up. But yeah, there were a few months where it was really reduced time at work. And then, eventually the clinics did reopen and it’s, at some point there was just actually a flood of patients because of all the backlog from patients not being seen for some time.

Mike Woo-Ming: So what made your decision? Now you’re getting busy, again, most of us would just go back to what we were doing. You decided to explore coaching. How were you able to do that?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: So I decided, after actually getting better and getting out of burnout I did not want to stay at that hospital.

I decided in doing the certification program, it’s six months of actual coaching training and then six months of kind of additional training, either an entrepreneurship or more coach training, depending on what you do.

So to back up a little bit… I had started thinking about even before the pandemic hit, leaving the hospital and starting my own private practice, but in doing the coaching and really enjoying the coaching. And then also just thinking about the pandemic and then thinking about how much regulation there isn’t medicine. I basically thought, I think I’d rather start a coaching business and start my own private practice just in terms of like with the coaching business, there is total location freedom, and when you start a private practice, now you’re building a practice just in that area.

And now you’re still restricted to the location that you’ve started, your practice. It the overhead, obviously for coaching way less than having to get a brick and mortar lease and equipment and staff and know all that from the get-go. I didn’t want to leave medicine and starting a coaching business was also something I thought I can do kind of part-time well, if I go to working as a physician part-time whereas if I start my own private practice, that’s a full-time thing to start.

But then in the beginning you don’t necessarily have a full load of patients and but you have a lot of expenditures that you’re putting out and it’s a lot of work to get patients in the beginning and it can take quite some time to actually become established. So basically, I already had that entrepreneurial spirit.

My father is actually a business professor and my mom was an entrepreneur. She at one point that started her own computer business. It wasn’t a foreign concept to me of starting a business. And I’ve actually been investing in real estate since 2008. And, the way you invest in real estate is you really need to think of your real estate investments as a business, as well as if you’re going to be successful at.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. So let’s talk about it because you’re not only life coach, you’re also a wealth coach or a money coach. So talk about how did that shift, you mentioned you were, you did real estate A decade ago. Tell us about your cutting your financial journey as well.

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: I’ve always loved money even as a kid. And I really credit my parents for kind of teaching good money habits of understanding the value of money. Understanding money comes from. No, as a kid, I did do like side jobs in order to earn money babysitting. I actually taught people how to use their computers and made $15 an hour at that, which was actually pretty good money.

But I would say I was still in that self-employed mindset as opposed to a business owner mindset as a kid and, At some point during, so I did a MD-PhD program, which is eight years. And, in retrospect, I realized that during grad school I was burning out too.

So because the MD-PhD program is on average eight years and I did in Cleveland, Ohio, which has relatively low cost of living for housing. A lot of MD-PhD students actually do purchase their own home. And I ended up purchasing the house from my parents actually because my father took a new job.

And so Kim moved out and my parents were actually getting ready to sell the house when I moved back to Cleveland to go to that school at case Western reserve university. And so I started just reading about personal finance in order to like, get the mortgage and understand all that and just really getting fascinated and reading more and more reading about investing. I started following the Motley Fool. I started investing in stocks and individual stock picking. I never did like options or like day trading, but, actually like reading business reports At some point, I read rich dad, poor dad, which then got me interested in real estate. And then by that point I was in grad school and I’m not really a happy grad student.

So I started thinking about investing. Okay. In order to try to get to financial freedom as soon as possible. So I was thinking that even before becoming a physician and actually graduating med school and so I started going to the local real estate investment groups. I actually purchased real estate courses and I flipped two houses. Got to know a lot of other people did some I had a friend that we partnered on some deals together. So yeah, I really started at the real estate investing as a grad school.

Mike Woo-Ming: So you said your first property was for your parents?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: I bought the house. I grew up in from my parents. That’s the one we ended up in.

Mike Woo-Ming: And so your parents, your tenants, are you charging rent?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: So that was our primary residence. So my father had already moved to California for his new job and my mom was getting ready to sell the house. And then we were, so I got to move home for a little bit, and live free for a little while.

And then we started looking to buy a place since we knew we were going to be there for at least eight years. And, as we were looking around, then I started discussing with my parents. No, could we work something out so we could just buy the home? It would make it so that they didn’t have to go through the hassle of actually putting the house on the market and we get to stay in the house.

So that was I wouldn’t consider that being in investment. Your primary home is a place to live, but really it’s still a liability, right? Like it costs you money every month and doesn’t bring in any money or cashflow. But that was at least the impetus to start really reading about personal finance, just the, getting the mortgage and, understanding we actually ended up getting a seven one arm.

So just understanding the different kinds of mortgages when. You know how they all work, what the library index was like, all that was like banging to me like that.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, it’s learning. I can, I never nomenclature as we do in medicine, and you have to understand all of those different temps. So you started to do flipping, you started to do some rehab. Sounds like some flipping. And then did you tell us about your real estate portfolio now? Did you increase it or you just continuing to flip or what’s it made of.

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Yeah. So when I started buying it was so the flip side did I bought foreclosed houses. So bank owned, foreclosures fix the up, sold the, did it again. And and then I said it with a partner and we actually bought some houses and those were rentals. And so I helped manage, I helped her find them and manage them. Went back to med school. I actually found that I really did enjoy ophthalmology.

And so I did do residency and fellowship and I didn’t move to Chicago for residency and then Milwaukee for fellowship. So at that point I wasn’t doing any real estate investing just because now I’m in a different market. And you’re pretty busy as a resident. Chicago is a whole different price range than Cleveland.

But I always had, in the back of my mind, I would get back into it. In fact, there was a part of me that just thought, like all doctors invest in real estate because all wealthy people invest in real estate. That was the way to build wealth. I don’t know if that was just from reading that gave me that thought.

But yeah cause I didn’t really know a lot of doctors, there aren’t many doctors in my family. I only have one cousin who’s a doctor. But that’s really it. Yeah. And she actually doesn’t invest in real estate. So I don’t know why I thought all doctors investment real estate, but my first job was out in Virginia and I did actually start looking into real estate investing there.

Learning that market was like completely different. And so when that job didn’t work out, We’re turning Cleveland was one of the reasons was actually like I knew the market in Cleveland, I know the different areas and I really want to get back into the real estate investing.

And, I have some contacts who are likely still around in Cleveland and then also was, returning home. I had made friends during the MD-PhD years that were that are still in Cleveland and no, it’s a little hard to make friends in your adults. So a lot of things that were driving us to come back to Cleveland.

And so that’s where I am now. And so this is, so I do real estate invest in Cleveland. I have long-term rentals in Cleveland, and I have a short term rental in the Hocking Hills area, which is in Ohio about two and a half hours away.

Mike Woo-Ming: And do you have a game plan? Do you say, ” I’m going to get out like 180 a year, two properties a year?” Do you have any goals for that or you just see what opportunities are out there?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: I think of looking at different opportunities, looking at ways to diversify. So I also invest in syndications as well.

Mike Woo-Ming: And tell me about your syndications for those who may not know we’ve done a program, we’ve had a few people talk about syndications, but for those who don’t know, can you tell us about syndications?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: When you’ve essentially got a real estate investment. Say, if you think about a large apartment complex, like a 300 unit apartment complex, typically you don’t have just like one person owning that. It takes a lot of capital in order to do that. So you typically have, what’s called a sponsor who finds the deal and then needs to get some investors to work together in order to have the down payment and potentially money to rehab or fix up their property in order to buy.

300 unit apartment complex. So that’s what becomes the syndication. So when you invest in syndication, basically you’re investing in the company, that’s buying whatever real estate, this large real estate property. So it might not be just an apartment complex big commercial buildings or self storage or a development like building a whole bunch of, townhouses or no, any big development projects.

So these can all be syndication projects. And basically you, as an investor are investing, with the sponsor, who’s leading the deal. And and then, when you can, depending on the syndication, you may have cashflow that comes back to you paid out through the time that you’re involved in syndication.

And at some point they’re going to sell the property or refinance, and you’re going to, get back your initial investment and hopefully a good return.

Mike Woo-Ming: So you decided to teach about money mindset or a money coach. Can you tell us about what exactly is a wealth coach or a mind coach or a money coach and why should someone go out and seek these types of coaches?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: So a lot of times physicians are smart, right? Like it’s hard to get into medical school and, get, we do amazing things as physicians, but a lot of physicians really don’t. We don’t learn anything about finance and in any part of our education, right? Not in high school, not in college, not in in medical school, not in residency.

And, as we alluded to earlier finances has its own in some jargon, its own language. And so it can be really difficult to understand. And, lot of times we’ll see… talking to, someone who knows about finances or like a financial advisor, and they’ll use all these terms.

And, we, as physicians, don’t like to actually quote, “look dumb” and sometimes we’ll just agree and think okay. And we also, as physicians think, okay, like we’re the expert of our specialty. So now I’m going to go to an expert of finances and they’re going to do right for me and do.

What, what should be done. But the reality of the situation is that most financial advisors are not truly, what’s called fiduciary and doing what’s best for you. Most financial advisors are really glorified salesman of financial products. And a lot of times those are not financial products are actually good for you.

They’re ones that pay a really nice commission to the financial advisor. And I’m not saying that financial advisors are necessarily evil. And some of them really believe these products are really helpful and there are situations where the products are helpful, but I think a lot of times they get sold more to people who it’s really not that helpful.

And really, I think most physicians who do a lot better managing their money themselves, then leaving it to, a financial advisor. Or if you are going to use a financial advisor, you don’t get one that’s fee only get a plan, and then you really execute. And a lot of physicians feel like “I don’t have the time for that. I don’t have the time to learn that.” And it really doesn’t take that much time or effort to make a huge difference on your wealth and your ability to really build wealth. And so working in that money mindset, I think it’s really important to understand like, Any physician is smart enough to learn enough about their finances to manage their money, to really build wealth. Even generational wealth so that their kids and their grandkids are successful. I’m going to retain that wealth of it that is built.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah! I can give you a first example. When I graduated residency I was given two financial advisors. One was someone that, the guy ahead of me used and he seemed more interested in selling his particular product than actually helping me.

And the other one was really, it was a disguise networking opportunity. So I didn’t get the best. I didn’t get the best financials. And you talk a lot, especially on your website, going through it about the mindset. And I think for many of us too, who are physicians and especially now I know how it was for me was, usually we have a lot of loans.

And when we’re in medical schools, I remember medical lids and residency, we sign paperwork, we don’t know exactly what we’re signing, but we know that, somewhere down the line, we’re going to have to pay this off and we keep pushing it away and pushing it away. And I think too, it wasn’t until I actually like, sir, wrote down and like circle that number and made that a target to actually confront it, for me, that’s what helped me.

And I think, there’s a book out I’m reading right now called The Psychology Of Money and it’s almost all mindset. It’s almost on mindset. And I think when I work with doctors who have issues with money is they feel like they can, I work with a lot of practice owners.

They feel like I hired this person and they can deal with it. And when I’m actually understanding, like, when I find out like why their practice isn’t doing well, it’s because they’re not willing to confront. Is that just some of the things that you try to do as a money coach?

Yeah, definitely. So a lot of times people, they don’t want to look at their finances.

They just, see that they’ve got money coming in and they spend the money and. There’s at least enough money to in their bank account to actually pay for whatever they spend. But they’re not necessarily thinking long-term, they’re not necessarily thinking about like their investments and how to grow their wealth.

And what’s the best way to do that so that eventually everyone wants to retire. You may not want to retire early lifespans are becoming longer and you probably don’t want to be working when you’re a hundred. And if you’re a surgeon, you probably can’t really me safely operating when you’re a hundred.

They have pilots who have, they have to retire. I think I get 58, but for medicine, Hey, you can keep going. So I never did understand that. So talk about some of the things that you talk about as a money coach, how you help your doctor clients.

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: That’s a lot of it was investing is overcoming fear, especially people who want to get into real estate investing. You look at how many people will take a real estate investing course, but then, all of them never even get through the course or if they do get through the course, they never buy that first property.

And once you get over the hurdle, the first poppy and there’s always going to be some quote failures, someplace where you lose some money or things weren’t optimal. But the more you learn, the easier it becomes to just keep doing it.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, for sure. My thing is somebody has figured it out and, you’re.

I don’t think you can be, if you want to be do well, you’d want to be the best surgeon. You need to follow and shadow gonna work on your surgeon. So if you want to study financial success is to find out people who are already successful in what they’re doing. And I think, it’s funny.

Cause when we talk about mindset, That’s usually what the part is. I don’t want, I’m not really interested in that, that I want to know about this hot new stock or this hot new cryptocurrency that everybody wants to buy and that’s going to solve my issues. Now it’s having to deal with the mindset if that crashes, or it goes down and really understanding what your risk tolerance is.

And as doctors, we’re pretty much risk averse. That’s part of what we do. The thing that’s important, for us to maintain it, just so it’s so surprising that many aren’t willing to to look at directly in the eye and feel it and say, this is what I need to work on. Do you see the same?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Yeah. And so certainly you talked about cryptocurrency or even the stock market. There are fluctuations, there are ups and downs and yes, the stock market has been doing amazingly for the last few years, but as we’ve seen recently, what goes up will come down and that’s just a natural part of the stock market, but when you think about it, you want to buy things when they’re on sale, right? Like you don’t want to pay top dollar. Like we understand this when we go buy material items, but when it comes to stocks, like just because the stock price is down, doesn’t mean the intrinsic workings of the companies that represent that stock are actually down, there’s always going to be some kind of perceived value in fluff, and then there’s the value of the company itself. And so if you can actually buy, when stocks are going down, when it goes back up and grows again, like that’s when you’re really going to, grow some more wealth cryptocurrency, lots of up and down. And so if you can stomach the ups and downs and you end up selling low and then it like, blows up and you essentially will never create wealth out.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now I want to talk to you too. And I appreciate your time here. I’m curious about your your stocks investing, many of us say, we should invest in what we know.

Is that a philosophy that you do, do you do invest in stocks that you do, or do you allow to do a lot of speculation?

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: For stocks, I mostly invest just in index funds. I do have some individual stocks that I still own from back when I first started learning about investing and was reading lot of the Motley fool and actually reading like business statements. So I’ve just held on to some of those stocks. One of them being like Starbucks, which, has significantly grown since I bought it in like 2005.

Mike Woo-Ming: I invested in a company every day!

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Addictive substance, right?

Mike Woo-Ming: Yes. Yes. That’s right. It’s my… it’s my pusher so I think it really depends. On, where you are in your journey, for me, I am like, I’ve got some conservative stuff when I’ve gotten my index funds, I’ve got those that I don’t even look at them.

I look at them like once a year, and then I’ve got my, individual stocks. I tend to do more, I like, I tend to do stocks that are things that I believe in, I have a Tesla, so I support Tesla. You have Apple, I’m an Apple ecosystem. I have Apple dividends from that.

And then I just have, a small portion. I did a talk on cryptocurrency, but that’s a very small portion of what my net worth is. And, I see. I see too many doctors who want to do, like what’s the newest and hottest thing. And I think you’re just going to get wrecked after a while, unless you can tolerate those that the volatility, sure.

One crypto currency might go to the moon. It might even be in the next Ethereum Sheba, whatever it is, but for every shoe, but you knew it was there like 99 other coins that, that can wreck you. But it has to do with the mindset. Can you. How do you react to when those things go down and like you said, the often will go down even real estate.

We all know that real estate’s on a high, but we also know too that, things can level off and you may not get the returns that that you’ve had before. What are some tactics that you help your clients with in, in their mindset and.

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: I think one really important thing.

When working with my clients about investing and where they want to go is really talking about their why. And if they have a really strong why that can pull them through the hard times. Especially if they’re interested in doing something like real estate investing, which while passive is really… if you’re doing direct ownership from real estate, it is nothing but passive in the beginning.

It is definitely a lot of work, especially right now, the market has been really hot. So even finding deals in may just take offer after offer. And, sometimes you just want to bite and just go for something and get it. But, you make your money when you buy.

And if you buy too high, like you’re, it’s possible to salvage that with, time and appreciation, but you really want to be smart when you buy the property and do your due diligence. And there’s a lot of upfront cost to that, right? You’re paying for inspectors or paying for other, expert opinions to come in.

We’ve got to look up all the regulations of the city that you’re investing in and those regulations can change, right? The city can pass a new ordinance, which could, really cut into your cashflow and you have to be prepared for that. And that’s why I’m got to make sure that any property you buy is positive cashflow.

And then you’re not just banking on appreciation because yes, while you’ll see appreciates over time, and it’s been appreciating a lot recently, back in 2008, there was a time where real estate really didn’t appreciate. So that primary residence I bought… I bought my home for my parents.

So we bought that in 2003, and when we sold in 2016 and basically was essentially the same value because the value had dropped in 2008 and, basically took till 2016 to level out. And then now, so 2016 is when I went to Virginia, I came back in 2019, and sadly, in those three years, that’s when all the appreciation happens.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. It tends to happen that way too. You never know. But on the other hand too, you might experience some like really big numbers just because you are more active, you are taking more of a risk and let’s say perhaps it’s indication, you could argue whether or not that is there’s always a give and take, right?

So it really comes down to, where you are and what you’re willing to. For lack of a better term stomach or what going to able to do. But for the most part, I think, the best thing to do is to do the best thing not to do is just to do nothing, because I think we all learned that, one of the most scariest things I believe in is just having one job. And I think you would agree with that as well. Yeah. That’s, for me, that’s the most scariest thing.

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Because if you think about it. People feel like, oh, my physician job is secure. If you lose your physician job, like it can take quite a while to get a new one and you may have to move for that.

And maybe you’re not in a position to easily move, right? Like your spouse has a job. Your kids are in school. Your family is nearby. But you may have a non-compete and now you’ve got to drive like an hour or two hours away. To work somewhere else.

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. You never know what can happen, you never know what can happen. I learned from a a hand surgeon who it was during my rotation and one night after call, he put his hand under his his bed and he ended up having a permanent nerve palsy and he could not operate. Again don’t know if you had, some type of insurance, disability, insurance, but you never know what could, what could happen.

We can walk down the street, we could get in an accident. There’s always things and that can happen. And, we’re only, don’t want to get metaphysical on this, but, we’re, we only got one time that we’re on this earth. We want to make the best of. How are we going to do it?

I think it’s through. And I think you agree through multiple streams of income, start looking at different avenues and realize, that there are no assurances in life

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: And even tomorrow is not guaranteed.

Mike Woo-Ming: Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Eliza, this has been wonderful. If somebody wanted to find more information about what you do, maybe a search for your coaching services, working with.

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: So probably the best place to go is my website, which is grow your wealthy mindset.com. There, there are links to all my other social media. I have I’m on Facebook. I am on Instagram. I have a YouTube channel. And I often do webinars and even free coaching sessions. So take a look for that.

Mike Woo-Ming: Take a look at that. Thank you, Elisa. It was very illuminating. Thank you for everything that you do and keep helping more doctors out there cause we definitely need it.

Elisa Chiang MD, PhD: Thank you so much.

Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you again. And as always guys don’t stay stagnant. If you only have one income, start thinking about there’s other sources it’s investing could be real estate. It could be the stock market, whatever you deal. You need to start thinking about these things. The worst thing you can do is not do anything. It always keep moving forward.

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