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Achieving Success in the World of Medical Devices as a Physician Inventor with Swarna Balasubramaniam, MD

Shark Tank makes it look so easy!  But coming up with something new isn’t like it is on the TV show, especially if you are a physician inventor and looking to enter the landscape of medical devices.  Filing for patents and writing business plans, pitching potential investors, while at the same time seeing a full waiting room for patients can take its toll. 

But for surgeon Dr. Swarna Balasubramaniam,  it has all been worth it.  After countless abdominal surgeries, she created a device that could shorten hospital stays and improve patient outcomes.   Now the CEO and founder of Noleus Technologies,  Dr. Swarna Balasubramaniam has now dedicated her life to bringing this cost-saving medical device to the marketplace. All potential and active inventors need to listen to her inspiring story on this episode!

https://www.noleustechnologies.com – Noleus Technologies

Contact Information for Swarna Balasubramaniam, MD

swarna@noleustechnologies.com

Transcript:

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey it’s Dr. Mike, welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD . This is the podcast for physician entrepreneurs , I love spotlighting physicians, medical doctors, who are in the trenches, who are starting their own businesses and really putting themselves out there.

Because as it’s not one of the most easiest things out there to do. And. We’ve got a great guest today. I think we actually met we were both speaking in Texas with our mutual friend, Dr. Michelle Mudge, Riley. She has a conference called physician helping physicians, and I got to know her a little bit more.

We were on  a session virtual session this summer. And eventually we got, I said, I’m wanting to interview you. Eventually. We got our schedules together. She’s a very busy, female physician and being a physician entrepreneur. So I’m so excited to have her on Swarna. I’ve just got to quickly read your bio and then we’ll get right to it!

She is  Dr. Swarna Balasubramaniam  a surgeon inventor and a full-time medical device entrepreneur. She actually recently left her practice last year. She’s the founder of Noleus Technologies. It’s a Houston based medical device company, focused on developing and commercializing innovative technologies.

Intended to accelerate, recover and to improve outcomes after surgery. She’s a board-certified colorectal and general surgeon by training as 20 years of experience as a practicing surgeon and surgical practice owner in Sugarland, Texas raised in Boston, completed medical school and general surgery training at an institution I’m familiar with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

She actually came out here to the west coast as a general surgeon at Kaiser Permanente for two years prior to completing a colon and rectal surgery fellowship at USC, she was experiencing basic science research in the areas of radiologic imaging, cardio, renal physiology, molecular oncology, and clinical translational surgical research.

And. Dr. Balasubramaniam, I am so excited to have you on the program today. Thank you for coming on Bootstrap MD.

Swarna: Mike, it’s my pleasure. And you did a great job there not only saying my name, but with my background, it was a lot of different things going on there. It’s been a long ride and it’s not over yet.

And I’m having a great time doing what I’m doing and, part of what I love doing in addition to this new career I’m in. Is letting physicians know that this is a possibility with a medical degree. And so I’m excited to come on your show and share that passion with your listeners to see if they might get a Pearl or two that helps them on their journey.

Mike Woo-Ming: Again, it’s a pleasure to having you on. And when I interviewed physician entrepreneurs, I’m always curious about their background how it got started. So when you first were deciding to start your own company, was that something that. You initially did prior to applying for medical school or how did this all come about?

Swarna: Life is just a, sometimes a long walk and then you take the opportunities when they come. My story begins that I actually was never going to go to medical school. So I actually was a chemistry major in college and I was going to go to graduate school in chemistry. And I was really good at research and everyone pretty much had slotted me for that and myself as well.

Yeah. The problem was, I didn’t really enjoy any of the summer internships. I had doing that. And suddenly in my third year of college, I decided I want to go to medical school because the only thing that seemed interesting in this research job I had at the national Institute of health was the doctor who was doing research.

And I said, I’m going to do medical research and be a doctor. My parents were like, what. What’s his big change, but I just decided, so I’m just that person. And then after I did that, I basically did more research and I thought I was going to have an academic career. And then I something bad happened in my residency.

My mom actually died. And life throws all kinds of roadblocks in your way. And at that point I was exhausted. I, Push myself through a surgical residency, which was not so easy. I was doing all kinds of things. And I decided at that point, instead of doing a fellowship right away, I would go ahead and work, of course, that didn’t please any of my academic attendings at all, but nonetheless, it was what was needed.

And so I went to work. As you pointed out at Kaiser, in Southern California. And after a couple of years, I did a lot of things there. We implemented some new technologies Localized breast cancer surgery instead of having mastectomy did some other things. And then I decided, you know what, I need to go back and see if I still want to be an academic surgeon.

So I went back to USC was really lucky. Dr. Bob Barrett was head of the program there and he took me into his program and. It was just great. I just liked what I was doing. And I think part of it was an ability to focus more on something. And along the way, he ran a really robust clinical research program where he did a lot of work with industry.

And that seemed interesting to me. And then I tried an academic job working in New York with one of the Montefiore, with the Montefiore system. Tim at one of their hospitals, but ultimately there were a lot of issues, which I won’t even get into. And I decided to take a job in Texas. And that’s how I ran to Texas as fast as I could.

And I worked for a large multi-specialty group practice. And then basically after I did that, I decided I would be better off working for myself. I wanted that control of my schedule, which I really wasn’t getting. And so I opened practice here in suburban Houston. Then, which is a super, it was a super growing area, even as little as 10, 12 years ago and practiced.

And I had a great practice. I really enjoy taking care of my patients, but I think it happens to a lot of people, as they progress in their career, Practice of medicine is great, but if you’re not an academic or in a large institution, there’s only so much so far, you can go with it.

And there’s a certain certain kinds of biases against women still. And people certainly have minority status. And I just saw that, I thought to myself I turned 45 one day and I said, what am I going to do with the rest of my career? I got another 20 years of this and, am I going to keep doing the same thing?

And I dabbled in doing other things. I thought about, doing opening a surgery center, doing all kinds of things. And I just kept thinking I got to do something else. Cause this was just not stimulating enough. And along the way, I basically had an idea and the backstory is about 15 years before that I had an idea for a medical device because when we operate, we have all kinds of technical problems.

And we, at that time, it was a technical problem with taking gallstones out. We doing a lot of laparoscopic gallbladder surgery and we had to manually crushed the gallstones before we remove the gallbladder, which sounds crazy. And I was like, hey, there must be a little device. We can , invent to do this.

To make this go faster. So I drew a picture and then basically talked to a bunch of engineers. Everyone said it was done. There was nothing out there. And I didn’t do anything else because back in 2000, what did I know? I just kept operating. And then when I moved to Houston, a rep walked in my office with a device.

That basically was my idea from that many years ago, from 10 years before that, I was like, Hey, I was sad and I was. Glad all at the same time. So this time when I had an idea back in 2015, I was like, Oh, remember that time when your idea was pretty good, maybe this is a good one. And so I just started following it and basically found patent attorney to try and see whether anyone else had thought of it.

And, having a little bit of experience from my previous dive into devices and then. I got a lot of encouragement. The patent attorneys were really excited and they knew more about it. I didn’t really understand it, but with their guidance, I just kept following it. And then basically it just it started to consume me this device to help patients recover faster after abdominal surgery.

I think your physician audience will understand that every time people have abdominal surgery, they have this period where their intestines don’t work and they’re stuck in the hospital waiting basically to pass gas, eat and go home. And that’s, pretty long stay. It can be anywhere from five days to two weeks, depending on the patient and the surgery and all kinds of other comorbidities.

And so I was just got more and more obsessed with this idea and I knew it would work. Because it’s basically a translation of an existing technology. So I just kept following it along. And then basically, one time, one day what happened was basically at the end of 2018, it was swallowing up so much of my time to do this.

And I realized I was having so much more fun following my device than I was practicing, which was great because surgeons always say, what’s the best thing you can do. What’s the most fun you can have with them. Your clothes on and that’s operating, but, that’s the thing about it that it just became so enticing to think of helping so many people at once instead of one belly or one hemorrhoid at a time, I was like, okay, this is the thing to do that in 2019, I basically stopped practicing and have been working on this full-time ever since.

And so I think, one of the things I hear from a lot of physicians who are thinking about, leaving medicine is they don’t like practice. And I hear that because, and I feel that because one of the things about practices it’s become really administratively difficult. And I think also, you get to mid career and really not, everyone has an opportunity to keep doing different things.

I think, if you’re an academic institution or you have a lot of Kind of administrative roles for a medical society. You have some different things to do, but not everyone is either drawn to those or has those opportunities. And I was in the same boat, but I think it’s really important to find something else that you get excited about.

It becomes a lot easier to leave medicine. I think it’s harder to leave. Because it is a risk. You make a good salary as a physician and it’s difficult to leave all of that, unless you have something else that’s, exciting and worth taking that risk for. So I’ll stop there and see, what kind of feedback you have about that?

I totally agree. As someone who has coached and worked with doctors in the past, many of them have been burnt out and they look to entrepreneurship as a way. Of going there. But I think the thing that you bring up is you have to be passionate about whatever you’re going to be doing. If, whether you’ve inventing something or you’re starting a business, because I see people who, yeah, I want to start a business, but I can tell they really don’t have the passion for it, or they don’t feel like they don’t have the experience to do.

Mike Woo-Ming:  And I said there were other things that you can do. You can go in and do some non-clinical work or something that’s a bit different. Maybe taking away from the patients. So business is not necessarily. The answer, but I think what you brought up is that you did have a passion for it. You did have, you had a problem.

You knew that there was a problem. You had a solution that can reduce the amount of time that you’re spending in the hospital, saving, thousands, perhaps millions of dollars, multi-millions of dollars. And,

Swarna: But I want to bring up one point what you said there. My, I didn’t really have a lot of experience in business, so I think, no one really has any experience.

I think the big thing is that, you have to, you have to spend some time figuring out if what you want to do besides practice is exciting to you. So I think that’s the big thing. So I think, there’s a lot of different things you can do. And I basically, worked on this for three and a half years while I was still practicing.

Now I cut my practice back a little bit, but I made sure that this was exciting and viable before I left. And so I think, it’s not really about experience cause I think it’s tough to have experience because medical training is. So all consuming, but I do think, definitely whatever you try out, you can do on the side, because that’s a great thing about medicine.

You can maybe even if you don’t own your own practice, you can try and negotiate some shifts or something. So many physicians are employed. Now you can work your schedule. So you have a little bit of free time every week to work on your side project and see if it’s viable. And it has holding power for you.

Mike Woo-Ming: And just as an, as in medical school, no one had any experience, but they threw us in front of patients in third year medical school. So we learned from mentors, we learned from attendings. So in your. In your entrepreneur journey. Did you have mentors? Did you have family members who were entrepreneurs that you could ask for advice?

Swarna: Oh, heck no, the thing about it is that the entrepreneurial community is very giving. So the one thing about it is in entrepreneurship, people help each other, and so there are these, all these resources out there where you basically, go and ask people for a little bit of help at a time, and then you get feedback and development help.

And, those exist at universities and different cities and then accelerators. And so they’re in different business verticals. So if you wanna. I’m in medical devices and life sciences, you go seek out help in those kinds of situations. So there are a lot of resources out there.

I think it’s difficult. To say that anyone would have entrepreneurship because when an entrepreneurship, if someone has A different kind of businessing, like owning golf courses or owning different kinds of business. It really is very different than what I’m doing. And so I think it’s difficult to find it so close, but there is a plenty of resources out there to find that stuff you just have to start looking and, with the internet these days, you just can surf the web and get a lot of information about what to do.

And if you are interested, if people are interested in. Learning about, device entrepreneurship or life science, entrepreneurship, you can simply go to the web and look up like Y Combinator is a great accelerator and they talk. And so accelerators are places where ideas and small companies become big companies and they grow ideas and develop.

Them and, commercialize them. And so you could simply go to that website and see what they have to say and all the components, and then, start working on something. They even have a free it’s called startups school, where you can learn about the different components of doing stuff like that.

Now, I didn’t know about that before I started, but I think he’s a great resource, entrepreneurship has really come a long way with the internet. And especially, I would say in the past few years, it’s there’s a lot more resources. And this year in particular, because of the pandemic, there’s an enormous amount of resources that have been put onto the web.

So I think I would tell your listeners if they’re interested at all to check out those few resources and then, you can learn more by. Contacting people are going around, but the number one thing, if you really want to leave medicine and do something else is you got to get a LinkedIn profile going.

I see so many doctors that are not on LinkedIn and the business world revolves around LinkedIn. And if you’re not on LinkedIn, it’s really hard to connect with other people.

Mike Woo-Ming: Well, a lot of information there, a lot of great how to information that you just gave. So let’s say a physician is listening to this call right now.

They have this idea. They’ve had it for the last six months a year. They found us some they’re invented something it’s worked in their own clinic and now they want to take it and they want to see where they can go. Your recommendation was to be a fine incubators in their

Swarna: community. Yeah, I think that would be reasonable.

Or you could go to a Y Combinator. The first thing you need to know is that, something needs a patent. You, you need to need to assess there’s two parts to every medical invention. There’s the medical part of it, which doctors are great at knowing if something is actually gonna sell.

Solve a problem. And then there’s the business side of it, which is a great mystery to most doctors. And so the business side of it is how do you make money with the thing? And that is quite specific. And it’s also quite different based on each type of thing, whether it’s a test or a drug or, a diagnostic test or a device.

And so it’s really variable. Now doctors have some advantages because they understand insurance, at least some doctors do, but so the business part of it is where most doctors need lots of help. And so that’s where, going to accelerators or going to your local university business school and see if someone will help you.

To make an idea of understanding a business plan is really important. And I would say that the very best thing to do is to just start reaching out. There’s no course, that’s going to make you an expert at this, but you just have to start reaching out for help. But I will tell doctors that if you have an idea don’t go and publish it on the internet or go blabbing to a lot of people, because then it becomes difficult to patent that idea.

And a patent is important in, making sure that you protect your idea so that it can make money.

Mike Woo-Ming: Okay, so then the next step would be one of the steps you do is find a patent is that the time where you should start considering. Having an attorney on board to considering doing NDAs and things like that.

Swarna: Oh, I think, you can find a PA a patent attorney and you don’t need any huge names. You need someone with obviously, some experience in the field and you file. What’s called a non-provisional one-year patent. Just protect your idea. Yeah. And then you have anyone you tell, you have them sign a non-disclosure agreement, and then you start feeling out whether your idea has any business legs.

And I think, doctors are pretty good at knowing whether their idea has a real medical legs, in the sense that it’ll solve a problem and it’s needed. But really the business part of it is where I see doctors are a little bit weak and. I think it’s normal because we don’t get any business training.

Now, on the other hand, there’s a ton of these business guys and engineers who have ideas, especially in the medical device world, but they have no idea whether it’s going to solve a medical problem because medicine is very complex and unique with the workflow and stuff. So I think, from from the standpoint of not understanding the business side of it versus not understanding the medical side of it, we’re at a huge advantage.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now let’s talk about it. Your situation. So you had. You started you had your device, how did you start spreading it? Did you have colleagues that you wanted to, for them to test these? How did, how did it start for you?

Swarna: Yeah, so that’s great. So I started off wondering if it, my idea, I felt like someone must’ve thought of it. I was just like, God, it’s like technology. That’s already out there. It’s negative pressure therapy and someone must’ve thought of this utility. And so I was just, basically, that was why my first step was to go to a patent attorney and say, I’m sure someone thought of this.

And they were shockingly no one’s thought of it. And I was like, really that’s crazy. So then we filed the patent and then I was like I think it’s a great idea, but does anyone else think it’s a great idea? Sorry. Say that again. How long did the process take? Because I know God that takes forever or so basically once you file a patent, you won’t hear anything back from the patent office for three years, and then you can go through the whole process of, getting a patent issued.

That’s a process. And so a lot of times, When something starts off patenting, it’s like in a research lab and there’s no idea of forming a company. So it you can do a patent independent of forming a company and commercializing something you need. So that’s often universities patent stuff with no idea that they’re actually going to develop it into something that’s just a way of protecting your idea.

So no one else steals it basically. And so that takes a while. And then after you have, I had the Penn, that was like does anyone else think it’s a good idea? So then what we did was basically I started talking to other surgeons I knew and showing them the idea, and if I thought there were people who would actually steal the idea, I made them sign a non-disclosure agreement.

And then, cause. Most doctors won’t do anything because, they don’t a don’t know and B they’re not, but there are people who will like, we all know from our training, who would be like that. So that’s diverse. And so basically once I got a whole bunch of surgeons who were like, immediately Oh my, my goodness, this would be so awesome.

And yeah, I get it. Then, it was like, what’s the next step? I needed to build that business plan. And so I’m in Houston. And rice university has a business school here and through the graduate students there, I was able to build a rudimentary business plan, doing some market research on understanding how much money we could make with this, because let me tell ya, no investor going to give you any money unless you show them that there’s a big.

A business opportunity. And then once we did that, we were able to start, talking about it in a pitch competition. So that’s like a big thing with the startup world. And so we entered a pitch competition in 2017 and I basically won. And so I was just like, Hey, that’s I wasn’t ready for that.

I was just like, I didn’t, it was my first pitch competition. And I was just like, okay, let’s see what this is all about. And then we won and I was like, Hey, I like this, just kidding. It was a kind of like the way you communicate your idea to people and you do it in a way, so you don’t give away the state secrets.

And then once we did that, people started to be like, Oh, maybe this is something serious. And then, you keep refining, and then you learn all the steps involved in commercializing something. And from that point forward in 2017, we have a prototype. Now we’ve developed an, a large animal model to test it in.

So the DA requires you to test your device in animals before you go into humans. And now we’re at a point where we have to get some feedback from the FDA and then proceed forward. So then we can file for FDA clearance and then go into humans and et cetera, et cetera.

Mike Woo-Ming: When was the day where you decided I need to focus on my business and close my practice? What was the thing? What was the catalyst for that?

Swarna: That’s a great point. I think the day came, so that was hard because, I like operating, I loved it. And when you spend so much, not only you, my whole identity. I think this is really true for a lot of physicians. Your identity becomes wrapped up with being a physician because, we spend enormous amounts of time, mental energy, physical energy doing that.

And everyone calls you a doctor all the time. And so it’s tough to give that up, that’s how you’re known. I live in a. And a suburb where if I go anywhere, chances are even as a subspecialist. People like have seen me as a patient or they know me cause there’s their family member saw me.

And so I’m always doctor to everyone. And that’s a little bit of a weird public persona that you have. There are bad downsides to it, when you spend your whole life working, 60, 80 hours a week doing stuff, it’s just becomes like part of your nature. But I think what happened was one day, like basically.

I think I had a case scheduled and then I had something else that was going on and the case got delayed and I got super irritated because it meant that like my other business thing would totally have to be rescheduled because of the, or, and, that happens in the, or, All surgeons have cases rescheduled because of surgical emergencies.

And we understand cause some other patient has needs the, or more, but I was just pissed because I was just like, God, cause I’d waited a long time to talk to this other person and yeah. That’s just really hard. It meant it pushing it back so much. And at that point I realized, because at that point I was only practicing about one third time and it was the minimum viable amount I could practice to make it economically worth it.

And at that point I realized if I’m this irritated about a case being rescheduled, maybe it’s time to just quit. And I could spend, and I wasn’t having enough time to focus on my business to begin with. And I was just like, okay, you don’t have enough time to really manage this business and grow it the way you need to grow.

Cause you know, I was already working like a dog constantly and then the other, 10 hours a week I was spending so practicing, I could totally like. Put it into the business and I was mad about the or thing and, we all get mad sometimes, but I was just unreasonably mad and I was just like, forget it. Okay. It’s time to stop practice.

Mike Woo-Ming: So I’m always curious when doctors are in the trenches like yourself, they’re out of practice just to get a bit of a flavor. So you’re out of practice. Now what’s a typical day look like for you.

Swarna: Oh, so different. It took me awhile to get used to like what, how it’s different.

Because I think as physicians, we just are used to pushing ourselves through no matter how we feel, because the schedule is largely dictated by other people, whether it’s your office scheduler or the Orr or your patients calling you and yakking about whatever, your time is never your own.

And then when your time becomes your own, it’s very different. There’s still a lot of focus you have to do, but Stuff is not so automatic for me now, partially because I’m doing something I’ve never done before, so that I have to focus a lot more. And I have to spend a lot of time learning, which is different, once you get good at practice of medicine, you still learn.

And of course we do CME, but 90% of what you do is like autopilot, right? I could practically close my eyes and still do an appendectomy or do a colon resection because basically I’ve done so many of them, it doesn’t go away. Yeah, not literally, but so that’s the thing about it.

It’s very different. So I get up and then, especially with the pandemic, it’s really weird. So last year, I did a lot of traveling. I probably went on 20 business trips. Cause you know, you have to go meet investors and pitch and stuff, but the pandemic has really changed things for business. And I think it’s probably some of it’s going to stick around because it’s been so long.

That, we do so much on zoom now. I get up and then basically I start work at eight o’clock and then I work for a period of whatever, like three hours really intensely. And then, I structure my work. So I do some like projects, like things I have to focus on. And then I do what I call the.

The busy work, like the answering emails and then, doing all the little administrative things and then take a break for lunch and you have to really structure your day in a very different way than you would when you were, in practice. So it’s very different, but there’s a lot of work to do, nonetheless.

I still have what I call three shifts of work. So I do work in the morning, take a break for lunch, do a little bit of busy work, work a little bit more intensely. Take a break in the evening, maybe do some exercise and then have a period of, two or three hours in the evening where I do intense work again.

So it’s it’s a long day, but that’s just, it takes a while to get used to working differently. Think work versus, Running around work. That’s what I call it.

Mike Woo-Ming: Control of your schedule for the most part, right?

Swarna: It is a joy though. I have to say, being in control of your schedule is like phenomenal feeling. And I was like, most people live this way, their whole lives. That’s just crazy.

Mike Woo-Ming: And your team is a virtual then I assume when you work from home.

Swarna: Yeah. I think in general, I think. When you do like medical entrepreneurship, if you’re in certain areas like maybe Silicon Valley or you’re in, even in San Diego or in Boston, there’s other people right in the area with the expertise you need. But in Houston, there’s not really so many people. And so our team has been distributed to from the get-go

Mike Woo-Ming: wonderful, but this has been a great. Snapshot at what you do. What advice would you give? Someone who’s considering getting into medical devices. You’ve, we’ve talked about it before, but just some of my words of advice or encouragement you’d want to give to someone out that’s out there.

Swarna: I would say that, I had zero business training. So I think that’s important to realize because a lot of people, I’ve talked to who come to me specifically for advice are always just should I get an MBA or is there a course to do this? And the answer is not really. And I don’t think an MBA is really useful. It’s not for this purpose. It can be useful if you want to do consulting or certain kinds of things, but not for the medical administrator.

That’s a certain kind of healthcare MBA, but I think if you want to do something like this, the first thing to do is to see just start, you can do a little bit at a time and check out your idea.

And basically by using some of the resources I mentioned earlier, going to those websites and then just start seeing if your idea’s any good. If your idea is good, then you can start working on it. And it’s not something that you have to quit your job to start working on. This can be a night and weekends kind of thing, and you can put in a little elbow grease and just see how it goes, because a lot of it is done virtually and over the internet through emails and conversations, and every doctor can find a little bit of time at lunch breaks and, at five o’clock to have a phone call or two and then figure out what’s going on.

But I would just say start instead of just daydreaming about it for another year, just try and put some, just. Try and put it into action and, make yourself a small goal. Oh, I’m going to talk to, two people this week to vet the idea. And then, even if it’s as small as, Hey, find that doctor on that podcast who became an entrepreneur and ask her, some specific questions, everything you do is a little step in knowledge.

Mike Woo-Ming: There’s a lot to learn, have fun with it. Along the way. I truly enjoyed our talks and where can they go to find out more information about yourself or your device? Where can a, we’re going to go and find it?

Swarna: My website doesn’t have much because we can’t say too much until we have approval, but you can go to noleustechnologies.com to learn a little bit, but if you’re interested in learning more about how to do some entrepreneurship, I’d be happy to talk to anyone for sure. A 15, 20 minute conversation to give them a little direction and they, people could just email me.

And it’s my first name. swarna@nolinastechnologies.com. And I think that is the easiest way to get started because it’s really tough. I totally understand that when you’re working as a physician and this world is very nebulous and the resources are out there, but there’s too many and there’s no direction. Sometimes it helps to have a little bit of specific direction to get started.

Mike Woo-Ming: I love it. Thank you again, Swarna, I know you’ve been busy. I know it took us some time to get it, but I can definitely feel that people are going to get a lot from this call today. So thank you so much

Swarna: excited. And I thank you for doing this and helping doctors have an outlet and some ideas, and I’m, podcasts are great. That’s been my pandemic hobby to start listening to podcasts when I go on my daily walks. So I’m all about them. Thank you again, Mike.

Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you again, everybody. Thank you for listing. And just as Dr. Swarna said. Don’t wait for another year. If you have an idea, just start. It’s all about keep moving forward.

All right. Thank you. Thanks again. I’ll let you know when this call is up. Thanks again.

Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, Interviews, Product Creation

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Taking Physician Real Estate Investing to the Next Level with Kirsten Limmer, MD

Meet Dr. Kirsten Limmer, a board-certified pediatrician, PhD in molecular biology, and also an incredibly savvy real estate investor.  She learned that she could save lots of time and money, by designating herself as a Real Estate Professional.  Most doctors are attracted to real estate investing because they hear about the potential tax deductions they can receive.  However if you do not have Real Estate Professional Status,  any losses that are involved in real estate activities are considered passive, and are limited by how much can you deduct on your tax return.

So why don’t more doctors opt for Real Estate Professional Status?  Mainly because you have to keep onerous and detailed logs each year as evidence you are involved in material real estate activities as a Real Estate Professional.   Not able to find an appropriate solution, Kirsten create one on her own.  Now available on iOS and Android, REPStracker is a portable solution to help you streamline the way you document hours for Real Estate Professional Status.  This could be a huge breakthrough in your real estate investing.

Kirsten also happens to be one of my students, and we discuss the obstacles she faced on her journey from turning her app into reality.  Prepare to be inspired!

REPStracker – a better way to document your REPS hours.  The next generation app that will streamline the way you document hours for Real Estate Professional Status. 

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD. Well, I’m really excited on my next guest. And she really is an example of how as entrepreneurs we find problems,  we are in front of problems that we know is hurting us either through time or money. And we come up with solutions to address these problems.

And this doctor did exactly that. Her name is Dr. Kirsten Limmer. She is a Pediatrician completing her residency at Harvard Medical School earned her medical degree at my Alma mater UCSD. She was at the UCSD School of Medicine, actually has a PhD in molecular biology at UCSD  as well. And as mentioned, she’s board certified in general pediatrics, but…

Probably even more important to you, especially if you’re a real estate investor. And I know many of you are, who are listening to this program. She has created a very cool app that can save you a lot of time and money. It’s called REPStracker. She can talk all about it. Welcome to the show Dr. Kirsten Limmer, Kirsten, how you doing today?

Kirsten Limmer: Thanks Mike. I’m happy to be here. 

Mike Woo-Ming: Well, I gave it this intro, you know, we got the Harvard, we got the UC San Diego here. Molecular biology. What kind of led you to creating this app known as 

Kirsten Limmer: REPStracker? 

Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Like you said, I’m an, I’m a real estate investor. I’ve also always had an entrepreneurial spirit.

In second grade, I started a business selling,  earrings that I made out of tiny little origami cranes and started a little side business inside of my second grade class. So always kind of looking for problems and solutions and  , in trying to make innovations out of that.

And you know, being a real estate investor , over the last several years have kind of been more of a hobby investor, kind of dabbled in real estate. But over the last year or so, I’ve become a lot more systematic, a lot more serious about investing and concurrently with the pandemic. I have three little kids who who started homeschooling at home, like a lot of people.

So I had to, to cut down my clinical time, pretty significantly in order to be at home for them. . So kind of, it was, it was kind of a clash of, of two worlds. I was both more serious about real estate investing and I had cut down my clinical time. And what  led me to start to go down the road of was something called real estate professional status, because I knew since I was not working…

As much in the hospital anymore. And I was doing more real estate that I could potentially apply or become a real estate professional in the eyes of the IRS for the, for tax purposes. Now I’m gonna give you a little high level overview of real estate professional status because it’s not like becoming a real estate agent or anything.

It’s, it’s really just a tax designation. And so basically, normally as a real estate investor, when you have profits and losses from your real estate those can only be used against each other. So that’s considered passive income. And so to give you kind of a real world example I have a house in Palm Springs that I use as a vacation rental.

And I put on solar panels a few years ago for, I mean upwards of $80,000 or something like that. So a really decent expense, but because those passive losses can only be claimed against other passive losses. I wasn’t able to deduct the whole thing off of my taxes that year. So that’s kind of a step-wise deduction off of my taxes.

Now what real estate professional status does is it takes that basically that bucket of… passive profits and losses and combines it with active profits and losses. And that could be something like a W2 or a 1099 income. So for, for myself and my husband, who is also a physician it’s that’s considered active income.

And unless I can say that I’m a real estate professional then that would be considered passive income. So now I’m putting both of those in the same bucket and now anything, any deductions or anything like that from our real estate investments, we can use against our W2 income. And that is you know, becomes a really.

Powerful tax reduction strategy when you have a lot of real estate and especially as you know, a dual physician couple so what I found when I was going down this road and, and I should kind of back up and say the most important thing about claiming real estate professional status on your taxes is documentation.

So I’ll, back up even more on that. And say, you know,  with any great power comes great responsibility. So the IRS is not just going to like, swallow that you’re just a real estate professional. And just here I am. And, and that’s it. And, and give me a tax refund of a hundred thousand dollars, please. No. So there, there’s a lot of hoops that you have to jump through and it’s a little outside of the scope of this podcast, but essentially what you have to do is show that you have… spent several hundreds of thousands, not sorry, excuse me. Not hundreds of thousands, several hundreds of hours on your real estate throughout the year.

And that, and that has to happen every year. And not only do you have to have the time logs to prove it but you also have to have the evidence. And so, for example, if you, if you say that you spent half an hour with your tenant on the phone on March 21st, not only do you have to have that, but you sh if, if you get audited, you better be able to bring up that call log and be able to show that you spent half an hour on the phone with your tenant.

So you know, as you can imagine, these, these time logs really add up and you have to be really on the ball to, to, to stay updated and, and keep you protected. And in the case of an IRS audit and what I looked around and what I saw was that most investors were actually using like Excel spreadsheets, Google Calendar, some would like, you know, just like a pen and paper note, pad type thing.

 And like, you know, keeping a little  shoe box full of  their receipts or their, their pictures of all of their evidence. And, and to me being you know, a little bit more on the OCD spectrum, I was like, wow, I can’t do that. Like, first of all, I know that I need a system.

If I’m going to be super meticulous and up to date amount, my hours, I need a system that is easy. I can do on the go. I don’t have to wait to come home and like, sit in front of the desktop. And because I just know I won’t do it if, if day after day with having such a busy life, I know that that I won’t be able to keep track of my hours that way.

So I looked around for an app because, you know, there’s gotta be an app for that. Right. And couldn’t find anything. So there’s, there’s kind of generic time tracking apps, but none of them really fit the needs that I was looking for. So hence, was born REPS tracker.

Mike Woo-Ming:  So, a lot to cover there. And then I’m curious to know, and probably you don’t have the the numbers on this, but…

It sounds like, you know, real estate investors that could save thousands of dollars, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars , you know, becoming a real estate professional or having a real estate professional status. But most of them don’t do it. What’s the reason for that? 

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. And I think that that’s a good question.

And I think that it’s something that even I kind of took pause about, and that is the fact that it, it is an auditable thing to declare on your taxes. And you know, in the eyes of the IRS, you are guilty until proven innocent. And so nobody wants to leave themselves open for an audit. So… that was really what gave me pause.

And finally, I kind of, you know, that was kind of a limiting belief that I, that I had going into it. And when, how I got over that limiting belief was that I was like, there’s gotta be a system. Like if that’s my only reason why I’m not doing this,  then let’s create a system that will kind of keep me, you know, water tight from, from that, that type of problem.

Mike Woo-Ming: It’s almost like when you thought about like these hours and like just having them on Excel sheets, it kind of reminded me of like doctors who are like tracking CME. Yeah. You can’t just like, okay, well I did a hundred hours of CME and I wrote it down on this piece of paper.  

Kirsten Limmer: So you, 

Mike Woo-Ming: you, you, you found out that there wasn’t any. Solution to this. And you said, you know what, I’m just going to create it myself. What  is the thought process that goes with it? 

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that’s a great question. And so as you can imagine, it wasn’t quite as just easy as, “Hey, I’m just going to like create it myself.”

There was, there was some.  Forks in the road, some bumps in the road. And I do have to back up and say that this is not my first app idea. This is not my first  kind of venture down the app world. I actually had an app idea, you know, right before COVID and it was just to give you like a really quick it’s it was matching carpools of parents who I would see them . At school, then I would see them at soccer. Then I would see them at a gymnastics. And I was like, okay, I can, I, I should be able to just create an algorithm where everybody, all of these parents have essentially like a GPS tracker and it matches your carpool and then spits it out. Hey, you need to like talk to Susan over there because she’s going to soccer at 3:45  so anyways, I, you know, being very naive, I was like, this is going to be easy. I mean, we have Uber, we have, we have all these apps out there that have GPS it’s super easy. So, you know, that very naive thought actually. So I went and I I talked to an app developer about that app idea and I was just like, wow, blown away by the quotes that I was getting for.

For definitely not the idea that I was coming up with for real scaled down version. It was along the order of like $40,000. Upstarting bare minimum app. So, so I knew kind of going into REPStracker that like anything that you have, that’s like, you know, kind of a grandiose idea, both needs to be scaled down in the beginning.

And also  it’s gonna cost a lot of money. So  I should say with, with that, that last app, I ended up going to a venture capital fund. It kind of went a couple of steps further and then COVID hit. So it was actually a pretty good thing that it didn’t, didn’t go all the way, but so I knew going into REPStracker that…

there was some issues with, with hiring software developers. It was hard to kind of translate your idea to somebody who is a software developer and, and often it’s because it’s hard to find software developers that kind of have the same vision as you and  there’s a cost versus quality versus money type  situation that you get into.

And so if you’re, if you’re hiring a developer, let’s say in like, India, it’s going to be really hard to kind of translate this idea that is,  very americanized idea to,  a software developer who really thinks in code and Java script. And  so it, it becomes a big hurdle to find somebody like that.

 I knew that it was also going to be quite costly off the bat. So you know, I kind of had this epiphany and said, you know, if all these guys can be software developers, I mean, I went to medical school. Like, it can’t be that hard. I’ve got to just, I can, I can create this app on myself.

So then I started watching YouTube videos and and like really trying to like school myself on app development and went down a couple rabbit holes and found actually like this app development, essentially school. So it was like going to med school, but for app development. And they worked on a platform that did not use coding language, just coding logic.

So it was able to kind of take the learning JavaScript part of my whole timeline out of the equation, which was great. And and, and then I, you know took it from there. I enrolled in this school, it’s called Coaching No Code Apps. If you ever want to look it up,  it’s an awesome program.

And I just learned this skillset kind of day by day, step-by-step. 

Mike Woo-Ming: And so what was the timeline from initial, you know, idea to actually deciding to, start developing it, start paying money to, to develop it, to actually then launch it. And how much time did you devote each week or month to this?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I started it… So it’s. March now. So I started it in November and I had my minimum viable product, my MVP, out by January 15th, I think. So it took less, it was actually less than less than two months that it, that it took for me to have a minimum viable product that had beta users.

And after that I had beta users use it and, and tried and iterated different versions of it until I was able to get it to a version I felt pretty confident in, launching into the app stores. 

Mike Woo-Ming: what do you think was the biggest challenge in developing REPS tracker?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. So for me personally, the biggest challenge was  thinking in coding logic, which I actually, I love thinking in coding logic.

But having three kids at home for most of that was you know, having to go down these. Like long pathways, or if anybody interrupts you, you have to go back to the beginning. So, so having my kids home during this, so actually adjusted my schedule.  I started waking up at like two or three in the morning so that I could just have these few hours of uninterrupted time, so I can really, really nail down my app.

But yeah, I think that that . And also  I spend a lot of mental energy in the beginning. Almost keeping it like secret. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of struggle with this.  “I’ve got this great idea and but I can’t tell anybody cause the people are gonna steal my idea.”

And   if I were to go back and do it over again, I don’t think I would keep it secret. I think that, you know, what I’ve realized is that number one, it takes a lot of time and effort to, to create an app. So, you know, you’re not going to like, tell Joe Schmo about it and then have them just like create the app right away.

 It’s pretty unlikely that somebody’s going to steal your idea. And also when you, when you are a really open and honest and,  excited about something, people will give you ideas that you might not have thought about. And I think it kind of adds to your own excitement and your own momentum.

So, really I think with any kind of future endeavors that I do, I’m going to kind of take that and go with it and really just  try to be open and gauge other people’s ideas on these things. 

Mike Woo-Ming: So a few weeks ago we had on the program Dr. Daniel Erichsen, who also developed an app and is  someone that I know you had a chance to talk to and, and he had his own ideas about apps and whether a physician should get into apps. What do you recommend say as someone who’s now,  been there done that.

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. And interestingly, since I launched this I’ve had a lot of physicians reach out to me asking me how to, to launch their own apps and, and bouncing ideas off of me.

So definitely those physicians are out there wanting to create their own apps and wanting to go down the entrepreneurial route.  I kind of hear the same thing over and over again, like, wow, it’s so hard. How could you have done that by yourself? And my response is, Oh my goodness, you guys, we went, we all went to medical school.

We all, well, you know, so in college I was a total dumb ass and maybe I’m just speaking for myself. And sorry  you have to edit that out of your podcast. But like, you know, like five years later I was doing central lines. I was intubating for premature babies. So, you know, we can do hard things and, medical school is a hard thing  and residency is a hard thing.

This is not that hard. This is a skill that you can learn and, and you can do it. And if you have an idea that you’re just going to keep on going back to and being regretful, if you didn’t do it, just do it, just do it. It’s not that bad.

Mike Woo-Ming: Awesome. Awesome. So REPS tracker is launched at the time of this recording. Available on iOS.

Kirsten Limmer: Yep. And Google Play now. Yes.  

Mike Woo-Ming: And so just to find it, if you’re a real estate investor, why should they… to get REPStracker, what can they expect after they download it?  Tell us the process. What can they expect to receive?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Good question. So do you mean talking you through the app, going through the app?

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah for people who are interested and they want real estate professional status? What is the app? What do they expect to receive? 

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Yeah. So the thing about REPStracker is  it’s very.. You can essentially individualize it for your own investing. So a real estate agent would log all of their properties and then.. After that every time entry,  the investors will add time entries and tag it onto that particular property that they’re talking about upload as much evidence as they want.

So for example I’m constantly messaging and text messaging, my real estate agent and also my property managers and stuff. And so, you know, I’ll just log like five minutes of texts and I’ll take a screenshot of my texts and upload it onto my little description and it takes me 10 seconds to, to log that time entry.

And so the, and those little things add up. Right? So so  I’m going on my, my own app. Like several, several times a day to log my own entries. And  so people can both log their time entries and also attach all of the evidence that they need in case they’re ever audited against against this, by the IRS, they can attach all of that.

And then REPStracker also keeps it. Keeps track of how much time you have left until you can reasonably claim real estate professional status. So you don’t have to go adding it up or anything by yourself. You just have a little cute little screen that will tell you exactly how much time you have left and how much time you’ve submitted.

And then at the end, if you want to just print out a spreadsheet and keep it in a shoe box, we want to go back to the shoe box method print out a spreadsheet… . Just export everything into Excel or CSV and, and keep it for the rest of eternity, if you want.

Mike Woo-Ming: Well, I’m so ecstatic that REPS tracker is now live and in the world and all the public can use it. And just to give some transparency, I was honored to join you on this journey. To getting this app launched and I had a pleasure working with you, so I’m curious, what’s next for you, Kirsten?

Kirsten Limmer: Hahaha! Okay. Yeah, a couple of, well, a couple of things. So number one, I’m going to start using my own app and really scaling up my real estate! Which I’ve kind of done concurrently. And there’s a lot of other ideas that I can kind of offshoot off of this. So, for one, going along my lines of just being totally transparent and open with my ideas a lot of people are getting really excited about short-term rentals. And short-term rentals has, has a pretty similar kind of tax structure for material participation.

And so starting to kind of build upon these different offshoots of these. These tax structures and being able to use my app for that. And yeah. And I’ve had such a great time working with you too, Mike, it’s been awesome! 

Mike Woo-Ming: So, where can they go if they want to reach out to you? I don’t know if you offer any.. You said a lot of physicians asking you about apps or maybe about real estate investing are you available for to hear from some of these listeners or doctors or… ? 

Kirsten Limmer: No, absolutely. I’m I actually am really happy to talk to people. I think it’s so exciting that there’s so many people out there that want to share their ideas and want to bounce things off of me. And I’m more than happy to talk to anybody who has anything.

That they want to ask about creating an app, about a REPStracker, about real estate professionals status, really anything. So they can go to my website actually that is probably the best way to do it. 

So REPS tracker.com. So R E P S T R A C K E R. Reps, tracker.com. And there’s a little thing that says contact me there.

And it goes straight to my email. Or else you can email support @ reps tracker.com, and that just goes straight to me. 

Wonderful. 

Mike Woo-Ming: It’s been a pleasure working with you and I am so excited again about REPS tracker, any like last minute advice or best advice you could give to listeners out there?

Maybe a doctor who wants to start up an app, or maybe someone who is just getting started in real estate investing and is not sure about that? You know doesn’t really know too much about real estate professional status and is considering it, any words of advice you have for those folks?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Yeah, you can do hard things. Remember that? Remember you probably did a really hard thing yesterday in your job. Believe me, you can start real estate investing. You can start making an app, you can do whatever you want. And you know, if you don’t have an answer for something it’s out there, so just go find it and just start.

Mike Woo-Ming:  Awesome. Thanks for this again, reps track you’re good REPS tracker.com to download an app. So you get a lot of time and money as a real estate investor. And again, thank you, Kirsten Limmer for joining us today. And you’re a perfect example of just, just finding that there’s a problem out there.

Figuring out that their solution, if you can’t find that a solution to it, why not create yourself, but it’s not just about reading about it. It’s not about just like, you know, going into direction. If you have something that you believe it can be a value to a world, nothing better to do, and to just keep moving forward.

Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, Interviews, Investing, Product Creation

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Developing Your Physician Legacy Mindset with Hala Sabry, DO

Leaving a legacy.  So what exactly does that mean?  And why are some physicians able to make it their life’s mission, and many never consider it?  Here to help us is Dr. Hala Sabry, best known as the founder of one of the largest and most influential social media groups of physicians in the world.  

Now Hala has done many, many interviews, but I specifically wanted to focus on her as an entrepreneur (which she never thought herself as one) and as an influencer to women physicians (which she dislikes the term).  

We discuss why she launched her first conference, and some insight at launching her four course “The Legacy Mindset Program for Women.”  We’re also starting a new segment, “5 Unexpected Questions” where you’ll get to know Hala a little better!  Enjoy this fun and lively interview!

The Legacy Mindset Program for Women

https://halasabry.com/legacy-mindset/join-legacy-mindset

RAW TRANSCRIPT

And I’m just super pumped for my next guest. Actually, she really doesn’t need an introduction. If you’re a physician, which most of you are. And we do have many moms who listen to me or so I’m told. You already know who she is. She is the founder of the physician, moms group, one of the largest, if not the largest group, Social media group for physicians that are out there. So much to talk about. She’s a Board Certified emergency room physician, she’s the chief community Officer of Doctoropedia. She has a really cool course that we’re going to talk about called the Legacy Mindset for Women. Again, needs no introduction, Dr. Hala Sabry. Hala. How are you doing?

Dr. Hala Sabry
Oh, my gosh, I cannot believe when you asked me to be on your podcast, I was like, just floored. So I just want to thank you for having me here. And for everybody listening. It’s crazy to be considered an entrepreneur. Like I don’t think I really actually gave myself that title until maybe a year ago, even though it’s funny, even just hearing your introduction to me, I’m like, why didn’t I think of that earlier? You know, I’m so funny.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, and unlike most things that doctors think you didn’t have to pay 1000s of dollars for a certification for entrepreneur, you just, you just bestowed it upon yourself. Right?I know, it’s definitely ludicrous, right? Like we’ve been taught for so long, that you can’t claim anything unless you’ve taken so many board exams and paid so much money to have this little piece of paper on the wall that nobody cares about except for you. So it’s really interesting.

Well, we’ll have the time of this recording at the time that you’re watching this, you’re actually in the middle of your launch for this course, that’s coming out. And so I thank you, I don’t know why you agreed to this interview, because I know all about launches and all the stress and strain about that maybe we could talk about that a little bit. But we’re also recording at the time where we’re at Peter Kim’s Leverage and Growth Conference. And that’s going on. So I know you’ve got so many things that are here. And because of that, and because you are so famous, at least now the industry community. I know and we’re gonna be you know, transparent. I know you’re all about authenticity. You’ve done a lot of podcast interviews, I have done a lot of podcast interviews, I know a lot of people already know about your story, and about how you started physician moms group. And and if you don’t know that I please go in and listen to those. I’m not trying to make light of it is a really interesting story how you started the group. Also just want to want to know, is it true? Is it the largest social media group of physicians? That that’s out there?

Dr. Hala Sabry
I think, I don’t know if it’s the largest now I’m well, I don’t know, I think physician side gigs has very similar numbers. I really honestly don’t compare. But I think it’s the largest for women. Definitely, um, you know, we are, you know, 96% women, we do have a COVID subgroup that has some men, but definitely women are dominating the field there. So, um, so yeah, I think we’re the largest woman woman’s group. And so, I mean, that’s a lot of people and internationally 115,000 people. So it’s been really fun. And yeah, thank you so much for bringing a little bit of light, you know, it’s to kind of what I’m doing now. I think a lot of the podcasts and the interviews, you know, do go over how I started. And it’s funny, because I’m like, Yeah, but I’m evolving. What about me now. And so I’m just so happy and refresh that we’re talking about? Like it the hollow like 2.0 or 3.0. So I’m so excited about this. So thanks for jumping right in.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
And that’s amazing, if not the largest, it certainly is the most influential, at least from what I see. So I’m just gonna start off the interview. I said, you did a lot of interviews, and I always tell my students, you know, to stand out, you got to really differentiate yourself. So I’m going to warn you, before we start, this is going to be a little bit of an unconventional interview, you know, you know, if you stop and walk off, I’m not gonna be offended on here. But, but I know that you, your BFF is Dr. Sadie Smith, one of your BFF you’ve lots out there, but she’s definitely up there. And I know if you know I interviewed her last summer, actually, just about the same time. And, you know, I had also just just really recently met her. And she, you know, it’s actually interesting of all the guests that I’ve interviewed. She’s the only one that I had planned one out episode and it actually went to two episodes so you know what i’m talking about we love you to death but she could be a little wordy sometimes again.

Dr. Hala Sabry
can i if i were best friends it’s awesome

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
yeah you guys said that you’re similar but we started off the interview by beat me basically making fun of her name’s sonny smith and i was singing about songs of sonny and i surely am not one to talk you know i got a weird last name booming you know i when i ran for fourth grade treasurer my dad said would be really cool if you put the poster that said woman is zooming for fourth grade treasurer of which i came in fourth place out of five and you know all the teasing that got in my name but i want to know and i know it’s arabic correct

Dr. Hala Sabry
yeah yeah i’m Egyptian.

Dr Mike Woo-Ming

Egyptian, and so i’m not trying to make light of it but does anybody say anything about “Holla Hala!”

Dr. Hala Sabry
oh like 1,000% like a lot of people ask me like if my parents named me after like jay z’s like holla but i don’t think they realize i’m older i’m like i’m like the same age as jay z i think i was born in 78 so um so yeah i get a lot of that or like “Hala-Day” or jHala-peno “or you know lots of stuff but um but yeah actually the way that my name is actually really you know pronounced is hella and the reason why i go by hala and a lot of hollows go by hala is i think it’s just i think the the english vernacular it’s just i don’t know why it you know goes to holla like this like hard a kind of or i don’t even know what the exact grammar is but you know i was in first grade and i got moved from a private school to a public school because what happened was i was in this private school and i was they would give us these packets every week on monday and the packets were like 20 pages you know stacked packet front and back and basically you’d have to do all these worksheets and um and then turn it in on friday so i would be so stressed out about this packet that i would finish it by tuesday afternoon and so i would skip i would skip you know recess and i would eat lunch with the packet you know and stuff like that i’m in total gunner right and and so the school was like i’m a little concerned like she’s not making friends and and things like that and so they wanted to hold me back for social development and so and i had already skipped a grade so i skipped kindergarten so i was the youngest i was the smallest i was the least social and so my dad was like i think that they’re just trying to get us to pay more money because you know him as an immigrant was like so she’s like the smartest in the class like what’s the problem you know why does she need friends so they moved me to public school and then the first day you know i mean this class of 30 people which is insane to me because i think my class before that was like less than 20 and i was like one class of like four other first graders you know and the smallest my mom said i was wearing a 14 dress at first grade yeah and so she you know what teachers do stand up and introduce yourself and this is like january you know they all know each other so i’m like oh my name is Hala which is like what can you speak up and i’m like my name is Hala, and she’s like Holla i’m like yep sure whatever gets me to sit down just answer and you know it’s funny when i went to junior high i’m like i’m going to reinvent myself i’m going to be Hala same thing happened in high school in college in medical school so i’m Hala i’m calling for life.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
and that’s what we know and then the lesson begins now talking with sonny and just kind of prepping for this interview you know she says love her to death but she says you tend to underestimate yourself and especially your influences and so i did my research before for this interview and you know just just putting up in your name and when i mean research i’m just googling yeah like everybody yeah

yeah and you know talk about authentic you know your name comes up and just like you’re putting yourself out there and really we’re gonna talk about legacy you know the internet google that is your legacy what what is coming up and just some of the things that you done and this probably doesn’t even scratch the surface i mean i found a usa today article from a few years ago with your battle for in fertilization how i mean talk about just putting yourself out there how did that kind of come about?

Dr. Hala Sabry
yeah you know it’s funny i was just talking to someone yesterday another coach that we were pure coaching each other and i was telling her that initially my identity and my identity had been so tied to my infertility journey so for those of you I don’t know, I had to do infertility for five years. Well, five years, plus five years before I had my first child, I had seven rounds that were failed. And then on my eighth round was lucky. And I got pregnant with twins that ended up having a vanishing twin. And I have my daughter who’s seven and a half now from that, from that pregnancy, and then I went back and, and had two other pregnancies, both sets of twins. So I have five kids. And when I, when I finished that journey, like so much had changed, because that whole journey took like, you know, 10 years total. But I had decided when I was going through the journey that I was, I mean, I was so aware about how isolated and how alone and crying I was, like, all the time. And I remember, like not being able to tell anybody, like I was in residency, and I was doing IVF. And I was like, nobody wants to know this, because they don’t want me getting pregnant, because who’s gonna cover my shifts, you know, and so just kind of like, the added isolation on top of just having infertility and feeling like you’re broken, like your body is not doing what a woman’s body should do. Like, I think that that was like a very common thought pattern in my brain. And I remember the one hour of the day that I would look forward to every day, it was four o’clock. And that’s because the Ellen DeGeneres Show would play. And I would cry every single time. And, and I think what Ellen had shown me, and I know that there’s a lot of like, bad press that she’s gotten them last year. But what I what she had given me, though, it was hope, you know, I was like, look at this woman, who also suffered from isolation, because of her sexual orientation. And, you know, got things taken away from her, like, just very similar. I mean, in a way very similar situations. But not only did she rise on top, but she doesn’t downplay it, she always remembers it, she always talks about it. And she is even more generous and giving at least that’s what the show, you know, makes us you know, think. And I was like, No, I don’t know, you know how I’m going to do this. But I know that when I, when I get pregnant, if I’m lucky enough, if that’s what the universe has, for me, I’m going to make sure to help other women. And in my brain, it was really with infertility, right? Because that was my world. So I’m still part of infertility groups, and I still go in there, and especially like, on Mother’s Day, and holidays, where those were constant reminders and triggers about like the family, you don’t have, you know, that was really hard. And so I always go in and give them hope, like, hey, even after seven failed cycles, $150,000 in the hole, you know, I thought there was no way I was gonna have a family and just like kind of how it ended up and to give them, you know, to give them hope. But it’s funny, though, because I, I actually, I don’t identify with it anymore, because I’m so far away. So I have to kind of remind myself, so thank you for bringing this up. But yeah, USA Today, it was like the anniversary, the 30th anniversary of IVF. And because I had been so outspoken about it, especially about my clinic, the clinic I went to was ccrm and Colorado. And so that that clinic, you know, reached out to me, and they’re like, hey, do you, you know, are you interested in any PR, and I was just delivering my second set of twins. So I said, Yeah, of course, I have no problem sharing my story. Because my Why is if any woman is crying, looking on the internet for hope, like I did for so many years, maybe she’ll come across that story. And ironically, that story has been seen. I mean, the the author of that story had reached out to me saying that she was so surprised about not only how many times that story has been seen, I don’t even know what the counter is for that. But also like it continues to be seen. And I continue to get emails from women who asked me questions or follow up questions. And I answer every single one of them. Because I’m committed to making sure that people don’t feel alone. But since then, there’s so many amazing there’s a coach that is committed to this like work to her name’s Kate Chandler, I believe her last name is. And so I’m just so glad that whether I took part in any of that, that there’s other women who also feel committed to that journey of normalizing and fertility.

Yeah, so that’s kind of how it came about. But yeah, it’s it’s so funny. I don’t talk about infertility nearly as much as I did anymore. But it’s definitely a big part of my journey and why I even started PMG because when I started trying to make decisions, whether I was going to stay home with my kids or I was going to continue to work as a doctor, part of my thoughts were like, I worked too hard. I paid too much money to have these kids to have somebody else raise them. And for me to have to choose between my career and being a mom, you know, so really, that’s part of the foundation of everything that I’m you know, I am today so everything that you’re hearing in this interview really started from struggle and sacrifice and and sadness and And then eventually resilience and seeing hope. Oh, yeah,

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
I see the pictures five beautiful children, handsome husband here. I got to ask with so many kids now, do you ever forget their names when? Oh, all

Dr. Hala Sabry
the time? I’m like, What’s your name? I even like I have two dogs. And sometimes sometimes I call them by the dog’s names, you know, but they think it’s hilarious. And now and now they try to play tricks on me, especially the twins. They’ll be like, so and so. And I mean, there, none of them are identical, but for some reason they think they are. So like, I’m, you know, I’m Athena today. No, I am Fifi today. So it’s really fun. They’re so cute. But yeah, I have a lot of fun with it.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So in addition to you, obviously, you got this PMG , physician moms, very influential, but I didn’t realize how influential and I just, I pulled up a couple of things that I saw, for example, your PMG was in a second psychiatric journal, I see something on in terms of COVID. And and it’s, it’s published, you know, your your group is published early on. Another thing, too, that I thought maybe we could get into a little bit is just just kind of maybe understanding the power of your group. And I found something and I, we can talk about this, we can’t there was a incident with an ad that you saw on the scrubs company that I found. Yeah. And you found it you posted something, because you found that that ad was demeaning. Don’t talk about it.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Yeah, so I don’t know, maybe two or three months ago, I don’t even know how long ago now it was fix, you know, fix have put in put out an ad of a woman physician and pink scrubs reading a medical terminology for dummies book upside down. And then, you know, she was it was like a video ad. And so she was reading it and then kind of thought it was too hard even with her pink scrubs reading this book upside down. So she closes the book and kind of throws it to the side. Like, who cares about books anyways? And I read, I mean, I saw that ad and I was like, you know, already I was already a little bit skeptical of things. advertisements, because I think that I think it’s hard. I think it’s hard when you’re selling apparel you need to be like, marketing it like you want beautiful models. You want racy things, like

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
maybe a little edgy sure?

Dr. Hala Sabry
Yeah, you want edgy, right? And so like, I totally respect the company for like, for all the bills, right? But I think that early on, like I started not personally as a consumer, like not speaking on behalf of PMG in any way. But as a consumer, I started kind of not really identifying with their ads, because I was like, that’s not what my body looks like, that’s not how I act at work. I wear socks because, like, I I see lots of blood, and I’m putting in chest tubes. And so for me, I just thought it was unrealistic. So I mean, I’ve never really been super connected to the brand, although I do respect what they built and, and, and everything like that. So when I saw the ad, though, I was I was really taken back now, you know, I also you have to understand, like, you know, I’ve been really understanding of their ads, like for the last couple of years, and there’s been a couple of things that have been problematic. I’m just personally as a consumer. But now, you know, my whole point is legacy, right? And so there’s this, there’s this actual study by Save the Children that I that I’ve been quoting, up and down everywhere. But basically, they found that after a survey study in 2015, of girls in the United States and on the west coast of Africa that by the age of eight girls think that they’re not as smart and they’re not as valued as men or boys rather. And so when I look at these ads, right, with this woman who’s reading a book upside down, that’s for dummies and then throws away because even that’s too hard. And I’m like, well, no wonder no wonder like, how like, and this is a woman run company. This is internal misogyny, you know, internalized misogyny. So intralinks someone’s watching me is sexism. internalized misogyny is when women promoted, you know, and so women can be sexist to against their own kind. And, and so I think that when I saw that, I was like, Okay, this is like, where this is where, like, I need to say something, like, I let go of a lot of my opinions before. And you know, honestly, being an influencer myself, like, um, and I really have a hard time even with that title, because I think, like it kind of, like, in the, in the layman’s terms, like means, like, you know, getting money for ads or whatever.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
It has a picture that we think of we think of influencer.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Yeah. And so I so I’m talking about influencer as like somebody who’s a leader that can influence somebody else’s opinion, not about buying something but about anything. You know, I’m, I’m really hesitant to put out personal opinions that I’m not very well thought out, like, you know, about all of the pros and cons and things like that. And if this is something that’s just like, my personal vendetta versus a bigger Miss mission, you know, so when when that happened, though, I was like, okay, like, I’ve been reading about this study, I’ve been trying to figure out like, how do we change the girls mindsets at eight years old realizing that 40 we still have that same mindset and this is why we hit mid career crisis and i’m like this is this is like not helping and so i wanted people to see i thought it was a great example it’s kind of like a morbidity and mortality conference like where you have a really good picture of like the chest x ray that’s gone wrong or whatever it may be so i literally it was really late at night i screenshotted it and i just put this is what sexism in medicine looks like just plain and simple this is what it is and it’s so easy to creep into it and think it’s funny and it’s fun and it’s racy and it’s edgy but it’s actually very damaging and they did the same thing to male nurses they have the same ad with a male nurse to marginalized populations you know out of all of the healthcare workers 76% of women 76% of healthcare healthcare workers are women every single health care line doctors respiratory therapists like name it right it’s all male dominated except for nursing nursing is the one that is women dominated hmm they put a male nurse in there and i was like okay that’s not okay either you know this is not just about women this is just about marginalized populations and so and so i posted it it did go completely viral ended up on the news and actually what people don’t know is that the ceo of the company actually called me on my cell phone and yeah yeah and so um and we had a really good conversation she was very straight to the point she’s like she wasn’t mad she i mean i don’t know maybe she was but she didn’t tell me she was mad she was like i just want feedback on how we could be better

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
and how quick?

Dr. Hala Sabry

So they took him here it took them to add well before she even called me they took time to ..

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
add how quick was it that sort of curious how…

Dr. Hala Sabry

i think a day i think yeah i think the day within a day um but she called me and you know i really had a lot of respect for her she said like hey keep my cell phone number if you ever see something that you don’t like you know tell me um you know kind of here’s access to me you know and some of it i mean i don’t know i don’t work for the company i’ve never called her again i’m not opposed to it it’s just that i’m an official consultant so if there’s a way that you know i’m going to work with a company it’s going to be more formalized than a text message but um but i think what what they put out there is that they have an action plan of how they were waiting to remedy this they were going to have you know a diverse board of you know healthcare workers whether the physicians or not looking at every single ad to make sure that it’s not offending you know any kind of marginalized population you know i mean it’s hard you’re gonna offend somebody all the time you know but i think just trying to be committed to diversity and inclusion so i’m glad that that company did that you know i don’t know what the outcome is of it i don’t follow them or anything like that but i’m really excited that they were able to own up to it apologize and take actionable steps for their company to be better i think it’s a good example for all of us how we can mess up and how we can be resilient.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming

yeah just kind of shows you the power of the group and just you know your influence too but because this is a podcast for physician entrepreneurs i want to talk about building businesses and entrepreneurs and one thing that you did and i believe so you did a conference how many conferences have you done for pmg which is one to two first one was in 2019?

Dr. Hala Sabry

no i think it was like 2015 2015

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming

okay.

Dr. Hala Sabry
yeah we did one and it was redefining dr mom and it was more of like kind of us it was really more of an entrepreneurial conference like people who just kind of wanted to think outside the box or at least be comfortable in their own skin it was one day it was in las vegas i think we had like you know close to 100 people that came it was good a lot of people that’s how i met Sunny so really really yeah so

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
i want to talk about that you know people see that you’re doing these seminars and it’s got a bigger and better what did you learn from that first seminar that made me know that…

Dr. Hala Sabry
So i learned that las vegas is probably not the best place to have a conference so it wasn’t the best thing for us

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
this specific one?

Dr. Hala Sabry

yes yes so our demographic you know we have these women who what we’re largely hearing is that they oh wait i want to say i want to back up i tried to have a conference the year before or two years before so in 2015 maybe that was june 16 2015 i don’t know i tried to do something before my group said oh we want to do a cruise want to do a conference on a cruise and this all ties in into why i’ve made these mistakes so they think that idea they’re like oh i want a cruise conference i went ahead i found out i found everything i booked everything i put it out there 600 people have like like this one post and yes we want to cruise i even had some buy in i was like hey what week where do you want to go what It’s a topic 600 people consistently answering guess how many people registered for it? Not 603

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. And so I was like, okay, that’s not gonna work. So um, but here’s where their objections were right. Their objections were like, I can’t go out of the country without my family. Those CMEs may not work because their crews CMEs And apparently, I don’t work in academics. I don’t even get like, reimburse me. So I’m like, okay, like, No, I’m learning. Right. So then the second one, I was like, okay, definitely, we’re not doing a cruise. Yeah, we’re gonna do somewhere where, you know, everybody can fly in and fly out the same day if they want to, you know, so Las Vegas seemed okay. The objections, like, I can’t take my kids because Las Vegas is not a child friendly area, you know, things like that. So I was like, okay, so I think my people like my group, really, they really value family, why am I trying to work around that, you know, so. So this third one, I guess, third attempt, right, was a family conference. So we had a kids track. So you drop off your kids, they learn throughout the day, so that we have like a plastic surgeon teaching them how to do sutures, like it’s age appropriate. So the younger, the younger ones, they’re like learning how to tie, you know, the older ones, got to touch a needle, and learn how to inject like we brought, you know, oranges, and they learn how to inject and I even tried it on my kids to to make sure that they weren’t gonna freak out and kind of use them as a, you know, trial. And we have the fire department come and talk to them about first aid. And you know, what, what do you see? What do you do if somebody is down, like what happens and things like that, you know, so it was really neat. The kids, my kids still talk about it. They talked about, like, how to learn how to splint and things like that. So it was really neat. And then the parents, the moms and you know, kid go and they were at the conference, and then we had a gala, we did a fundraiser for UNICEF, and it was so fun because we were dancing. We had an auction. It was fun. And then what happened was, though, is a complete mess up on my part, but it was ended up being the best part of the conference. I ended the childcare an hour earlier than the gala and just did not realize we had changed some of the times. So all of a sudden, they’re like we have to pick up our kids. And so the kids go to the childcare they have they have their mini gala, but they they went in pajamas. So they’re having a pajama party. We’re in like ballgowns. Okay, so my conference organizers are like, what do we do? And I’m like, dude, just bring the kids over here. So the kids are dancing on the dance floor, they’re in pajamas, parents are all dressed to the nines. It that was the best part. I’ve never seen people so happy. You know. And I was like, This is what PNG is. And this is what the future is. These are kids that are not only going to a conference, but they’re involved. And one of the things also that happened, and I promise we can move on to the next topic is when I had to ask for speakers. One of the members, Dr. Jean Roby, her daughter was like, I want to speak Can I speak at the kids track? And I was like, Whoa, okay, so she, I think she’s like, 14 at the time. So I’m like, Oh, yeah, sure. Like, of course, right. And so I gave awards to every single speaker. It’s this Diamond Award. It’s really awesome. I love them. And so I actually presented her with an award, because usually we would present it after their talk. But because I wasn’t there for her talk, I actually presented it to her at the gala. And that in itself, like her mom still messages me, telling me what impact that had on her daughter. And her daughter’s name is Jade, and how she’s gone on to apply for community service. And, and it’s just helped her mission. And she still has that. You know that that little, you know, it’s that little bit award that she that she uses as inspiration. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, like, this is what we could be doing. We could be changing the next generation of women physicians, and what kind of I mean, who else who else can say that they have part of that legacy? You know, it’s going to be us, our community.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
She could be President and it started right there on that cruise.

Dr. Hala Sabry

It’s, yeah, I’m excited for her and what she has to, you know, offer the world.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So this has been awesome. And I mean, talk about that a legacy, but I want to change things up a little bit. And we’re going to talk about the program that you’re going. But like I said, I want to be a little bit unconventional. So I picked five questions that I want to give you. But probably the typical podcast interview you’ve done, probably don’t ask. So I’m ready. Just you could pause and say pass. Okay, I think your fans would be very unhappy. So I go for that. challenge here.

Dr. Hala Sabry

I will answer all five of them.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming

Okay, five questions. Okay, oops, my my computer went down here. Okay, first question. What was the last show? You’ve been binge watched? Oh,

Dr. Hala Sabry

what’s it called? The crown. But there’s also like this Netflix part. I think it’s called the wins the House of Windsor. That and Schitt’s Creek. Two things. Yeah.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Yeah, those are pretty similar. Similar shows, I think but we’ll move on. Okay. This is one that I’ve wanted to know, for a long time. Have you ever been or maybe have seen on someone else’s screen – The Physician Dads Group?

Dr. Hala Sabry
I do know Johnny Diaz. And I actually worked with him on a project last summer and have been trying to get him some connections for some amazing ideas that he has. But so I know of physician dads group, I have never seen a screenshot of any Well, actually, no, I have seen some screenshots, but they Nope. But I have not seen the group. I have seen some screenshots that were not very positive. But I think is a representation of a very minor part of the group. I hope so. So

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
yeah. Okay, that’s kind of a non answer, but we’ll confirm or deny that. All right, moving on. You spent, I believe seven years of working for Disney. Right? I did work for Disney. Okay. What is the best ride at Disneyland? And what is the ride that they need to get rid of?

Dr. Hala Sabry
Oh, gosh, okay, so the best ride? Oh my God, why are you asking me such a hard question? That’s a really hard question. So I worked on Pirates of the Caribbean for many years, and I was a lead on that ride. And so that will always be one of my favorites. And small world because I love the mission and that they actually opened it with UNICEF, which now I partner with. So both of those are my favorite. What do they need to get rid of? Um, gosh, at? Oh my gosh, what a Disney World. Yeah, hollywood presidents. It was not my favorite, especially since they put Trump in. I am not a fan of him. But you know, I think actually, it’s not really an attraction. It’s not a ride but Liberty Square in and I’m in the what’s it called the world showcase. I don’t know. I never stopped there. So maybe get rid of that. I

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
don’t even know what that is.

Dr. Hala Sabry
=It’s like, it’s like old colonial America. Okay, my mind. Let’s put another country in there. Yeah, so maybe that’s what I would get rid of. Okay, number four. Yeah.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So how are you doing? Good. Okay.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Yeah, yeah, that’s

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
cool. Okay. You’re an emergency report certified emergency room? Doctor? Yeah. What? specialty or what specialist is the hardest to get into the ER? And what kind of superpower do you use to get him or her in to see a patient?

Dr. Hala Sabry
Oh, well, this is like, actually not fair. But um, yeah, I think ophthalmology, but to their defense, it’s because they don’t have the equipment in the ER, so like getting them to come. And also, like, I mean, there’s just so many different eye, eye issues that come to the ER that are not really like, er, like, we don’t have any of like, the actual tools to help them. And what’s really hard is most of these people don’t have access to an ophthalmologist. And so it’s like, I think that’s the hardest part of it. But I will say that every place I’ve worked at, I’ve connected and networked with the ophthalmologists gotten their cell phone number have been able to text them and be able to get every single patient taking care of no matter what. So that’s the way I’ve worked around it.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
That’s the superpower. Yeah, along with kindness.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Well, and they want to help too. So I think that just you know, establishing a foundation. Yeah.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Every 100% all of them. Do.

Dr. Hala Sabry
I the ones I’ve talked to you. Yeah. Great.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Okay. Okay. One last question. Okay, you’re ready. Okay. Have you ever scheduled an interview, and then later texted the interviewer to reschedule the interview? Because you had a conflict at the same time, but then later texted them back that realized you were on the wrong week. Is that

Dr. Hala Sabry
that sounds so familiar. I think I did that this morning. Oh, you. Alright, that

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
wasn’t a question. That was a question. We’re going to end on. I know, some of you. I think this is great. I’m learning a lot but we’re gonna talk about entrepreneurship. This is kind of a standard question, but what three books influenced you the most as an entrepreneur that changed her life. three books.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Um, I think, Oh my gosh, there’s so many books, but atomic habits for sure. And it’s just about Yeah, I just thought, and I actually give it well, I don’t want to say that I give legacy boxes to all the people in my program. And that may or may not make appearance in the legacy box.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
But okay,

Dr. Hala Sabry
maybe we’ll see atomic habits, because I think for me, it was just a way of reframing my brain to be able to have the superpower to do anything.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
On the topics you guys don’t know.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Yeah, atomic habits by James clear, um, first things first. Um, I think that was really helpful in me, like kind of, when I started thinking about legacy, you know, all of the internet really focuses on financial legacy. And I don’t think that’s what legacy is. And in fact, if you look up the definition of legacy, it’s the expressions of one’s value, and their contribution to community and their family and to their environment. So that doesn’t really even mean money. But before I used to think that that was like, you have to like leave $100 million to the Humane Society to have a legacy, I didn’t know that it was accessible. But truthfully, your legacy is your obituary, if you don’t think that you’re leaving when you are. So you might as well decide what you want to leave behind or not. But also, I kind of think through that book, I think I was like, I can enjoy my legacy. It’s not something I’m leaving behind. It’s something I’m making now for myself to enjoy. Right. And so I think that was really helpful. And then a third book, Oh, my gosh, let’s see, there’s so many. I think anything by Brene Brown, like any any book that she’s written, has been really influential for me. But I think if anyone’s like me, I listened to Brene Brown. You know, I would binge watch, like interviews by Oprah and things like that. And it would give me that feeling of sensation, like I could really do anything, but it was like the execution of like, when I was in moments, or when that feeling died down, it was like, I was left again alone. So I think that’s why, you know, I kind of started delving more into this work of like, how can I extend the work of all these great women on a real practical level of helping them kind of change their mindset, not only by being an example of what can happen, but also having an opportunity for them to work with me directly? So I think those those are not three books. Those are three kinds of books. But yeah, I think that’s what I would do.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
You got it, you pass the challenge. Question challenge. I know, we’ve got only a few minutes left here, but you’ve got this course. I know, you’ve put a lot of time and effort into it. It’s fine. I think your biggest course you you’ve you’ve put up before I’ve been in terms of what you’re doing in terms of I know, you’ve put a lot of time and effort into this.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Yeah, but I haven’t made a course before. I have not made a course before. So this is my

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
So I’m accurate.

Dr. Hala Sabry
Yeah, first and biggest,

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
first and biggest the legacy mindset of women. What do you want to know? I mean, you I know that you’ve been getting a lot of questions about it. Um, maybe you can cover some of the questions that you’re getting. I know, you said, You’ve got a lot, a lot of questions. First, you know, is it it’s for women, legacy mindset is for women? Do they have to be a doctor? No, no,

Dr. Hala Sabry
they do not have to be a doctor. I’m really focusing on women in male dominated fields. Because like that study I mentioned, when the eight year old girls and then thinking that they’re not valued or as smart, you know, it’s funny, when I first saw that article, I immediately was like, phew, I like dodged that bullet. Because clearly, I think I’m smart, and I’m valuable. And that’s why I became a doctor. But you know, what’s interesting is that, you know, in my mid career crisis, where I was like, gosh, like, what else do I want to do with my life? I mean, I was happy being a doctor, there’s nothing wrong with that. Clearly, but, and I love it, and I still do it. But I was like, thinking more about, like, what’s the impact I’m going to have on my family, on my career on medicine, like, whatever it may be. An impact doesn’t have to be big, you know, it could be anything. And so I started kind of thinking, like, instead of just thinking I was on this hamster wheel of life, or just a cog in the wheel, like, what kind of impact do I want to actively work towards to make sure I’m having and so and so I think the mindset of like a mid career crisis is the same thing like, what’s our value? And so for me, I was like, that’s so interesting, that that eight year old is searching for her value and the 40 year old or the mid career person is searching for her value as well. And so I really want to speak to those mid career, really highly motivated women who are in positions like me where you know, they became the lawyer, they became the dentist, they became the engineer. They became the woman in tech. You know, all of these uphill battles with sexism and you know, competition. And then they get to a point and they’re like, Wait, where’s my impact, because I’ve just been so focused on the destination, and tying my value with the destination of what I will be and not how I will act and how I will be. And so I think that, for me that that group of individuals are really important. I mean, every woman is really important, but that group of individuals is what I’m focusing on, because I think those women, that mindset needs to be cultivated, because the eight year old girls are looking up to them. And those those women are teaching the eight year old girls, whether those are their daughters, or nieces, whatever it may be, you know, they’re teaching them and so I think like, even through this mindset shift that I’ve gone through, you know, how I was thinking I parent differently, like the way that I teach my daughter’s so different than what I would have done, you know, two or three years ago. And so for me, I’m like, wow, like, that’s a legacy in itself. just changing your mindset is a legacy in itself, focusing on her values. And, and so I’m like, you know, I know that my daughter, like right now, one of the examples I gave is that she wanted a cat, and I did not want a cat. And so every time she’d be like, I want a cat. And I was like, No, just No, it’s easier to say no. And so finally, I just stopped. I said, Why? Why do you want a cat? And so she kind of explained to me that she wanted to, you know, somebody that was, you know, I have two sets of twins, and she’s not a twin. So she was like, you know, you know, I want? Everybody has somebody? Yeah, you know, and I was like, Why don’t have a twin? And she’s like, Yeah, but you’re our other dog. He follows you around all the time. I’m like, Yeah, because I feed him and I, I pet him, and I walk him and I do all these things with him. And he’s 10 years old, I’ve been doing this since you know, he thinks I’m his mom, you know. And so I said, you know, you’d have to do that for this animal, but we get. And so she’s like, I’ll do it, you know, and we all know this, like, kids are like, I’ll feed it, I’ll do this, and you know that, you know, you’re gonna end up doing it, right. And so, so I was like, you know, look, I know, I’m gonna end up doing it. So like, we know that that’s a given. So I’m not gonna fight her on that part. She’s, you know, seven. But what I started doing is like, you cannot take care of another animal or another thing unless you take care of yourself first. So we talked about, like, what does that look like? How do you take care of your body? How do you take care of your brain, and we listed all the things like taking a shower, doing the laundry of what, like, not laundry, but like getting all your stuff into the basket, you know, and, you know, doing your homework, things like that. I was like, you cannot take care of this dog, unless you take care of yourself first. And so she practiced that. But it’s funny now, like, you know, whenever her brother and sister want to walk the dog or anything like that, you know, she’ll tell them like, oh, did you take care of herself first? And it’s funny, because, you know, I, I didn’t learn that till I was 35. And she learned that at seven. So you know, for me, I think that that’s hope, you know, I don’t know what I mean, every person is going to have their own issues and mindset blocks and objections and things like that. But my hope is that hers will look different than what it was for me. Last question,

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
I know you’re gonna get a lot, a lot of it’s closing down. Maybe at the time of this recording, you may not see it. So if it’s still open, you want to go click on the book and get it. But you beginning some questions on there, and you’re answering each one one by one. You said one of the questions is your hearing that they feel like they’re they’re not ready, you know, to take your course. What do you have to say to those folks who say this? And what do they hope to get? What will they get after they complete? Your course? For women? Yeah,

Dr. Hala Sabry
I don’t want you to be ready. Because then there’s no reason to have a course. Right? I mean, I wasn’t, I wasn’t ready. My whole point is getting you ready to think about legacy? You know, I don’t I mean, not that I don’t want you to be ready, I think I’m not expecting you to be ready, who this course is not for someone who feels very comfortable with the legacy that they’re leaving. They’re not questioning it, they’re not questioning about their impact. Those people you know, they probably already done the mindset shift. But if you have any question in your mind, don’t like not feeling unfulfilled. The whole idea of like, Oh, my gosh, well, I’m already a doctor, I’m already a lawyer, I’m already a dentist, like, what else do I want and then and then kind of thinking and shaming yourself, like, I should be grateful, I should be lucky. And then and then some people what they’ll do is they’ll go back and they’ll become a lawyer, or they’ll become something else. And then you know, and then what they’ll do is be like, well, how can I prove to myself that I’ll or how can I like assure myself that I’ll be fulfilled and that if I’m not fulfilled now, and so they constantly searching for changing their circumstance, or giving themselves an opportunity that they think that will fulfill them not realizing it’s just a power within them. And so some of the things that I thought I was not ready to focus on legacy are things like, Oh, I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough money I you know, I have a I have to work on my relationship with my mom or my my husband first or, you know, things like that. So, basically This course helps you with all of those things, just to be able to get all of that noise out of your brain. So you can actually focus on your legacy and your values and understand how your values are shining through everything that you do. And I know it sounds really intangible, you know, and that was part of the reasons I was a little hesitant as an entrepreneur to even put this out there. You know, when you think about coaching, you think about someone who’s like, you know, I’m a business coach, and I’ll make a help you make six figures in a year, you know, or I’m a weight loss coach, you’ll lose 10 pounds in a month, right? There’s a real tangible, deliverable.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Sure.

Dr. Hala Sabry
And that was one of my hardest things is like, what is the tangible deliverable here, and it’s you betting on yourself, it’s you focusing on your mindset and knowing that you’re unfulfilled now, and that you will have a sense of fulfillment, in the eight weeks, you will understand what that looks like for you. And that will be the start with your work, you know, and so, um, you know, and the other thing, too, is that there’s nobody talking about legacy, like, and they’re talking about legacy in the aspect of like, you know, money, which is a big part of it. And we do have two weeks on money, we have one week on money, scarcity, and one one week on money abundance, like how to in like investment, like just the idea of opening open to that, and what what kind of thoughts that you have to have to kind of like, even be interested in that. Not the how to do it, but the why we do it, you know, and the realization that the generational wealth of women is far inferior of women across the world, to men, there’s not one area in this world that women have more wealth than men ever so, and with money comes power and influence. And that’s why these girls at eight years old, don’t think that they’re valued, because they’re only seeing men, right? They’re only seeing men in the history books and things like that, you know? So, um, so I think it’s just more of, you know, to answer your question, it’s more of like, you don’t, you don’t need to be ready. We’re not none of us are ready. That’s why legacy is not something that’s it’s completely if you guys had read Russell, Branson’s book, expert secrets, it’s all blue water, you know, so it’s like, it’s a new, it’s a new discussion, you know, but that even the discussions that are being had are by men, you know, and it’s funny, as I was talking about this, I was on clubhouse one day, and I was talking about legacy mindset. And I had this man who DM me on Instagram, and I mean, he, I mean, great. I’m so happy that he connected with me, but he was like, Hey, I made a legacy mindset, or legacy mindset club. I’d love for you to teach in my club. And I was like, Well, of course a man did that. Right? And I mean, I’m, I’m happy to help him and I’m happy to represent his woman. But I went and all the people that were in the club, mind you, it wasn’t a lot of people, but they were all men. And I was like, Where are the women? That’s because they don’t think it’s accessible to them. So if you’re a woman who cares about these eight year little girls cares about your fulfillment now cares about legacy in any kind of way or does want to start to prioritize it is interested is curious about it, then, then, you know, sign up for my program. And like I said, I have no idea when this is going to air or if I’m going to have spots because I only have eight spots left at this time of like, talking to you. But um, but you know, you can always follow me on Dr.HalaSabry.com, sign up for my newsletter, there’s a values worksheet there, that’s where I started my journey. So I made it accessible for everybody. If you scroll down to the end of our of my landing page, you’ll see it. And you know, and just start, you know, start by starting, you know, read the books, read, you know, listen to the podcast, do the work yourself, but it is hard work. But the return on investment is like infinity. So

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Hala this has been very powerful. Thanks for playing along with me, I’m here. If you guys are looking for clarity in your legacy, and if it’s still open, you got to check what she has out here. The Legacy Mindset for Women by Dr. Hala Sabry. Thank you so much for. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, everybody. And as always, you can just read about it, you know, nothing’s gonna change until you actually implement. And so whatever that is, it’s all about keep moving forward.

Dr. Hala Sabry
I love that.

Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, Interviews, Mindset

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Making Money with Your Own App with Daniel Erichsen, MD

We’ve covered all types of businesses on the BootstrapMD podcast, but one of the areas that we have not covered  that has had a tremendous amount of interest is developing successful phone apps.  This internist reached out to me over six months ago, and I’m so glad we are finally able to bring him on the show! 

Dr. Daniel Erichsen is a sleep specialist and the founder of Bedtyme, an app to help people overcome insomnia through better sleep education. We cover, warts and all, how he brought this app to the marketplace, and is now certifying sleep health educators to spread his vision even further.  I think you’ll enjoy and learn a lot from this lively interview!

LINKS MENTIONED

Bedtyme –  health app to help insomnia sufferers restore the power of sleep

Https://www.bedtyme.co

The Sleep Health School – online sleep education and coaching portal

https://www.thesleephealthschool.com

Sleep Health School Youtube and Podcast
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC_tdQDMQon0CfD0xAbZPNDg

RAW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 0:17
Hey guys, it’s Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another episode of BootstrapMD. If you’ve been following us on the program, you know, I love to spotlight physician entrepreneurs. And actually, last summer, this doctor reached out to me, and unfortunately, I don’t know if it went into my spam folder, or not, but once I heard about his story, I said, I need to have this physician on. His name is Dr. Daniel Erichsen. He is from Eugene, Oregon. He’s a sleep specialist. But he had an idea about just basically sharing his message more out into the world. You know, outside of his patients, he saw that there was a dearth of information on insomnia and other aspects related to sleep, and he wanted to create an app. And I know many of you are interested in either creating an app or maybe you have an app available, and maybe you don’t know how to market it. He was actually successful six weeks after he launched his app. We’re gonna hear all about the trials and tribulations that actually led to creating a website for certification of sleep providers. But enough from me, they want to hear from you, Dr. Daniel Erichsen, welcome to the show.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 1:31
Thanks so much for having me. I really, really enjoy talking to you.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 1:35
This is good. And, you know, I think a lot of times when I have a lot of doctors who either are entrepreneurs, or what I call want-trepreneurs, and maybe they live vicariously through us, and I always try to highlight examples of doctors who are actually out there in the trenches. So, before we begin, I always like to hear about origin stories, a little bit of a comic book nerd, you know, how did Peter Parker become Spider Man? So how did you become, from Dr. Daniel Erickson to the sleep coach?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 2:08
So absolutely, it’s a good one. And you know, I love this origin story. So I’ll share mine, which is this one. So just very briefly, my core specialties are actually in pediatrics, and I was I did my residency back in the Bronx, New York. And I thought I was going to be like, I knew I needed to, I wanted to niche down to become a little bit more narrow, and I thought it would be an intensivist maybe, or something like that. But I realized that lifestyle wasn’t for me, I wanted something more kind of, you know, more lifestyle friendly, if you will. And it so happened that a friend of mine just mentioned, hey Daniel, do you know that there’s a fellowship and sleep medicine? And I was really curious and intrigued, and I applied, got it, got the fellowship, and I really enjoyed it. And during fellowship, I learned mostly about sleep apnea. That’s like the big thing and a little bit about insomnia. But then, as I started practicing as an attending, which is about 10 years now, 10 years ago, now, I saw that insomnia is really, really a big problem. You know, just as big as sleep apnea. A lot of people struggle with sleep. And I would teach these methods called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. It’s kind of a mouthful, but it’s quite straight forward. And I would always, or very often, I would ask people, you know, when I heard them talk about their insomnia, I would say, Have you heard about CBTI? Have you heard about CBT? And you know, either they would say no, or do they go like CBD? Yeah, I’ve tried that. I’ve tried CBD. I was like, no, not CBD, CBT. And so anyway, that’s this just a way of saying, like, I realized that there were millions of people struggling and like, really, virtually nobody got like, a helpful message. So that’s, somewhere along the journey, I was like, there has to be a better way. There must be a way of getting the message out there to people. And that’s how I kind of transitioned, you know, towards being a sleep coach.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 4:00
Now, you know, most of our listeners, we do have doctors and non doctors but you know, most of our listeners are doctors. And I can’t even remember if we got any education on sleep. I know a lot of us had lack of sleep, I know I did in my residency, and we continue to have this and obviously, it’s a huge problem. So can you define for us, what is your definition of insomnia?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 4:26
No, no, that’s really good question. I’m very important because it’s there’s often a lot of confusion, sleep deprivation, which which we had as residents, is very different. That’s just you don’t have enough opportunity for sleep. And when you get a chance to sleep, you typically have no problems whatsoever sleeping you asleep really easily, in fact. Where as insomnia, it’s a struggle. It’s when somebody tells you like, I just can’t fall asleep. I can’t stay asleep no matter what I do nothing helps. And that’s the sense that there’s something wrong and basically, they’re really, really trying hard to sleep but sleep just doesn’t happen for them. That struggle, that is insomnia.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 5:03
So, when you were deciding to create an app, first, why did you consider creating an app for insomnia?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 5:13
That’s a good question. And that actually goes back to a not very successful venture with an app actually many, many years ago. This was just after I finished fellowship. And I had this idea that you could create an app that people could take their smartphone, and use this, you know, the thing you use like, when you’re jogging, you put on your arm? People could put their smartphone on their legs, and check if they had like leg movements, kind of like restless legs in their sleep and monitor it. And that’s one of those, like, you create a product that nobody wants. There’s no interest for that whatsoever.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 5:47
Or at least it’s hard to market.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 5:49
It’s hard to market, exactly. And hard to get people interested in. But that was with a friend who was a programer himself. So apps were a little bit on my radar. And I had a little bit of experience with it. And, so I just felt like with everybody having a smartphone and the ease of just downloading an app and being right there, that sort of, you know, led me towards thinking an app would be a really good way.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 6:17
Now, the app is called Bedtyme, and that’s B-e-d-t-y-m-e, so it’s with a “Y”. How did that get started?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 6:25
Yes. So what happens so in clinic, very briefly here, the core of CBTI, is that, someone who has trouble sleeping often spends a lot of time in bed, and actually, when they spend less time in bed and are more sleepy when they go to bed, that typically helps. So I had this idea, and I realize it was kind of a naive idea that, you could basically boil it down to an algorithm. That if somebody said, Okay, I’m going to spend this amount of time in bed, and it calculates how much percentage of that based sleep, then it could do a suggestion, it could be basically almost like an automatic solution. So I thought that was fantastic, when I thought of the idea. And so I thought, this could be a simple algorithmic solution that could really help people. So and the idea actually came to me during the sleep conference in 2017, in June in Boston. I just I had that idea. And it took awhile, It took about six months until I started executing it. And I found online, on like one of these websites, I found a developer in Russia that could build it for me. And, you know, it was expensive, it was like 40 bucks an hour. And the total cost of creating that app honestly, was probably like $40 or $50,000 or something. And the sad part of that was that, my wife actually was sort of skeptical. She was like, Daniel, how is this actually going to help people? I was like, Oh it’s gonna work great, people are just gonna sleep better. But she was right. When we launched that first one, people used it, but nobody actually got better. Because it was lacking in education and support and guidance, etc., people didn’t really do much better. But another learning point here is that you often have an idea and you launch it, and then easily at that point, I could have easily gone, Oh, no, it didn’t work. Let me like scratch the whole idea. But I knew there was something there. So that became a complete rehaul, where instead, I added a curriculum and built in coach within the app. And that’s when it really started to work. So you mentioned like, six weeks after launching, it started making money. That was actually a relaunch, but since then, it has is starting doing really, really well.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 8:43
So you mentioned it cost, maybe $40 to $50,000. Was it just the development time for the algorithm? Or was this guy taking you for a ride? What’s what, tell me more about that? That’s a pretty expensive for an app. Or is it? I don’t know.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 8:59
I would say overall, I think development costs are coming down quickly, but I think they were a good company. It was just that the way I had created it, It was pretty complex and it did require a lot of work. But what then happened was, actually was very serendipitous, my kids had a playdate with another kid, and they’re dad was mentioning that he was an app developer. And he actually did different types of apps where the first one was like native only for for iOS only for Apple. But there are these softwares now where you can create for both, and we used so he used that. So anyway, long story short here, that recreating it actually became much less costly than the first one. So for anyone out there thinking about it, we use software that can can create for both. And that becomes much less costly.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 10:08
Now, so you found a local developer, a friend, or a friend of a friend. Did that seem to speed up the development process, rather than going overseas?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 10:18
It was much, it was so much better. You know, imagine with the first developer that was in Russia, and again, they were nice people. But it was also like, I’d have to sketch things on a paper, take a picture and send it to them, they created it, they sent it back to me. Then I’d have to say, oh no this is not what I wanted. And also, what was so nerve racking, honestly, was that whenever there was a bug, I had to describe it to them, they had to try to figure it out, and then create a new build, and it could take like weeks. And in the meantime, a client couldn’t access anything. It was very nerve racking, it’s so much better to have someone within the company. And by the way, the local person, we found his name is Hank, I gave him a part of the company, for him to become the CTO. And that also, when we have somebody on board like that, it makes a huge difference.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 11:13
Yeah, yeah, that opens up a whole lot of new questions. And I know we’re gonna probably gonna get a lot a lot of feedback from this call. But just so I have the timeframe, so you originally launched it in 2017?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 11:28
The idea came June 2017, started actually working on it with this Russian company in like January of 2018. And launched it for the first time in, I want to say was like, August or September of 2018. And then it took about like, six months to figure out that the initial thing wasn’t working. We relaunched it with the same Russian company, like a second relaunch, you know, when was that? That was like,maybe mid 2019. And then, the final reversion happened, and then that relaunch was about the time I emailed you.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 12:09
Okay. Okay, so that was in July.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 12:11
Yes. 2020.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 12:13
So when you initially made your deal with the local developer, was it strictly cash for services? Or did you say, Hey, I’m going to give you a piece of the company? When did that discussion happen?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 12:29
No, no, absolutely. That is a very good question. And it’s a nice piece of the story there. So we had this play date and he talked about how he was an app developer. and me and my wife, and by the way, she’s a big part of the company, most of the good ideas come from her. We were kind of like, He’s perfect for us and he lives in Eugene. It’s kind of crazy. So I literally when I came home, I just texted him and said, Hey, do you want to meet up in Starbucks tomorrow? And we did. So he came there. And I was a little bit nervous, because I really wanted him. But I had to, like, convince him that this was a good idea. So I basically told him, like, Listen, we have this app. And we have seen that people are willing to pay money for this type of service. And we have brought in a little bit of money. So I was just convincing him that it would be a good deal. And I offered him a small percentage in the company, for him to become the CTO. And now he has a team in China that he works with for other purposes, so he just oversees it. And then we’ve paid them a little bit anddevelopers, but that that’s how it happened, basically.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 13:31
Great, great. Great. That’s really good to know. So let’s talk about the app itself. I know we talked a little bit about it. It’s called Bedtyme, and what it’s all about.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 13:44
Absolutely. So again, when somebody has trouble sleeping, like insomnia, it’s sort of like an anxiety and miseducation thing. So it’s really pretty straightforward. And by the way, I want to quickly mention that there is this very successful app for weight loss that is called Noom, you know about it? We basically have the exact same model, we took it from them really. So every day on the app, you get this like an educational text module…

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 14:16
We might have to edit that out, by the way, just kidding!

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 14:24
No problem. Although, I don’t think they mind actually, I’ve told them that I took it from them on Twitter. They said something like, Oh, you know, good for you or something like that. So they know it. But yeah, so every day you get an educational text module and and you have access to coaching within the app. And that actually, is it. So every day you learn something and there’s a little tracking function, you can count see how you’re doing? And that’s it. It’s pretty simple that is it.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 14:53
So you’re going to steal my thunder because there’s this joke that I had my back my head, you just give them content so they fall asleep. How does it work? It’s a paid model or free trial? How’s the financials? How do you set that up?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 15:12
Yeah, exactly, I think it’s called freemium. So it’s free for one week and then, it’s kind of like Netflix, you sign up for free, but you do give your payment information, so if you if you don’t unsubscribe, then you are subscribed, and you will be charged after one week. And, we started off with a two week free trial, and then it was, I believe, $39 per month and then we went up to $69. And, the thing is that it requires a lot of education and coaching. So if you compare to other products, this is still very cheap. So we actually just a few weeks ago, we upped the price to $129. So after a free trial, it’s $129, which I think is going to be a good price for a long period of time. But people are still purchasing it, it’s still doing well, etc. So that’s our current model.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 16:03
I gotta ask, are you willing to share numbers? Either like users or revenue, you know, from the app?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 16:10
Absolutely. So at this point in time, in my interface as a coach only, I only see the clients that I talked with in the last week. So there are probably more, but I think I have around 40 to 50 active paying clients. But we only recently changed the price. So I’ll share with you that at this point in time, the app is bringing in probably around $2500 a month.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 16:37
Very nice. Very nice. Now, I know that you’re a sleep specialist. Has that been able to allow you to reduce your hours? Or are you still working full time? How has this effected your job, your career?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 16:53
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I’m still I haven’t actually paid myself anything from the money we’re bringing in. And I have gone down to a part time position. So I went down 100% to 70%. And partly it is because yeah, I really want to focus more on the side projects. And, partly it was because of COVID, too, things became very slow. I’m RVU based, so it made sense also to decrease my time. So right now, I’m working 70%, three days a week.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 17:24
Now, I like what you said, you know, it’s very difficult to hit a home run when you’re first up at bat. And it’s actually gratifying to hear, you mentioned that you had a failure, your first first attempt didn’t succeed as you wanted it to. You got the app out of the way, it’s successful. It’s on iOS, and now it’s on Android as well. You mentioned that you there are companies out there that let you do both. And then I guess, if you could go back in a time machine and change it, you probably start with that. Are there any other lessons learned from from this app? Or did everything go as smooth, as you’re telling us it did?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 18:12
No, it was not very smooth at all, actually. You know, again, the first version of the app, which was quite expensive, the idea was not sound, it was not a good model. So I think for anyone out there that has this, you know, fairly ambitious like entrepreneur idea, your first product may very well be not that great. But you can learn so much from that if you’re willing to change trajectory, learn from from what didn’t work, then iteration by iteration, you will get to a product that works. That’s huge.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 18:52
Now, sometimes you see things like with Shark Tank, or they’ll have a commercial where they’re launching a product and they click the on button, I’m sure seeing this in like dollar signs appearing. But we all know, that’s not reality. How did you get your app? How did you start marketing it? How did how do people find you? I don’t know what the landscape is on sleep related apps out there. How did you really stand out in the marketplace?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 19:23
Oh, that’s a great question. And that leads us to kind of a whole different topic. So when I started working on this app, I was like, I think I’m starting to become an entrepreneur. I have to learn more about this. And you know, went on YouTube and like heard people talk and stuff like that. And one person that I came across that you probably come across them is Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary V. So for anyone who isn’t familair, he’s many things but one thing he’s really good with is marketing and social media, etc. So one thing he said I believe I heard him say it, and I read it in one of his books too, was that whenever you have an idea, you’ve got to start talking about it, you got to start talking about your idea. And that, that hit home with me, I was like, I gotta do that. So I started a YouTube channel, like two and a half years ago. And I just talked about sleep and insomnia, and shared whatever I knew about it. And that became super important for many reasons. I will say actually, number one was this, that I thought I understood insomnia, but I didn’t. You know, I only partially understood it. Then when people would submit comments, I was like, oh, that’s a good call, I haven’t thought about that. It really made me understand and my teaching improved immensely. That was number one. Number two is, I built a following. Little by little, and this is a slow process, but little by little, more and more people found it and the channel grew. So when I had a product, I had somebody that could share it, and they almost became like my beta testers, you know, my followers. So that is basically all the marketing is through that YouTube channel, and also word of mouth and a little bit other things. But that became really helpful.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 21:10
I love it. So basically, free content. So you’re not paying for advertising at this point?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 21:18
No, I mean, we’ve done like, $10 Facebook campaigns, fiddled around a little bit, but it really, it’s only content marketing, exactly. Just sharing helpful information, and then a lot of people just come to you then, because they trust you and want to work with you.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 21:37
So your company, you said your wife is involved, as well as, of course, the CTO. Are there other employees that you have or is that about it?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 21:47
Yeah, that’s really it. We have one more partner, actually. His name is Alexander, he also serendipitously found me on the YouTube channel. He happened to have a company where he does like UX design, you know, user interface design. And he helped with designing the app. So that’s the four of us, the partners, and we’re in that space of a startup where, we’re doing everything like marketing, coaching, you know, everything ourselves. But I think we’re very close to being able to hire somebody. I think that the next step for us is to hire a second coach. And so that’ll be the next kind of like, litmus test of the model here. Because a lot of the clients I have are people that sort of know me from the YouTube channel. So, will it still work when we have a hired coach? I’m sure it will. You know, again, we have to tweak it, but that’s kind of the next step for us.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 22:46
Well, and obviously, you’re in a space that is going to continue to grow. I assume from the pandemic, you know, I don’t know anybody who’s been sleeping soundly since the pandemic. Maybe right place, right time. But did you see any changes from when you when you launched? I guess, it’s hard to say. Because you actually launched it during the pandemic? For the most part, right?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 23:08
Yeah, that’s right. I think, again, when you’re in the phase, you have some natural growth, and I don’t know if it’s accelerated with the pandemic or not. But, just generally speaking, I can tell that definitely the pandemic has affected people’s sleep, and there a lot of people having trouble sleeping nowadays. It’s like that combination of the stress, but also the isolation and inactivity. Insomnia, a lot of times comes from, you know, if you have a lot more time on your hands, more time to ponder your sleep and more things to focus on, it actually typically gets worse. So, yeah, it’s a lot more people have trouble sleeping now.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 23:44
Yeah, I mean, just from a personal standpoint, my son actually has a lot of issues with insomnia. And you know, it’s because his mind’s racing, and then it’s just a vicious cycle. And, I know we spend money on it. Everything from pillows, to cool blankets, to meditation apps, CBD. Not yet CBT, but yeah, it certainly is a big issue. But you didn’t rest on your laurels, you decided to create something called the Sleep Coach School. What is that about?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 24:21
Absolutely, it started off as kind of a separate project. But now I see there’s a lot of synergy between the two. So during this journey, I was on Twitter, and I connected with these two guys, Michael and Martin, who are both here in Oregon, and they’re also really into like helping people with insomnia. So we chatted here and there, and a common theme was that we were like, Oh my gosh, look at this article, it’s so unhelpful and this is going to cause so much stress. Also like, Oh, look at this person that calls himself a sleep coach, but all they say is not helpful at all. And then Martin, he was like, I wish there was some kind of like certification. So you could at least know that this person knows what they talk about, you know? And then I was like, there’s nothing like that, why don’t we start that? Like, you know, why don’t we start actually certifying coaches? And Michael, the other guy who was like, Yeah, sure. And Martin had a lot on his plate so he didn’t join. But me and this other guy, Michael, we did that. So it became an online school is called The Sleep Coach School. And it was really designed for someone, our initial thought was maybe someone who’s a counselor, or maybe doctor who wants to learn more about it. But I realized, after a while, that probably isn’t going to be the thing because doctors, counselors, we already have so much on our own plates. But so what we see now is that, it’s mostly somebody who actually had trouble sleeping, got past it, and now wants to help others. Those have become most of our students that we certify.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 25:53
I think it helped too because, I believe you have an MD or a DO behind your name. That actually accelerated the process and made it more, certifiable, so to speak. Or legitimate.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 26:06
Absolutely. And I think, to this day, still, being a doctor, it means something, a lot of people have confidence in doctors. And something I thought about, that may be helpful for anyone that tunes in here. You know, as a doctor, you do some things that are kind of pure medical. Like, you cannot call yourself, I don’t know, a knee coach and start doing knee operations. That’s not gonna happen, that’s not ethical, that’s not right. But then you have things like, in sleep, for example, we have insomnia. Which is really not medical, it’s just education and guidance. And, you had your guest from the other podcast, was named Kevin…

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 26:48
Cucarro, yeah,

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 26:49
Cucarro, for example, a pain doctor who sees that education, about your relationship with pain, for example, is often what the problem is. And you can see that, as a doctor, you actually do a lot of coaching, too. So you could have, for example, a pediatrician who tells people how to potty train. They could become a coach for that. It’s a silly example, but what I want to say is that as a doctor, you have a lot of opportunity, because you actually do a lot of coaching. And you could take that into a whole different space, if you want to.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 27:24
What I like about this, I’ve coached doctors for years, and I’ve had a couple of sleep doctors who wanted to do entrepreneurial. Unfortunately, they got into some financial issues. I know, one particular doctor, he had a sleep center, that because of declining reimbursements, he had to close it. So, it’s gratifying to hear someone, a doctor who like figured it out. And yes, it is something that you can do. And it sounds like, not only are you generating revenue from it sounds like you’re having fun doing it too.

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 28:04
Absolutely. It’s super gratifying. I mean, literally, almost every week, somebody sends me messages saying, I’m sleeping again, after so many years of struggling and it’s like you changed my life. You know, which is, by the way, all of us really, went to medicine for that. Right. And you can do that in traditional medicine but, you can do that as a coach too. And it’s, it’s super gratifying. Absolutely.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 28:31
And then in addition too, talk about your reach now. I mean, obviously, you would have your patients in Eugene, but now, you know, I assume you’re you’ve got people from all around the United States and maybe beyond?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 28:43
100%. I had a client that came on, you know, on Bedtyme on the app, popped up as a client yesterday and she was mentioning like, Oh, it’s super hot here, I’m in Australia. And I was like, so cool. It was so cool. I love every client wherever they are, but just reaching people in Australia or you know, wherever it’s really cool. Yeah.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 29:04
Well, it sounds like you’re having a fun time. All the best of success to you. The name of the app is Bedtyme B-E-D-T-Y-M-E at bedtime.co. Dot C-O if you want to find out. And thesleepcoachschool.com, you also have a YouTube channel and a podcast also called The Sleep Coach School. It’s been great talking with you Daniel. I know a lot of people are gonna get a lot out of this. If you have any advice for you know, an aspiring physician, App Inventor or developer. What advice would you give them?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 29:43
Absolutely. I would say you know the classic one is just do it. Go ahead and do it. If you have that within you and feel like, I should be doing this, I wanted to do it. Do it. And the thing is that yes, it I spent a lot of money on initial product that didn’t really work that well, but I learned a ton from it. And if you’re willing go there, learn from things that may not be that comfortable in beginning, you can really get to a place where things turn around, you make back your investment and beyond. You help people and it can be fantastic. So just take the plunge, do it, and you’ll learn.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 30:21
Thank you so much. I so many lessons that we learned here. I love how you pivoted, you didn’t give up, you knew that you had something of value to the world. And I’m sure there were times when you wanted to stop, right? You wanted to say, enough’s enough. I know for you, or maybe your spouse, family and friends. But I think the world is a better place for it, guys. So Daniel, any last minute thoughts before we end the call today?

Dr. Daniel Erichsen 30:52
No, I just want to say that if anyone is just curious or wants to connect, have questions, then, you know, I’ll share my bio with with you, Mike, and very happy to talk with anyone that’s even remotely interested in anything I do.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 31:08
Oh, wonderful. Well, thank you, Dr. Daniel. Again, it’s The Sleep Coach School, Bedtyme is the app. If you’re considering an app, and to want to learn more about it, I think, Daniel made a very generous offer out there. And I really appreciate it learned a lot. As always guys, don’t stay stagnant. Don’t just think about the idea over and over that someday it’s gonna happen. It’s not gonna happen, just like Dan says, unless you actually just do it. So again, guys, it’s all about keep moving forward.

Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, Interviews, Product Creation

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7 Success Metrics Every Physician Entrepreneur Should Know

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“If you can measure it, you can improve it”.

I learned early on as an entrepreneur, to do well in marketing you need to know a little math, and there are specific indicators to track what’s working and what’s not.

If you have 100 people  land on your website, do you know what percentage actually buys your product? , I want to share seven success measures to determine the health of your business using the example of my cash-based medical practice.

And as an added bonus, I also share four things I look at to determine the  effectiveness of a new online ad campaign.  Whether you have an online business, a local practice, or just getting started, these are the measures you’ll want to know to save you time and money.

LINK MENTIONED:

http://www.callrail.com – software to track your phone call leads

TRANSCRIPT

If you want to get more sales, you want to get more customers, you have to measure it. So I use certain metrics in my business to determine if I’m losing money or if I’m making money. The metrics that I want to share with you guys I think can be used to apply to almost any type of business out there. I use it for my medical practice, for my online businesses.

Hey, guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD, the podcast for physician and healthcare entrepreneurs. If this is your first time, welcome, and if you’ve listened to me before, welcome back. Today, I’m going to be talking about metrics. Sounds like a pretty boring topic, but it’s something every entrepreneur needs to know. There is a quote that I like to use. The quote says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve on it.” For me, as someone who is introverted and likes to see numbers, this works perfectly for me. I learned early on that to do well in marketing you just need to know a little bit about math.

Take your website. You’ve got a website. You’re selling some type of widget. When you have your website, you want to know analytics. For example, if 100 people come to my website, what percentage actually buys my product? Now, the average is about 1%, 0.5%. Are there things that I can do to improve that percentage? There may be different variables to test on my website. Maybe I’ll have a blue background versus a red background. Is there a difference between people who buy the blue website versus the red website? Maybe I introduce a video versus a still picture. Maybe I add testimonial A versus testimonial B. These are all things that you can measure. An example that we would use is from, let’s say, my online business. Maybe I’ll buy a Google ad. The ad allows you to show a blue background website versus a red background website. Then, you can measure it to see if we send 100 people this versus 100 people on the other site, is there going to be a difference in percentages?

Another adage that we use in marketing is, “If it’s not working, test, test, test,” with the idea that you’re split testing it, and you’re using just basic mathematics to determine which site is better. Once you’ve got a website that is doing well, you then have your control. Then, maybe you’ll add another variable. That way, you can incrementally increase the success of your website, increase more sales.

What I’m going to cover today are these success metrics that I use to determine where I am in my business, just as you would a patient. You would be checking the vital signs to determine if this is someone who’s going to be ill or is this someone who is going to be healthy. You’re going to be looking at the labs. Well, you do the same thing in a small business. I want to share these success metrics that I use. For an example, I’m going to be using my cash-based medical practice. Some of you who are new, I own or co-own a number of different practices that are cash based. They don’t take any insurances. In our practice, we do aesthetics. We do medical weight loss.

Again, we don’t have insurance companies to refer us patients, so I have to have a marketing budget each month. I need to know the dollars that I used, I set aside for marketing, and what isn’t marketing, getting it into the right place. It also determines what I need to improve on, just a general assessment, how we’re doing. So these success metrics indicators just give you a snapshot of your business so you can see where you stand. It’s something that, if I can’t get to it every month, at least every quarter. That way, I know where my marketing budget goes, if I need to promote something, or if I need to take something out of my practice. These are all things that an entrepreneur needs to be aware. Now, again, I’m using my medical practice as an example, but if you have an online business, you can use these same success indicators.

So without further ado, here are the seven success metrics that every physician entrepreneur should know. Number one, customer acquisition cost, or CAC. Plainly speaking, how much money is it going to cost you to acquire a customer? let’s say you spend $1000 on a Facebook ad campaign and you get one customer. Customer acquisition cost is $1000. So I and a business partner, we agreed to put this big banner, pay for this banner, in a shopping mall that was near our weight loss clinic. We got a good deal, but when it came time to re-up it, we didn’t really know if it was making money or not. This one cost thousands of dollars to apply, very similar to I’ve seen practices advertise on billboards. Sure, that Jaime may get thousands of cars every day, but is it targeted traffic, and how do you know that it’s actually worth it? You don’t. In that line of thinking, sure, you might want to get the most traffic as possible. Why don’t you buy a Super Bowl commercial? You have to have something that you can measure.

Now, I do understand that there are some businesses, it’s all about branding. Coca Cola, they have the budgets to have this big media advertising, but not if you’re, in my case, a small local medical clinic. I’ve got a very limited marketing budget. I’m not all about branding, but I want to be sure that your marketing dollar goes farther. Now, one simple way of determining what’s the best strategy for your customer acquisition costs, and most people do this, most businesses do this, is the simple “How did you hear from us?”

Let’s say you decided to do a health talk at a local community group, and maybe it costs you $50 a year to be a member. You find out that you got 10 new patients from that talk that you did. Maybe you should do more of that versus paying $3,000 for a billboard that maybe gets you two patients. That’s just one way of having some type of understanding of what it is. I’m so surprised that more people don’t realize, when they say to me, “Hey, I think it’s working, it sounds like it is,” but they have no real grasp of it.

One thing that I do, if you’re going to do something like a print ad or a billboard, is to have certain tracking phone numbers that forwards to your main clinic number. When I’m doing some online marketing for my medical practice, I’ll have a different tracking number on my Facebook ad versus, let’s say, my Google ads and another number for a print ad that we’re doing, or a direct mail ad. That way I know which one is bringing in more phone calls. That’s a way that I can track. In that way, I know I can put more money in this one because it’s working, and this one is not. I use a system called CallRail. Callrail.com is what I use. I know if you use Google system, they do have their own Google tracking that’s free, that comes if you use the Google ads platform. But at very least, it’s one way that I can track more effectively what’s working and what’s not.

Next is customer lifetime value or CLV. Simply put, it’s a metrics that indicates what is the total amount of revenue that a business can reasonably expect from just one single customer. If you’re doing this, you are ahead of 95 to 99% of all business owners, yours truly. I have a general idea about my CLV, but it’s not something that I compute regularly. Simple example, I went to Starbucks this morning, got my vente for $6.50, but my customer lifetime value isn’t $6.50 cents to Starbucks because I go there a few times a week and I’ve been doing this since it’s opened. My customer lifetime value, over all the coffees that I’ve drunk, is a lot higher.

Simply put, in your business, are they just buying like one $27 ebook and you’re done, or are you offering additional services? Are you offering services that are more expensive, more lucrative for you as the business owner? Are you offering a webinar experience that may be a few hundred dollars more or coaching? That way, the average customer lifetime value increases. In my example, we have, let’s say, a special on Botox, but they don’t just come in for Botox. They come in every three months. We’ll add complimentary services to a skincare line, supplements, dermal fillers that all increase the customer lifetime value, just a measure of retaining as well as a measure of satisfaction. Are they just here one and done, or are they here for life? I’ve had patients here ever since I’ve been opening.

That’s something that you need to track, and again, most business owners don’t do that. The one measure, just as an aside, there’s a ratio called the CLV to CAC ratio, so customer lifetime value over their customer acquisition cost. Some businesses use that with the sense that you want to be able to increase your CLV and then decrease your CAC. You want to increase the customer lifetime value and then decrease your customer acquisition costs, so the higher the number is, obviously, the better. So that’s one way that you can combine those two measures.

Number three is return on investment. We cover that in the first part. I gave you an example of the different types of online ads. Am I getting a return on investment on my Facebook ad versus my print ad? What’s actually working? I might turn off my print ad when I find that, my return on investment, it’s just not where I need to be. Then, I could put my marketing dollar in a better place that actually is converting.

But again, it always surprised me, in using the understanding of return on investment, how many businesses, at least in my space, in the medical spa space, where they’ll just throw money at it. If they’re business is hemorrhaging, they’ll say, “Well, I’ll just buy this laser because it’s a high priced item. I can get $6,000,” but not measuring what is the customer lifetime value, not measuring what the customer acquisition costs. Then, that laser becomes a coat rack after a few years, until the laser rep remind you of the new best upgrade that’s going to be coming out that you need to have. When you’re looking at return on an investment, don’t just trust what the salespeople are going to say. You want to trust and actually, if you’re going to introduce some type of new procedure or treatment, ask around, “What is return on investment on it?” You want to hear from the business owners. They’ll tell you, not the salespeople because they have an ulterior motive.

So if you’re new to marketing, the first two or three might be a little bit difficult to explain conceptually, but I think the next couple are pretty easy to understand. Number four is how many customers do I have each month, or with Mike it’s, how many patients do I have each month? I also look at breakdown. Are they new? Are they recurring? I’ll also look at appointments. What are the type of procedures that are occurring? How does it compare to 12 months ago? How does it compare it to from two years, from that data point? What do I need to do? What’s changed? I also look at things like seasonal components. That’s why, for example, around December, in weight loss, it’s really slow because people are going to holidays. They want to eat a lot with family and friends, so I might be promoting something different. I might be promoting some skin lines during the winter season to make up for the decreased amount of visits.

Number five is just looking at monthly revenue. What’s the revenue that’s coming in? Again, taking to all the things that I just talked about. One interesting component, too, is do you have recurring revenue? See the thing with a cash-based clinic, it’s based upon how many people are actually going to show up? That determines what the amount of dollars you can be bringing in that day. With recurring revenue, you don’t have to worry about those ups and downs. That’s why the gyms love memberships. They know that, when they joined on the first or 15th or whatever the date is and it automatically re-bills, they’re going to be getting that set amount of income whether the customers show up or not. We don’t have a membership in our clinic, but it’s something that we’re strongly looking at because it does save you, that you know that you’re going to get this recurring revenue that’s coming in, that can help pay the bills when things might be dire.

Number six, website traffic. Obviously not something I look at every single day, but owning a marketing company that did local search engine optimization, it’s important. You want to make sure that you are being ranked for the keywords that will bring in more customers and will bring in more patients. Where do you stand versus your competitors? You want to make sure that you have your Google analytics, you’re bringing in more traffic to your website, the targeted traffic that’s coming in, and if it’s not, what you need to do to improve that.

Number seven, reviews. This is especially important for local businesses. We’re on Yelp, so we want to make sure that we’ve got an excellent reputation on Yelp. We’ll look at the number of reviews. We’ll look at the average amount of stars that we get. These all play a role to it, like it or not. Study by Bright Local, just giving some stats, 82% of consumers will first read up on what other people have to say about a local business. I know I do that myself. Other thing, too, is, as a local business, you always want to be bringing in more reviews. Another stat I’ll throw at you is that 84% believe that reviews that are older than three months are no longer relevant, so you always want to give an opportunity for your customers to say nice things about you for reviews.

Now, as someone who owns an online business, Yelp may not be very important to you, but the same principles apply. What’s coming up on your name or your product on the search engine? Is it positive or negative? Just like you want to respond to any bad reviews that you would get in a business, you want to respond to some bad reviews on an online testimonial that you may or may not see. Again, reviews is very important in this transparent society that we live in today.

So those are my seven success measure indicators. As a bonus, I want to give you some indicators that I use when I am doing some online marketing. These are things that I look at when I am doing online advertising. Now, you may not be someone who wants to do your own online marketing. You may want to outsource it to a company. These are some things that you need to be asking these medical marketing companies or any kind of marketing companies. If they’re putting out these online ads, these are the indicators that they should be telling you because these are the indicators that can determine the effectiveness of the online ads.

We’re going to again use the example of my clinic. We have online advertising vendors going, where we’re trying to attract cold craft, people who have never heard of us before. The way that we do it, in this scenario, is we use a coupon. We have an ad that goes out where they get a coupon for a Botox at a discounted price. They get a special. Now, we were putting out an around, and let’s say we’re using Google or Facebook. The ad goes in, and if they click on the ad, they’re going to be taken to a coupon where they’re going to get this discount, this discount on Botox.

On the ads, we want to know what is the click through rate. So of people who see my ad, how many actually click through to actually see the coupon? That’s your click through rate. So of those, taking 100 clicks on the initial ad, how many will actually go and click on the advertisement and see that coupon? We want to know what that is. The second thing is we want to look at their opt-in rate. Now, this may not be used for every single ad. You might have, let’s say, a click through that just goes to your website. There’s nothing to opt in. We like to have an indicator.

So for people who decide to take the coupon, we want them to jump hoops a little bit and opt to answer. They have to give us their email address or their phone number to actually get the coupon. That allows us to track and also determines that they’re more serious versus someone who just could be a competitor or just clicking on the advertising. But if you’re just sending them straight to your website, you won’t need to have it. So the number two indicator is the opt-in rate. So of those 100 people, let’s say 20 people, or 20%, actually clicked on and got exposed to the coupon. Now, if they actually get the coupon, of those 20 people, how many actually gave us their email address or their phone number? It could be five out of 20, so that’s our opt-in rate.

Now, taking that further, number three is of those people who’ve got the coupon, how many actually made a phone call? We want to know, from the people who initially clicked on the ad, how many people actually took us up on our offer, got the coupon and then called us to make an appointment. How do we figure that out? You probably guessed it. I have a special tracking phone number, so I can determine who are the people who saw the ad, got the coupon, and I know how many calls that I’m getting. That way, I know whether a campaign is working, or if it’s not.

Again, these are indicators that you need to know, you need to be able to ask your marketing company, whoever you’re going to be using. Now, I told you, there were four. Three are related to the actual online marketing of the ad. The fourth one is related to how well you are at hiring your staff. The fourth one is the conversion rate. How many of those people who take the phone calls, what percentage actually make an appointment? If you find out that one person is getting 95% and you find out maybe another person is getting 25 or 50%, you may need to talk to that person because they’re not doing a good job in actually converting that phone call and inquiry into an appointment.

What I like about it, with these indicators, you can actually break down to see if there is an issue with your online ad campaign. You can actually see where the breakdown is. Let’s say you have a low click through rate. You’ve got your ad, but not a lot of people are clicking on that ad. That means that your ad needs to be improved. There’s something that is not resonating. Let’s say you got a pretty good click through rate. People are clicking through, but they’re not giving you their email address or their phone number. Well, there’s something on that website that is stopping them. Maybe it looks too spammy. Maybe they’re not comfortable giving you their email address, or you’re asking them for their cell phone number. So what’s on the website? Are you having testimonials that enlist trust, that, “Okay, this looks legitimate?” You need to be looking at that.

Then, let’s say people are getting the coupon, but they are not converting those into appointments. We had that issue, and we needed some reminders that they had this coupon. That’s what we found out. That’s where we found our breakdown. Once we improved that, then we started getting incredible amount of appointments. Then, if they’re calling in and it’s not converting into appointments, you’re getting the phone calls, it’s not converting to appointments, what is your front desk person saying? Maybe they’re saying something that’s turning people off. Maybe you’re so busy. You can’t get appointments, and you have to be seen for a few weeks or months. These are all areas that you can look at and investigate and analyze.

So those are the measures that we’re using when we’re doing our online ad campaigns. You notice I didn’t say anything about how many Facebook comments I’m getting or Facebook likes or views. Those all may be important, but in determining your campaign actually being effective, the four ones I gave you are much more important. I have a marketing friend who says, “I can’t deposit likes into a bank.” So if you just stick with the four that I gave you, it’s going to be well worth your time and money.

As an aside, I have a marketing team that we work with that will help you with those four indicators. At least at the time of this recording, they are open to take a couple more clients. So if that’s something that you may be interested, they’re specifically working with med spas and cash-based medical clinics. The guy who owns it I’ve known for over 10, 15 years. If that’s something that you’re interested in, I’m not going to put out their information publicly, but if you are interested in that marketing company, just go to bootstrapmd.com. At the top right is a contact us. Just put in [inaudible 00:24:56] marketing team and maybe a little bit about your business. Again, they’re just working primarily with med spas, cash-based medical practices, and be happy to share with you that information.

I hope you found that helpful. These success measures can really make or break a business and not a lot of entrepreneurs are actively doing it. It’s all about teaching you guys to be more proactive with your business. Find out what’s actually going on with your business before it’s too late. With these indicators, these are the things that are going to help your business, keep moving you forward.

You’ve just listened to the BootstrapMD podcast. For more valuable resources, as well as past recordings of our show, check out our website at bootstrapmd.com. Now let’s get to work.

Filed Under: Articles, Entrepreneurship, Online Business, Practice Growth Tagged With: medical practice metrics, online business, physician entrepreneur

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