When I was in private practice, I spent a lot of time working to build an "Autopilot Practice". For me, that meant a systems-driven practice that I could choose to work in or choose to let my team operate independently. A few years into my business, I ran into a major challenge:
The Challenge of Consistency
I realized that our relationships with our patients - keeping them engaged, coming in for follow-up care, and referring their friends and family, was critical to my "Autopilot Practice" vision. Maintaining those patient relationships required a lot of complex tracking and manual outreach, and even though I wasn't the one doing all of the work it still created a lot of managerial workload.
For someone with a dash of ADHD, managing these systems would work for a while, but I would inevitably drop the ball. We would send out end of warranty mailers, emails, and phone calls...until we got distracted by something else. We would reach out to tested-not-treated candidates to get them back in...until we got busy and it wasn't a priority.
We would invite our current patients in to product-test new technology when we got the bug to do some marketing outreach, but it was inconsistent.
Automation to the Rescue
In 2018 I met a guy name Phil. He's a wizard with automated business growth. He taught me how to create what he called "Automated Intimacy": building meaningful, personalized relationships with clients using well-timed and thoughtfully crafted messages via automated systems. I spent the next 6 months taking all of the cobbled together manual systems I'd created and building a digitally automated system using software called ActiveCampaign.
Now we almost never dropped the ball on TNT and database outreach, but it still required duplicate entries of data in CounselEAR and ActiveCampaign and some manual work in the software to make everything happen. Then, in 2019, CounselEAR released their internal marketing automation tool. I worked with their team to move all of my systems over to their software.
We worked with their direct mail partner to add a layer of physical mail outreach on top of email outreach. Now, not only did we never drop the ball, we didn't have to do anything except keep our patient records updated, and our database marketing just...worked. During the next two years, in spite of COVID, we enjoyed our most stable and predictable growth ever.
In 2020 a few of my colleagues asked if they could use my systems in their own practices. I worked with CounselEAR to build a simple way to drop everything I had built into their practice, creating a turnkey database marketing program for patient-centered private practices. Since selling my practice and becoming an independent practice consultant in 2021, over 100 of my practice owner clients have implemented these systems in their own practices.
Using tools that are directly integrated into CounselEAR, these practices have now automated their database marketing - generating millions of dollars in profitable hearing treatment revenue with less repetitive manual outreach.
