Episode 18: Profit Pyramid

Dr. Deb shares how you can grow your practice today using a profit pyramid. Adding courses, group visits and more to enhance your revenue in 2022.

Do not miss these highlights:

01:19  One on one model can get to a point where you've reached your maximum capacity, and no longer able to take on new patients

02:20 Getting those new clients to see your other providers is a huge planning process

02:53 One of the things you can do if you’re driving your patients to your other providers is to create a Profit Pyramid

03:47 You could become a Virtual Practitioner, and have a virtual program

04:51 It takes time to create the program, though not as complicated as it sounds actually - You can earn money while you're creating the program

08:47 Creating a home study program 

09:47 Low ticket vs Mid ticket vs High ticket Programs

11:13 When we're looking at dealing with the general population for health, you should be careful with high ticket prices

12:50 You can build a six to seven figure income profit stream for your practice without necessarily getting you involved in everything

14:33 Helpful tip from Dr. Deb in creating a program for those who are new, and maybe don't have a large practice yet

 Transcript of Episode #18:

0:01
You're listening to the Functional Medicine Business Podcast featuring Dr. Deb, one of the most creative functional medicine business practitioners in her industry. She shares the wisdom and knowledge that she has gained over 25 years of functional medicine, a pioneer in functional medicine, scheduling, leadership and Practice Management. Dr. Deb has a wealth of knowledge and is eager to share to help functional medicine become more productive. And for the practitioners and patients to live better lives. Our podcast shares the good and the bad of our industry. Because Dr. Deb knows the pain you live every day building a functional medicine practice with practical tools on how to manage money, taxes and patient care, she will discuss it all with you.

0:54
You're listening to the FMBI podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Deb. And today we're going to talk about profit pyramid. So for those of you who are in practice, and you are doing a one on one model, first, let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with the one on one model, I love the one on one model. That's where I really feel like I shine is working one on one with people. But let's be real, that one on one model can get to a point where you've reached your maximum capacity, you're no longer able to provide any more care for your clients. For me, actually, this week, we had the conversation of do I close my practice to new patients, because my practice is so full and I have such a large waiting list in a way to try to drive the new patients to see my other practitioners so that patients don't simply want to wait for me. And that's a really tough decision, right? Because you're closing off your practice and you're closing off the growth of your practice, you have to think long and hard about what that does to your practice, A) and B) how are you going to structure your practice so that people don't find out that you who's the face of the practice is no longer taking new clients? And how are you going to get those new clients to see your other providers. That is a huge planning process, not just something that you wake up one day and say, I'm going to close my practice to new patients, and everybody's going to see my other people, it'll be great, there'll be no problems and the practice will still thrive and grow. And I'm going to still continue to be the face of the practice. It doesn't work that way, let me tell you that, once you close off your practice, to new clients, you personally, if you're the face of the practice, you have got to have a plan in place for how you're going to drive those patients to your other providers.

3:01
So one of the things that we can do is create a profit pyramid. So we can create a one to many opportunity where people work with you in a group setting. We can create a passive income opportunity where you create something one time you create it in a digital form and then you create a marketing plan around it to sell that information. And that allows you the opportunity to work with people 24/7. You have little hands on, it takes little time. But it can drive people to your existing practice, whether that be a virtual practice or a brick and mortar practice. And then there's other ways that you can create products as well. So you could become a virtual practitioner, and you have a virtual program. But maybe they uplevel with you to do the counseling to do laboratory testing to do individualized care. And you can create that model in that same thought process. So you drive traffic to your virtual program. And instead of clients seeing you they see your team that you've created. So now you have a group of people that are coming to your practice that already know they're not going to have the opportunity to see you they're going to work with your team instead. And that's another really good way to grow your team practice and get people moving in a direction away from you personally and into your team.

4:44
Now, this takes some thought this takes some planning on your part to be able to do this. It certainly takes time to create the program but it's not as complicated as it sounds actually. You could host a challenge, say you do a five day challenge, and you teach the material that you want to have in your program, you record that material that's being taught in that five day challenge. And now you have your first product. That's one way of looking at how to do things. You could run a six month program and do the same thing, have people come into the program, you might not even have the program designed yet. And you're designing it in that six months process while you're working with people. But you're actually collecting money from people while you're building the program so you know that it's something that people want. So you're you're creating something that already has a want and a desire behind it, you're earning money while you're creating the program and then you're taking that program and making it into what we call an evergreen program so the program runs continuously 24/7 with a marketing plan behind it while you sleep, people can be purchasing that program for from you, and you can start earning some money.

6:08
Now there are ways that you can do this, that can earn a lot of money or a little money. And it all depends on how you structure it. Now I've been in coaching programs where people really believe that everything should be high ticket, I've been in coaching programs that believe you should start with a free item and then do a low, a medium and a high ticket. And I've been in programs where it's everything in between, I will tell you one of the mistakes that I've made over the last 20 years of being in practice, is I've had a lot of free content. So I've given so much free content over the last 20 plus years that I've been in practice. But that was my way of bringing people to my brick and mortar. And it was prior to me understanding this whole profit pyramid and understanding there was a way to monetize it. And it was mind you before the internet was as popular and can do what it does, because I'm a little older than most of you guys. So it was at a time where things weren't as easy to do. One of the only ways we had to engage people with free content was free lectures that we did at the library or the health food store, or at our office. Now we all have the opportunity to do a live zoom or do a live stream on Facebook or Instagram. And these are ways that we can get our information out to people so that they know who we are and what we're doing. And they have an opportunity to know, like and trust us, because they're seeing all of our free stuff because they're they're feeling like they know us when we're talking when we're live in front of them. And this is already building a relationship with this person. And they may need to see you to build this relationship multiple times before they actually buy from you. And there's nothing wrong with that. But that's where giving this free content can be extremely helpful, because you're delivering that content and people are learning about you, knowing you, trusting you. So you've built that already.

8:16
There's masterclasses that you can do paid and free or some people call them webinars. Today, the buzzword is masterclass. And you could do a one day master class, you could do a five day master class you could do anything in between. But this is another way that people can get to know you. It can be a paid masterclass, it could be a free master class. But there's lots of different opportunities for you to build these programs and build this community for yourself. So many times when we're creating programs, we want to do a home study program. This is where people will learn on their own. They learn at their own time, they learn at their own pace, they can do it whenever they want. And it's not really personalized. Most of it is very broad based information. It's not individualized or personalized. It's a generalization of the information that you're teaching. And this would allow people to learn about a particular topic. Now some of those programs can sell for anywhere between $47 and $147 for a home study product. I've seen people charge in a word limits of f $9,000 for a home study program, depending on what the topic is, what the desire is, what level of expertise you're giving, how in depth it is, how long it is those kinds of things. So typically, in a entry level or low ticket program, that's where you're going to bring people in for $47 to $147. It's a nice low price point. Most people are going to say, Oh yeah, it's under 50 bucks, I'll go ahead and buy this, that's not a problem.

10:06
When you start going into the higher level tickets items, then people think about that a little bit more, they expect more information, they expect more one on one services. And that's totally okay. And you can do that as well. Your mid ticket item is going to go anywhere from that 150 mark, up to it could be a $2,000 program, which would be a mid ticket. So 150 to 2000 is your mid ticket item. And that also is going to depend the higher the price, the more one on one individualized care you should be giving to this person, the more hand holding you do for this person, or the longer timeframe that this program is in. So those are the kinds of things that you're looking at for a mid ticket, and then your high ticket is $2,000 and up. For some people that may be 5000, it might be 10,000. Some people's high tickets are 100,000. And then they're because their high ticket is so high, their mid program is higher, and their low entry ticket program is higher as well. But when we're looking at dealing with the general population for health, I think you have to be careful with those really high ticket prices. You know, $5000, $10,000 is probably your limit it when you're working with an individual unhealth that people are going to feel really comfortable paying for. Unless you're working with a very specific elite population, you'll see people go into the executive market, and feel like they can charge an executive $7-10,000 for our program. But if you were working with the general population, that program may be $3-5,000. So it depends on the type of people you're looking to attract, what your program is about who your target audience is, or your niche markets, that would determine where your pay structure or fee structure goes for those programs. So these things can compound relatively quickly, when you make these programs, it's not uncommon for people to be able to sell 28 to 30 spots in a lower ticket program or medium ticket program like $300 or less, it's pretty common to be able to get people in that course, very quickly and easily, especially if it's a shorter course, if it's under, you know, three months, very easy to do. And it's easy, when you look at that you can do the math relatively quickly that if you have 28 people in your program, times whatever your dollar figure is, that can grow really quickly.

12:50
And this is where you can build a six to seven figure income generation or income profit stream for your practice, that doesn't necessarily require you to be involved in everything, you have to do the initial development of the program, you may have to outline it, record it, unless you're going to have somebody else do that, instead of you, you're going to have somebody design your program for you make the thumbnails for you. And then you're gonna have to have somebody that can help you create the lead gen. So like the landing page and the marketing plan behind that, to get that information out to the general public. Because if it's just sitting on your website, and you're not driving traffic to it, chances are the people that you want to find that are not going to find this. So you really need to drive traffic to this program. And you're going to have to invest a little bit of money behind it in order to do that. But once you get this down, you get your landing page down, you get your marketing plan down, it becomes a fine tuned machine, because then it just becomes tweaking. And so your program is rolling, and you're tweaking it, tweaking it, tweaking it, and you're tweaking the marketing, not necessarily the program, but you're tweaking the marketing to get dialed in as clearly as you possibly can. So that you can get people to that, that program and they're signing up every single time they're landing on your program.

14:18
Now, some people are gonna say, "Well, I don't know what to teach about, I am not good at anything." I'm going to challenge you and say you are very good at things because if you wouldn't, you would not have a practice, you would not have people coming to you. Now for those of you who are new, and maybe you don't have a large practice yet, that's okay too. Because guess what, you're new. You just came out of learning. And you can take what you've learned and create a program of something that you love to talk about. So maybe you love to talk about gut health. Well, if you're just out of a program, you just learned about gut health and you just learned the latest and greatest about gut health. And so you can take all of that training that you just received, you can turn that into a patient driven program and now you can sell that information into a patient visit program of your own individualized and you can start attracting clients to you, it does not take that long to do this, trust me. If you're talking about doing a six week course, week one, make week one and do it as a drip. If you don't have anybody in the program yet, no problem week to make the next one, week three, make the next one. If you have people in the program, that's even better, because they're driving you to continue to make the program. If you don't have people in the program, sometimes it's easy to say, well, I'll push this week off till next week, and then next week, and then next weekend, before you know it six months went by in your six week course still isn't done. But if you have people signing up in your program, and it's a drip program, well, now it's forcing you to create that content every single week for those people who have paid you to have that content. So I think that's super important to do. And I think it's a huge asset to your practice and it's a great way for you to provide care to a whole host of people that you would never be able to reach because of your location. This gives you an opportunity to work with people around the world regardless of the licensing, regardless of places, regardless of time zones, you get to do this, and you get to help people from lots of places in the world, which is so exciting. And I love that part of things.

16:38
So I'm going to tell you that one of my clients, she started working on profit development like this and adding this to her brick and mortar practice. And she was able to earn $30,000 as an integrative functional medicine practitioner. And what she did is enrolled 15 people into her three month program. And her three month program was about $2,000 a person and they were going over Hormonal Health, it was a female program driven. And she made $30,000 In one month just enrolling 15 people into this program that she's going to teach. So this can be your one to many model, where you sit down and have this hour to two hour conversation with your group of people who paid you $2,000 versus your one to one person that you're having the same conversation with over and over and over again all day long, for way less than $2,000. And reimbursement declined, because if your insurance you're getting hit a mat. So this is a great way to grow your business, add revenue to your business, and ultimately provide the care that you want without getting burnt out. So I think this is so important.

18:01
I'd love for you guys to share with us what your course looks like that you want to create. And what's your profit pyramid? What are you doing to get your profits up where you want to go? Another term for this is called a SWOT analysis is a you you write down what programs you want to offer, what services do you want to offer each year. And then how much of it do you want to sell? And what's the cost of it? And it will tell you then what your business is worth at the end of the year should you reach those goals. But more importantly, if these are the goals that you have, then you need a structure for how am I going to achieve these goals? How am I going to get where I need to be to drive this revenue, because you can't just put it on paper and then not have a plan for driving that revenue. It's super important to know where your numbers are, know how you're going to get there, and then have a plan that you can execute to get there. So share with us below and let us know what your profit pyramid looks like. Please like and share our podcast that's important for us to get to more people and it helps in our ratings. And it's been a pleasure to chat with you guys once again today.

19:15
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others. post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest for me. You can follow me on Facebook at FMBI, join our free group where we support one another and share our struggles. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.