Do Less And Do It Better

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDannald. Welcome back to podiatry marketing. I'm your host, Jim McDannald, joined by always my cohost, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, how's it going today?

I'm great today, big Jim. How are you doing?

Things are good. Things are good. The winter is almost over. Right? I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It's been a cold one, a windy one, but, you know, what is it now? Not too far away from from springtime. So no complaints here.

But seriously, being the February, when does the snow actually stop where you are?

Yeah. Things start to slow down a bit in March. You know, it's not it's not insanely cold in March generally. It can kinda go two ways, but I'm pretty optimistic. I think this year, you know, we had it so bad in December and January that March is gonna be a good one for us.

It's always fun and games. Okay. Let's get on to our topic for today. Let's get stuck into production.

What did you jump into today?

I'm gonna talk about the sub it's it's sort of it is marketing related and it's sort of business related, but people could also take it just as career related as well. So the the title is do less and do it better. And Okay. And I think what happens is just as health professionals in general, we're so eager to just take on more, learn new skills. And I think sometimes before we've even mastered a skill or become really, really proficient at it, we we could sort of say we're, like, better than most in our area of doing it.

We're so eager just to move on to the next thing because everybody else is learning something new. So they feel like they must just keep doing the next thing. And I think as a yeah. It applies to us being a podiatrist. Yes.

But I also think as a business owner, we've got to look at basically the same thing. There's so many aspects of a business that we could be taken on, and we can become extremely average in a lot of things, or we can start focusing on certain things in a business and just do it better. Do it better than what everybody else is about how everybody else is actually doing it.

Yeah. So kinda like trying to be a more of a master than a jack of all trades. You know, jack of all trades, master of none. Try to be the opposite of that, you know, kind of go deep on things as opposed to being kind of a a general expert on everything under the sun.

Yeah. Well, a perfect example could be audio. You know, someone's listening to this podcast, and they they can hear us now, and they understand how awesome we sound. So but it might be they wanna do some audio recordings for their business, but they don't know what to do. But if it's something that you feel that way, if I learned how to use audio better, I could use I could use it in my podiatry business in so many different ways whether it's whether they're doing it for marketing or they might be doing it for team training.

They might have a a list of manuals that they're thinking instead of them having to read read through it. What about if I did an audio recording of it and they could listen to it after hours, or I could do examples on this is how you use this equipment. So as they're doing it, they're listening to me explain it. Now you can do a recording that's crap, and when the person's listening to it, you're actually hurting their ears at the same time, and they can't wait for it to end. Or you can make the quality better through better microphones, knowing where to have it positioned, maybe doing some courses on audio, how to edit that audio better.

So if you know that's something you wanna get better at, instead of just moving on to something else and doing audio poorly, why not don't move on to something else and stick with your audio and just get better at doing it and be better than most people in your market with that particular skill.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Like, can't the more you spread yourself thin, the less you are kind of a generalist. So, you know, like you said, being a specialist of the foot and ankle, you know, once you're going into something, it's it's good to really master those skills so you can, you know, the bright shiny objects are tough to ignore at times. Right?

You know, this week it's video and the next week it's audio. And if if you just kinda, like, put yourself, like, as a a hamster on the, you know, on the wheel, you're gonna be exhausted at some point. But by going deep and really learning how to use some of these tools and opportunities with different technologies or different skill sets, I think that's some really sound advice.

Well, if you think of social media, for example, there's so many platforms that you could actually use. And I was talking to someone the other day, and they said TikTok came up in conversation. And they said, oh, when TikTok first came out, I said to my team, and they and he had a really young team that I think this could be something we could actually use business wise. And they'll go, but it's just a bunch of 16 year old girls dancing. He's going, yeah, but it could be more than that.

I'm not quite sure. He said, I can see how it could be used as a business application. And now there's a lot of business information that's actually on TikTok. But, yeah, you've got Facebook. You've got Instagram.

You've got TikTok. You've got YouTube channels. There's so many avenues. It's hard to be really, really good on all of them. So instead of trying to be add more onto what you're doing, pick the ones that you know that you you might enjoy, the ones that you know your patients are sort of on, and just keep improving.

How can I get better on Instagram if that's what we wanna use? And don't just copy what everybody else is doing. Think about because I've seen you would have seen it. There's gym people on Instagram where they're they're standing there, and they're, like, pointing up in the air, pointing to the side, and all these messages flash up.

Yeah. Yeah. I've seen those. Yeah.

Yeah. When I first saw it, first time I saw it, I thought, wow. That is interesting. The hundredth time I've seen it from the hundredth podiatrist, I'm like, that's no longer interesting. It's actually boring.

You would have seen the ones where the people have the held cards up, and they dropped the cards and they were telling a message. Usually, a sad message. And first time I saw it, interesting. Probably the third time I saw interesting. The fiftieth time I saw it, it's no longer interesting.

It's, ah, you're just doing what everybody else is doing. So I think you just gotta find you gotta find where you fit, say, in social media, and and then try and get better in that particular area and have your own style to it.

Yeah. I think that makes sense. And I think you like you talked about, I think understanding where the patients are that you wanna treat. You know, maybe it is TikTok for a younger generation. Maybe it's still print media if you're in a you know, taking care of seniors or folks who are a little bit older.

So, you know, finding that right channel with the right message and just, like you said, just practicing and getting better. And and it kind of speaking to the unique value you provide for those types of patients in a way that isn't trendy but helpful. You know, if you're being helpful and providing value to those patients, it'll definitely be appreciated.

Yeah. And if you think about what you're going to talk about, I mean, podiatry is so broad. I mean, it's such a such a broad profession on what you can talk about. So you could know a little bit about everything in podiatry and be a real generalist, or there could be certain parts of podiatry that you really focus on and and get better than other people. And then you take that skill and you apply it into your marketing or how you talk to your patients or or whether it's social media.

There's I think if we if we constantly just keep trying to take on more and I've said this before, sometimes you gotta let something go to be able to fit something else in. You can't can't just keep fitting fitting more in. And I think podiatrists in their businesses, they have a look at all the equipment that's there. What equipment is sitting around that's got dust on it that you no longer use? Are you better to just get rid of it and say, okay.

We we don't need that anymore? And I know some people are reluctant to let something go because they think, well, that piece of equipment I paid x for, if I don't use it now and get rid of it, am I just telling my team that was a bad decision? And to me, it's a bad decision to hang on to it if you're no longer using it. Free up the space. Maybe it's taking up room in a corner where you could have something else in there.

I think I think, like you like you touched on there, time is probably the most valuable resource that someone owning a practice has, you know, whether it's taking care of patients, you know, managing a staff, doing the paperwork, you know, running the business side of the practice. You know, you have to find time and make time because it's just not gonna show up. Right? So you have to prioritize and really just make time to learn some new skills and double down on what's working in your practice.

Yeah. And if you think, you know, the business aspects, there's so many parts of your business. Do you wanna get better at marketing? Well, if you do, then listen to this podcast every week. That's gonna help.

Read marketing books. If you and I were running a marketing workshop, is make the effort to take some time off of work and actually be there. Don't think it's just gonna all happen for you. There's gonna be a magic pill. Do want the blue pill or the red pill?

And you're gonna take that pill and all of sudden, you're gonna wake up and everything is going fantastic. If you look at your business and you wanna be better at communicating and building a, you know, a cohesive team, you have to put time and effort in to get better at that. But you can't be you can't you can't be fantastic at everything. And that's why sometimes you need help from other people.

No. For sure. Nobody can do it alone.

So a couple of questions that I like people to actually ask themselves is what is this something that you've always wanted to be better at? Whether it's a certain aspect of podiatry. Had a a lady that was on the Podiatry Legends podcast, and she had done, like, ten or seventeen years, I think, of, like, general foot care, but wanted to get into more into biomechanics. She knew she didn't have that skill anymore, so she made a conscious effort. If I wanna treat more sports and biomechanics patients, I need to learn that skill more.

So she put a lot of time and effort into it and and and ended up achieving that at the end. So I think that's one thing. What do you wanna be better at? And or is this something that you you're already good at but you wanna improve. I think that's an important one as well.

Yeah. I think anyone can benefit from self reflection. You know, like, we're we're still relatively early in the year. It's kinda like people are still optimistic about 2023 and reflecting reflecting on, like, you know, why did you get into practice in the first place? You know, what is that right combination of business opportunity and something you really enjoy doing that provides, you know, you professional satisfaction?

And then kind of, you know, making a a long term plan to develop those skills or improve those skills so you can do more of that. There there's, you know, I think I know a lot of people are in the practice. They're in it for the long run, but sometimes we get stuck in the day to day. Mhmm. And we get stuck from week to week.

But it is those times, you know, if it's learning a new skill or improving something that, you know, it takes months, years, maybe hopefully, it'll be pretty good by a decade, but you need to have a reasonable expectations for yourself because life is busy. But if you keep on putting in the work, it's like going to the gym. Right? Like, everybody shows up the gym on January, what, third or fourth and thinks something.

Oh, yeah.

This is the year I'm getting to get in shape. And by this time of year, most people have are not going anymore. It's a similar thing with you and your think the skills you wanna learn and the things you wanna improve on your practice. You know, is that consistent time and effort towards developing those skills? Just make it a habit.

And sometimes easier said than done, but, you know, long term approach to these objectives will really pay off.

Well, you've have you read that book called The Twelve Week Year?

I I haven't read the book.

No. Okay. So The Twelve Week Year, if if you think of the normal year, so we're towards the February now depending on when someone's actually listening to this, so they might have got to this till March. And a lot of times, you're at the beginning of year, you've set your goals for the year, and you're very excited. 2023, this is the year I'm gonna do such and such.

This is this will be the year that I am going to take my business from where it is and take it to that next level. I don't know how I'm gonna do it because it's just gonna happen automatically, but that's what I'm gonna do. And then normally around October, all of sudden, you realize, oh, you find your goals where you had them written down. That's if you wrote them down. Gets November, and also you bust your ass to try and get these goals accomplished.

So they reckon most people achieve more in that last month of the year than they do for the previous eleven months because they're, I got plenty of time. I got plenty of time. Plenty of time. I'll get to that. It's the same as, oh, I'm gonna lose weight.

I'm gonna lose x amount by this time. And you give yourself twelve weeks to do it. And by about the tenth week, you go, I'm a little bit off. I've lost one one kilo out of the 10 I was gonna lose. And then you're trying to kill yourself in the next two weeks, and it's just not possible to do it.

So the twelve week year twelve week year is all based around breaking your year into four twelve week segments, And you set your goals or what it is that you wanna achieve or what else you wanna learn, what you wanna get better at for that twelve week period. And you do that four times a year with a week off in between. So forty eight plus the four weeks off, that's fifty two weeks a year if people wanna sort of add it up. So the idea is if every three months or every twelve weeks you set yourself a goal that you're gonna achieve, you will get something done. You'll be doing it four times.

So therefore, you got more chance of actually getting this slight improvement as time goes on.

Yeah. That makes sense.

It makes perfect sense, Jim. And I think another thing that people can ask themselves if it's not what they wanna improve, what do they wanna fix up? That whether it's whether it's with your business, whether it's marketing, whether it's profession, it could be something personally that what is something that you need to fix that is going to make other things better? So for for example, myself, my ankles have been dodgy for the last couple of years from kicking things, and I've just had MRIs done. I've got fragments floating around all over the place.

And the ankle swelling and ankle pain that I have every single day does restrict some of my activity. Doesn't stop me going to Muay Thai and kicking things, but just general day, day one, I'm thinking, oh, I might just go and do something. My ankle's too sore. I'm just gonna rest it. So to me so that's something I need to fix if long term for my health, I need to fix that, or otherwise, it's just going to get worse.

Yeah. What is it in your business? What is it with your marketing or some aspect of your career that you need to fix because it could be holding you back from something better later on. I think it's only a question that you can only ask yourself.

For sure.

Have you got any, Jim? You got anything holding you back? Other than that big woolly beard that you have?

Yeah. No. I mean, you know, being in my mid forties. Right? Like, I try to stay active and healthy and stuff, but, you know, with work, you know, with having two I've got two relatively small kids, you know, sometimes it's hard to kind of, you know, take take an hour for yourself each day.

And one thing that I've done over the last six months is, like, back to lifting weights for the first time since I was basically in college. Right?

So Oh, it's just big Jim got to you now, hasn't you? We keep saying big Jim, you've gone. That's it. You know what? I'm a bulk up.

Exactly. Exactly. I'm on the juice and I'm just, you know, ready to get huge. But no, I mean, you know, as you get older men, you know, the testosterone level drops, those things. So you can find some ways to keep that flowing and also just, you know, just general strength because, know, if you lose, you know, one or 2% of your strength each year, it doesn't seem like too much until, you know, decade or two decades later, you're, you know, you don't have the muscle or that's been you know, what look what you thought was muscles now, maybe a little bit of a little bit of fatter adipose tissue.

So Okay. I'm I'm trying I'm trying to fix myself here to just have some general strength so I can be strong and relatively fast to keep up with the the little ones. So that's my my current kinda goal.

Yeah. And the thing is if you're only in your forties now, as your children get faster, you're gonna get slower.

Exactly.

So if you don't if you don't make a a conscious effort now and this is the same thing. It applies to people's business. They can have a business that's been there for a number of years, and it's plotting along and it's going fine. You think, I have no competitors or there's only two other podiatrists in town. I've got nothing to worry about.

They're they're fat and lazy as well, and we're all doing okay. No one's, you you know, creating any ruckus. And then all of a sudden, get some young dude or or girl that turns up who has been out three to five years and is pumped up to the max, and they come in and they start stirring the pot. And by the time you realize the momentum that they've got, it's too late. Because you've you've you've become you've just become and I'm gonna say fat and lazy.

I'm not saying that you're actually fat and lazy, but your business sometimes gets fat and lazy. It gets successful, and some people think it because it's successful, it can't be touched, but it can be.

Yeah. Complacency can be a killer. You know? Like, you have to be adapting to what the market is, the, you know, local competitors in the market. Just, you know, how the profession is changing, how regulations change.

If you just try to like do what you've always been doing, like it could be a a dangerous thing for your business.

Yeah. And a podcast I did last year that I posted towards the end of last year called Care Differently. And and on that particular podcast, we were talking about if you're doing everything exactly the same as everybody else in in your market, then what sets you apart? If you're all doing the same thing, and it only takes somebody to come along and disrupt what everybody else is doing, that all of a sudden, all the eyes turn to them, and you sort of just get left behind. And then by the time you realize that, some businesses never recover.

They just don't recover from have a look at yeah. I wish Blockbuster would have was Blockbuster didn't they offer Netflix or Netflix want to sell the Blockbuster for $50,000,000 in the early days, and blockbuster said no.

Yeah. I think something like that.

Yeah. Great business decision. That one was. Because they saw their model and thought, no. That that won't work.

This people wanna come in people wanna come down to our store. They wanna leave their house, come down, get a DVD, take it back home, forget to bring it back, pay an extra late fee, and they don't wanna just stream something straight into the house and not actually have to leave their home. Who would wanna do that?

Well, even before that, they were like mailing DVDs, right, which seemed like the craziest business model ever. Like, to get a DVD in the mail, like, was just when Netflix first started, it was it was bizarre to to start off with.

But the thing is it it was a model that and it wasn't when they first set up, it wasn't perfect. It's like if you've got a marketing idea, you can't wait for it to be absolutely perfect. You just gotta do it, get some feedback from it. What would you do better the next time you did it? And then make those changes and then do it again.

And just keep working. And over time, things will improve. I know some of the marketing that I did from a podiatry clinic, some of it was awful. Just terrible. I look back and I go, what were you thinking?

But if I hadn't done the first version of whatever it was I was doing, I wouldn't have had the second, third, fourth until you had the final version that actually worked. If I waited till I had that final version, yeah, I don't know what would happen. I'd be on the streets. I wouldn't be doing this podcast.

I'd be off and lonely doing a solo podcast about the dietary market. I know I don't know to do without you there.

You'd be bored. You'd be going, hi. I'm Jim. I feel like I've got missing something in my life. So if it's because it's because I did version one.

I and I did. I did exactly what this topic is about. I did less and I learned to do it better. I I I really focused my marketing into a couple of particular areas that worked really, really well in its day. And as things changed, I kept looking at the figures, looking at the numbers, and going, oh, okay.

For example, television isn't working as well as it used to. This is going back a long time ago now. So I moved away from that, but radio was still quite strong. So we then put a lot of emphasis in the radio. In our local area, are here in Cairns, radio was still very, very strong.

A lot of people still listen to the radio. And but I I slowly just kept changing. And then back in the old days, used to do print, and then print moved to more online sort of marketing. So it's but if you don't do that first thing and work out what works, it's it's gonna be hard. You can't wait for the perfect marketing idea just turn up.

No. For sure. That's great advice.

So I'm I'm done on this subject. I just want people to remember, do less and just do it better than what everybody else is doing. And when you're doing it really, really good, then you can start adding in more things. But as you add things in, remember, sometimes you gotta take something away to actually free up your time to do it better.

Couldn't agree more.

Okay, Jim. I will talk to you next week.

Sounds good, Tyson. Okay. Bye. Later. Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDaniel.

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