Is Your Plan to Open Another Boring Podiatry Clinic?

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 as always by my trusty cohost, Tyson Franklin. Tyson, what's going on today?

I am fantastic. Big Jim, how are you doing?

Lovely. Lovely. Things are good here in Montreal. No complaints whatsoever.

Just saying off air, I can't wait to get the big Jim Mac t shirts. And underneath a little little doctor t. I said, I'll be like Robin. You'll be Batman. And I'm like, Robin.

We'll have to see what the market demand. If the listeners, you know, if they they think that's something that they wanna have in their wardrobe, definitely, that's something we can make happen.

Okay. Imagine, like coffee cups. They they have a coffee cup and they lift it up and it's got big Jim Mac and doctor t, podiatry marketing podcast. And then on the back, it it could say, I woke up this morning feeling dangerous.

Apparently, the last time I woke up feeling dangerous, but, yeah, that that's a that's a first good first try to add a catchphrase or a slogan, but maybe the readers have or the the listeners have something that

Is better.

Think is is better. So, yeah, we'll leave it up to maybe it'll stick, but definitely write in if you think that you have a better catchphrase than Tyson just came up with there.

We will workshop it at our one day marketing event, October 21 in Chicago.

That's correct. Looking forward to it.

We can get everyone's opinion. What should be the slogan on the back of the of the coffee cup and see what the best one is, and there'll be a prize.

Sounds like a plan.

Okay. Let's get on to today's topic, which is you ready for it? Here we go. It is Yeah.

Yeah. Let I'm ready for it.

Is your plan to open another boring podiatry clinic?

Well, who's gonna say yes to that to that question?

Well, be surprised. I I don't think anyone consciously goes, oh, I'm gonna open up another really, really boring podiatry clinic. But a lot of podiatry clinic that get opened up are just like the other one down there. There's nothing different. Nothing makes them stand out in any way.

They're just another boring clinic. So I always say to people, yeah, is your plan to be original somehow or you're just gonna be an imitation of what you've seen previously? And I think you have to stop and ask yourself that question.

Yeah. It's it's interesting to kind of, like, like, kind of how do you differentiate yourself. Right? Like, I think the the safe path or the easy path is is sometimes to, like you said, just kinda be a run of the mill kind of foot and ankle doctor clinic. As long as you're providing great treatment, that's great.

But if you really want to set yourself apart and thrive, you have to take time to think about what you love to do and what does the local community you serve need how can you best serve them. So, yeah, I think that's I'm looking forward to hearing your your thoughts on this topic today.

Well, and I think that's why it's important when people graduate. You you may predominantly work in one place, and you're probably gonna get influenced by that in a lot of ways. But I think as a as a student or even once you've graduated, or even if you've been working now five, ten, fifteen years and you've got your clinic, have a look around and go, are you providing the same service as everybody else in your area? Are you doing anything different to what the rest of them are doing? And that's why whenever I used to travel, no matter where I went, I would go out of my way to go and visit other podiatry clinics.

I'd ring up. Sometimes I'd make a time, say, hey. I'm gonna be in your area on the 10/21/2023 in Chicago? I'm at a marketing event. Can I drop in and have a look at your clinic?

Because I'm always interested to see what other people are doing because every time I have a look around, there might be just one thing they're doing and go, ah, that's I really like that. How can I use that in my podiatry business?

Yeah. No. I definitely agree there. I think it's also interesting too, like you said, like, kinda looking around and kind of, like, taking some pearls and some ideas from other people. So, Tyson, when you were getting to practice, what was the was there a specific area of podiatry?

Were there certain things that, really interested you and you wanted to kind of mold your practice towards a certain look or feel or differentiate yourself?

Okay. Well, when I opened up my first clinic, I opened up just another boring podiatry clinic. I had no I I didn't know what I was doing. I had seen a few clinics, thought this is what you do. So I leased the place, I bought some equipment, I set it up, and I put a sign up that said, podiatrist.

I will see if you're breathing and you have some money, I am prepared to see you. And that's what I did for the first couple of years on the Gold Coast. Fortunately for me, I had a hand problem, and I had to sell that clinic, and I had to have two years off. Moved to Cairns. When I moved to Cairns, I went to a a one day workshop.

And that one day workshop was just a few things that were said at that one day workshop that totally changed my thinking on how to do things. So as I set up my next clinic, I just not so much got more specialized in what I doing. I was still quite broad with what I was doing, but I just lifted the professionalism of it a little bit more. So my clinic looked different. It had brighter colors.

We we brought a bit more fun into the business, but I then worked out. I did enjoy orthotics more. I did enjoy active patients. So all their marketing started to get was all focused in that particular area. So we we became known for orthotics, sports patients, active patients, and where everybody else every other podiatric clinic at the time was beige.

Mine was bright red, white, and blue, like the American flag, like the Australian flag, red, white, and blue. I sorta just I wanted to go, what are the colors that everybody else is using? I don't wanna use those colors. I wanna do something completely different. Barcelona red was my signature color, which is still is now for my podcast.

Everything else I do, Barcelona red is the color. It's the one you can see behind me there.

Yeah. I think that's an interesting point you bring up there just to really, you know, jump in there. You know, like, in the lessons you learned from your first opportunity into the second one, you know, it's nice to have that restart and it gave you some, you know, kind of a way to kinda visualize what those opportunities were. What other, you know, ways besides, you know, getting into, like, you know, orthotics and active status, you know, patient population did you kinda take away from that experience?

Well, from doing that is we then decided we're gonna set up another clinic in Mackay, which was about 800 kilometers away, 500 miles. The plan the reason for doing that is I wanted to set up another clinic and I wanted to test how I was running my business and the systems that I put in place and making it run. Could it be duplicated in another town, but I didn't want Cairns to have any influence over it whatsoever. So I could've set one up half an hour away, and people there would go, I already come to your clinic, so therefore, I'm gonna come there. I've already heard of it.

Mackay was a fresh market. So we went down there with a different focus. Again, we were looking at what services are being provided in the area. Everybody's doing it the same way. So what's gonna make our business different, and what skills do we have that they may have but they're not sort of really promoting it.

So we set up the Makai clinic, one hundred percent orthotics, sports, active patients, biomechanics. That's all we did. Didn't have an autoclave. Didn't even have any instruments. We just went went in with that focus.

Now the advantage of doing that when we were talking to someone at a coffee shop, someone, you know, if I was gonna buy a burger, which I like to do, and they said, oh, you're open up podiatrically. What do you do? It was really easy to tell them, we do orthotics, biomechanics, sports people, active patients. We make orthotics and arch supports. When we're talking to doctors, physios, it was exactly the same thing.

It was really easy to have that that focus in in the conversation. So I think it's one of those things that if you look at what everybody else is doing and this is this sort of relates to niching down a little bit that and people people get scared when they talk about, oh, if I niche my business down, I'm gonna lose patience. Will never happen. You will always gain patience by niching down Because the patients that already know what you do, they know what a podiatrist, they're gonna come anyway. But if you focus your your time and effort into a bit more of a specialized area, you will get even more of those patients, and it just makes work more fun.

No. I'd agree a %. I think it's when you have that niche and those talking points related to what the kind of care you want to provide, you can really connect with kind of your ideal patients when you're trying to do everything, you know, be everything to everyone, and you're basically talking to no one sometimes, right? You do ankles, you do diabetic wounds, you do sports. And not only for your patients, but other healthcare providers, they don't know what you do, right?

Like in one of the kind of mistakes or the things that we kind of like think about all the time is that we're the podiatrist. We went to school doing this. We went to some of us went to residency or in practice. We know all the things that we like to do, but our patients and other health care providers don't know that. So if you just go with them kind of with a mixed message or a very general message, you're not really standing out in those areas that you want to be seen as the expert in.

So when you have a strong message, you know the care you wanna provide, you kind of repeat that message to to multiple different people, to patients, and they have that kind of, you know, it can can be reflected in your marketing, your website, your branding, the way you run your clinic, you know, what, you know, visualization, what kind of like, you know, materials you have about your clinic. It's much more simple for people to have you related to that thing that you wanna do as opposed to just like a generalized foot and ankle care doctor, which is, you know, like I said, it's not the worst thing, but if you're really trying to go after a specific patient demographic, you really have to speak to those patients, to those healthcare providers, or refer those patients to you.

Yeah. And I always say, if you can't tell your podiatry business apart from all the other podiatry businesses in your area, then how are your patients and how are the referring doctors supposed to be able to tell the difference? They can't. So it'll pretty much be who's the closest? Who's the cheapest?

That's that's how they're making their decisions on where they're gonna go. Oh, I need to see a podiatrist. Oh, there's one down the road here. They're all the same, so they'll just go and see the the closest one. Or they might make a phone calls.

Other one down the road is $10 cheaper. They're all the same, so I might as well go to cheapest one. Whereas if you if there's certain equipment that you have that you know the other clinics don't have, you need to let people be aware that, hey, we have Shockwave. Because I know when we got Shockwave in cancer, we were the only podiatry clinic. We were the only business in cancer that actually had Shockwave.

So when we started talking about it and people started to understand what it was, we were getting people, you know, hunting us down because we had that equipment. We introduced lasers for fungal nails. We were the first clinics to do that. And then when people needed that treatment, we were sought after for that particular treatment. So I think there's there there might be equipment you have.

There might be a skill that you have. I I know most of the people that work with me, we all had sporting backgrounds, whereas some of other most of the other podiatrists in the area at the time were all overweight, lazy podiatrists. So we used that that whenever there was a a running event on or, yeah, a a five k walk, we were entering people that were wearing podiatry shirts because we knew all the fat lazy ones weren't gonna be there. And we're after active patients, so it just it just made sense to be seen and heard in the areas where that you want to sort of attract more patients.

Yeah. It kinda go where the in a for lack of a better term, kinda go where the money is. Right? Like, if if you're trying to treat active patients, need to be visible in those places, in those communities where they're active. And I think, you know, it's one of the things also where it's kind of like attracts like.

Yeah.

You know, if you have for example, whenever I had some foot and ankle issues when I was younger, I, you know, where did I go? I went to the podiatrist like about three hours away from me. I didn't go to the local one, like twenty minutes away. I went to the one that had been known to treat, you know, high school, college, and even some professional runners because like, okay, like that's that's the guy that they use. So that must he must be good.

So, you know, he kind of worked and that was even before the Internet. You know, I don't update myself too much. This is like, you know, in the early, you know, late eighties, early nineties when I went to go see this person. And, you know, the fact that they had kind of built this reputation as the running podiatrist in the Chicagoland area was something that just was like, okay, of course, that's the that's the person I have to see because, you know, he's treated people similar to me. So, you know, obviously, we now have other ways of searching and finding people that we think are kind of that, you know, it's like we're we're humans.

Right? So we like we can have this kind of pattern matching. Right? Like if if something is showing on the website, you know, I think I've probably this a hundredth time I brought this up on the podcast, but, you know, Tyson likes to say, you know, if if I go to your website and, you know, if what you love to do was like a crime, you know, would I be able to convict you? Yeah.

I think it's a similar thing where, like, you have to put, you know, messages out in the community by your actions, your, you know, your website, your marketing, you know, just the way you act and the way you talk about what you do has a huge impact as far as, like, what comes back to you. So I think it is a huge point of, like I said, like, kinda like attracting like and building that reputation in a in a certain area of expertise that you wanna practice.

Well, it's funny. You'll look at podiatry ads, and some ads will say yeah. They're all advertising the same way. We do general foot care, warts. Oh, we do orthotics.

We do ingrown toenails, diabetic foot care. You see this list of all the things that they do. And when you talk to them, and this is I do with coaching clients, I'll sit down and go, what do you really love doing? Oh, I really, really love doing ingrown toenails. I said, but you got it okay.

But you've got it sixth on the list of things that you actually do. So if you like it that much, why isn't it at least number one? Oh, because I it's I don't see that more than I I saw this other stuff more. Okay. Because you have it sixth.

One, with all the list of things. But every person I talk to who says they want more ingrown toenails, I've said to them, well, why don't you promote yourself as, yeah, Cairns ingrown toenail clinic? You can still be ABC podiatrist, you know, ProArch podiatrist, and then you can have another business name you wanted to, yeah, Cairns ingrown toenail clinic, if that's what you wanted to do. And when people are searching for ingrown toenails and they see the Cairns ingrown toenail clinic, and that and there's all this information about ingrown toenails and the surgery you do and the success rate you have and and how many you've done, and they look at the other podiatry clinics, and they've got ranked sixth ingrown toenails just below orthotic but above diabetic foot care. I know exactly what if I had ingrown toenail, where I am actually headed.

And you can do that with so many different parts of podiatry.

That's a great point. I think it also translates to, you know, people's websites. Right? Like, again, you know you know, when whenever people are working with different marketing providers or website providers, you know, had this, like, cookie cutter list of, like, the 40, like, biggest diagnosis or the 40 biggest surgeries or, you know, those types of treatments that are there. So, you know, every website that I go to that's you know, it's not every single one.

I'm not trying to, like, you know, make fun of other podiatry marketing providers. But, you know, if you have four you know, 40 different diagnosis listed, you know, you click that button diagnosis and you get a drop down

Yeah.

Of 40 things. Like like are you expecting the patient to go through all those different ones? Or are there five or maybe eight of things that you really, really like to do that you want to make sure that, like you said, it's in that order. And then they click on that and it it when they go to the next page, it's not just like a generic two paragraphs. It says like, you know, an ingrown toenail is a the nail, you know, butts into the skin and causes an infection, blah blah blah.

Like, and then it's onto the neck. Know, it's like two paragraphs of some description of something that doesn't really provide

them No information.

Yeah. No information. No, like, trust building. No doesn't show how you're an expert in it. It doesn't show you before and after if you're able to do that.

It's just kinda like it's and it's not only that, but it's copy pasted on every other website that that company does. Right? As opposed to having those, like, five to eight, like, killer pages where it's like you doing the thing, a picture of you doing it, you describe beginning the video, like your success rate, why you do it a certain way, why it's the right thing to do, and, you know, pictures of it and just giving people like real information that's gonna show the before and after just at least what the benefits are so they can understand how it's going to impact their lives or make their lives better. It's easier though, right? It's easier just to do those two paragraphs and just move on to the next thing and you've got full website, but it's, you know, what do you really care about?

What do you want to practice? And how are you showing the patient those benefits in a way that, you know, will really help them see you as the expert and also receive excellent care?

I will I will talk to podiatrists, and I go, what do you like least in podiatry? And some of them might go, oh, you know, I really don't like diabetic feet. I don't like high risk feet at all. Okay. Okay.

No. It's fair enough. I said there's no right or wrong answer. It's just what do you like and what do you don't like. Then you go to their website, and number two is diabetic foot screening.

Mhmm. And I'm going, as soon as you put diabetic foot screening, you are talking high risk. You're you're promoting something you don't like, so don't put it on there. And they're going, oh, but I might lose patience. Okay?

They know what you do. They they will find you if if they really wanna come to you. I said, but would you rather see somebody that is in another area? It might be fungal nails, it could be ingrown toenails, more orthotics, sports, running people. List what you want.

Talk about what you want. What is everybody else in the area doing? And I'll guarantee most of them are not really focusing on certain aspects of podiatry that you might enjoy, and then promote the hell out of it. I've got a good quote from Albert Einstein. I could've written down here.

And it says, you have to learn the rules of the game, and then you have to play better than anyone else. I like the quote. So pretty much and Albert seemed to be good at what he did. Yeah.

Not bad.

He wasn't too bad. Above average. Going back to what the original topic was, yeah, is your plan to open another boring podiatry clinic? If it is, then that's fine. There's nothing wrong with having a boring podiatry clinic if you're a boring podiatrist, and you live a boring life, and you're satisfied with that.

You're sort of like because most boring people don't know they're boring. So if you're listening to this and you're going, oh, I don't think I'm boring, then you might you might be, but you don't know because you're just you. But if and if you're happy, I reckon don't change a thing. But if you're not happy, look at, okay, am I not happy because I have a boring podiatrist? And I'm not a boring podiatrist.

I know that I'm better than that. And if that's the case, then start doing things that are gonna make your clinic stand out from everybody else.

I think, you know, they can take you know, it it sometimes feels risky. Right? Like, you're in practice or just starting and you feel like there's a certain way it should be done or the way that you saw it done in your residency or when you're in school, it feels it can feel kind of risky. Right? But at the same time, you know, like we talked about, just because you put out this front as being a running podiatrist or you wanna do wound care or you wanna do indigrones, you know, other stuff is still gonna come your way.

And it's also one these things too. If you get to the middle of your practice and you're so, so busy, like you said, that you're, you know, two months out and maybe not giving your community kind of like access to your expertise, then it's time to utilize this as a way to kind of filter patients in a way. Right? And, you know, making sure that you're treating your patients with your level of expertise and the stuff that maybe you're either not as good at or just don't enjoy doing goes to someone else in your community that loves doing that stuff. So these things aren't necessarily just like selfish.

You have to do like your thing to like, you know, make yourself happy and it's all about that. But there is, you know, significant patient benefits to, you know, having kind of a tighter niche or, you know, not opening a boring or a niche down practice because, you know, you want to provide excellent care. To think that you can be great at 50 different procedures or 50 different types of patients, I mean, you might be all right or better than someone who's not trained to do those things. But if you're being realistic, there are these niches within podiatry. And if you really can focus on them and get to a super high level, not only where your practice benefit, but also the lives of your patients will.

Yeah. What's a quote is Bruce Lee, where he talks about, I don't fear the guy who knows how to do 10,000 kicks. I fear the guy that knows one kick and does it has done it 10,000 times. Because it just means when they become hyper focused on certain areas and they repeat that time and time again, you get known for being really good at that thing, whatever it is that that you like doing. I've had a couple of people on the on my other podcast who liked wounds, who love blisters, who are right into warts, and that is the focus of their business.

But they probably don't see any more than maybe twenty, twenty five percent of the patients are in that particular area. They still seventy five percent are still other aspects of podiatry, but they're known as the podiatrist in that area, And that and they actually love doing that. So when someone thinks wounds, they think Joseph. When they think blisters, they think Rebecca. It's and that's what that's what you're trying to do with your business is you're trying to create a podiatry clinic that when you go to work in the morning, not every single patient is exactly what you want, but a high percentage are, and it's because that's what makes you happy.

And it's about becoming a happy podiatrist. It's a good goal

to have.

Well, that's what I always think. Your goal is I have this five step thing that I run through that you're you're a student first, and then you graduate, and then at some stage, open up your own business, you become a frustrated podiatrist. But the fifth step is having a thriving podiatrist. But you can't go from frustrated to thriving until you get to the fourth step, which is happy. And I always say, if you become a happy podiatrist and you never end up having a thriving podiatrist, how cool would it be just to have a be a happy podiatrist?

You don't have to have a thriving podiatrist business, but you will never have a thriving podiatrist unless you become happy first.

And Yeah. Happy is definitely better than frustrated.

Yep. And if you if you do your whole career being a happy podiatrist, you will die a happy person. So I I just think you wanna get to happy as fast as possible. If thriving comes after that because that's what you want, then by all means, do it. But first, get to happy.

So I think I've covered that. Don't have a boring clinic. There's there's enough of them already. There's enough boring clinics out there. We don't need one more.

That sounds like a good plan.

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

Sounds like a plan.

Okay. See you.

Bye, Tyson.

Thanks for listening to Podiatry Marketing with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDaniel. Subscribe and learn more at Podiatry Marketing. That's the website address, podiatry.marketing.