Leveraging Semi-Professional Referrers for Your Podiatry Practice

You're listening to podiatry marketing, conversations on building a successful podiatry practice with Tyson Franklin and Jim McDaniel. Welcome back to podiatry marketing. I'm your host, Jim McDaniel. Joined as always my trusty co host, Tyson Frecklin. Tyson, how are you doing today?

I'm good, Jim, and I'm so glad that I'm trusty. That's why I always like to hear that.

I trust you more than any other of the people I do podcasts with. So, I mean, it's, you know, it's a lot of people.

That's a that's a you've set that up pretty low, haven't you? Okay. No. I'm good. Everything's fantastic over here.

It's tropics. What can you say?

There you go. What are we gonna jump into today?

Today, we are gonna talk about leveraging semi professional referrers for your podiatry practice. Or if you're in North America, it'd be semi professional. But I speak both languages as we were discussing before I before we press record.

Yeah. I mean, some people are gonna say it's, like, semifinal. Like, I'd probably, like, say semifinal, like, for a tournament and stuff, but for yeah. Semi, semi depends on what part of the country you're in.

So you'll say semifinal. You wanna say semifinal?

No. I'd say semifinal.

Yeah. Do you say aluminium or aluminum?

Aluminum for sure.

Okay. We should do a whole episode just on the different languages and get a UK person on here, we could do an episode because I'm sure people in The UK would have some funny things as well.

Absolutely.

Okay. The first thing I wanna talk about before I talk about where semi professional or semi professional referrers fit in is just to quickly review the six pillars of marketing, which I've done in previous episodes. We did an episode for each pillar. Pillar number one was professional referrers. Pillar number two was non professional referrers.

So the semi professional fits basically in between pillars one or two. So it's now like a bonus pillar. You can almost call it pillar number seven. So for the other four that people are wondering, there's internal marketing, external marketing, what I call verbal marketing, which is anything that comes out of your mouth. It could be a presentation, it could be a guest podcast, and online marketing, which is absolutely massive.

But I think the semi professional referrers, it's a really, really valuable source of patient referrals that I often overlook for everybody. They just don't think about it. And we when I had my podiatry, we sort of stumbled on it accidentally. But once we understood it, we went, oh my god. We need to do this more often.

And even though I didn't in my book, the world's greatest podiatry business book, It's No Secret There's Money in Podiatry, I didn't mention it in there. I'm sure why I didn't put it in, but I think I didn't want seven pillars at the time. I just wanted six. So my next book, I'll put it in there as a as a bonus pillar. Now if people are wondering, are you wondering, Jim, what is a semi professional referrer?

I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm like, who are these people? Who are these people you haven't told me about that you had to create an entirely new pillar for?

The best examples, and there's gonna be other ones, but the best examples are accountants and lawyers. They're probably the so you could look at financial planners would be the same thing. So anybody that's in the finance industry, management. Back in the day when we were doing this, we were doing a lot with banks as well because but now, to try and find a bank manager is almost impossible. I don't know what it's like in North America, but in Australia now, a lot of the banks themselves are closed, and they just have holes in the wall.

And and maybe a little like a small bank where there might be one or two people in there. But there's no such thing as like a bank manager at a branch.

Yeah. I do most of my banking online and to you know, I sometimes drop off a check at an ATM, but very rarely do I have interaction with any kind of human when it comes to banking.

Yeah. I can't remember the last time I spoke to well, actually, my sister-in-law works at a bank. So I do talk to a bank person every now and then, but I don't think I've ever spoken to her about banking. And I bank with a different bank, which makes it easier. But anyway, back to accountants and lawyers.

So despite not being directly involved in the medical profession, they still can contribute to your patient base. They can add a lot of patients to your patient base. And the reason why this group's important, if you just have a look in your community, how many accountant accounting firms do you have? How many law firms are actually in your community? I did a quick search before jumping on here.

And just in Cairns, which a population's, say, a 150,000, there's 35 law firms, which there's 35 potential places that could be referring patients to you.

That's huge. That's a lot of potential networking and connections there.

Yeah. And if you think accountants as well, they'd probably I'm sure there's just as many accounts. I didn't look up accounts, but I know I know there's a lot. And there's some that are probably really small, and there's gonna be other firms that which are gonna be, yeah, absolutely huge. And that's how when we came across it, there was a a law an accounting firm called the back then, they were called BDO Kendall's.

I think now it might just be BDO. And they were a national company, like, all around the country, and that's and they approached us. Could we come in and do a presentation for their staff? And I went, yeah. Not a problem.

How many staff? They said, oh, there'll be about 40 people in the room. Yeah. No problem. Oh, and we'll pay you.

So they paid me to turn up, do a a thirty to forty minute presentation with a bit of q and a afterwards. We picked up maybe five or eight patients from that presentation.

Wow.

On top of it, we were paid to actually be there, which I thought was was great, but that's what sparked the idea of. And with accounting firms, I'm not sure about overseas, but in Australia or a lot of businesses, a certain amount of money is put aside that they must spend on work health and safety, you know, about employee education. And that was why they reached out to us. They said, oh, we've this budget here. We need to spend some money.

Will you come in and do the talk? We went, well, if they've got a budget, maybe other people have a budget. And that's that's how the whole idea was started.

That's a really cool story. I didn't that's not kind of area of market or networking I hadn't necessarily thought of before.

Yeah. Well, it's if you wanna get into it so that kicked the idea off, and then we went, well, if they've got that budget, that means other people have the budget. So then we started reaching out to to other firms doing the same thing. Hey. We can come in and do a talk.

We didn't ask to be paid, though. We didn't say, oh, we'll do it for this fee. We just said we'd come in and do it. But there's still a few people then wrote back and said, oh, what's your fee for doing it? I went, oh, well, as a matter of fact.

And so then we would throw something out. We'd stress test what we could get away with. So it was sort of like a a win win. But this all but that's how we did it with accounting firms. Law firms, we did it a little bit different.

If you wanna know how do you get this thing started, you can just start with an email introduction if you wanted to. You just send an email out to these firms. The only limitation might be you don't know if that email will actually get to the decision maker. That's the hardest part.

For sure.

So first, you need to find out who are the decision makers in those firms. And sometimes, some of these larger accounting firms and also the law firms will actually have, like, a professional practice manager who may not be a lawyer, may not be accountant, but they're great. They've they've got management degrees, and they are usually looking after the place. So that's the person you want to find out who they are. So you may need to phone the the business and say, hey.

I need to send some information. Who is the manager of the actual practice? Who makes the decisions on what happens and what doesn't happen? And the person on the phone, they'll just tell you. Because usually, the person answering the phone is not the person who's making the decisions.

No. It's I've done that before sometimes to to figure out exactly who's making decision in a larger, you know, clinic when I'm trying to figure out who makes marketing decisions. So, yeah, definitely, you can you can find that out pretty easily.

Yeah. And usually, I think the term over here, they refer to them as the business manager in the larger companies. If you can find out who they are, if you can get their email address, then you can go on their website. Their email address may be there. You can send them an email, introduce yourself, tell them a little bit about what you do.

If you can't do it that way, but if you wanna make sure that the information that you put together is gonna end up in the right hands, You could do something where it could be registered mail, cost a little bit more, but at least it's going to end up in the hands of the person you want them to read it. So Federal Express, what you wanna do is make sure they're aware that you exist first, and then educate them a little bit about what podiatry is and how it can help their clients. So with the accounting firms, it was more how can we help their team. But with if you're talking to a a law company, you wanna know how can we actually help your clients, and how can we help you? And this is the one that the lawyers like.

This is how we got into the law firms. And how can we increase the payouts that you get for your clients? Because a lot of times, if someone's had a foot injury, the lawyers are not even thinking about what's the long term repercussions from a podiatry point of view that what type of surgeries may need to be done? Does this person need orthotics in their shoes? How often those orthotics need to get replaced?

What type of footwear? Do they need to have different footwear now? Do they have do they need multiple footwear? How often should the shoes get replaced? More so than if they hadn't have had that injury.

And sometimes we when we've gone through it, we've added $10.20, $3,050,000 dollars extra to what they could claim for, And I tell you, that puts a big smile on a lawyer's face, especially if they're getting a percentage of what the person's pay it is. But it's also good for the patient.

Yeah. There's a I don't know how it is now, but when I was in practice in Oregon, there's a lot of workman's compensation claims

Yeah.

And things where you can jump in and help out in a case or give an opinion and charge a pretty reasonable billable hours for doing so. But, yeah, that's one that's one way that sometimes podiatrists would get involved with that. Sometimes people would be expert witnesses as well at trials and things, but that's the That's a different people have

that's a different ballgame altogether.

Yeah. But definitely, those are kind of the two areas where I kinda podiatry and law that I've seen intersect. Some people wanna are excited about that opportunity. Other people wanna stay really, really far away from both of those things.

Yeah. Like, I do know some podiatrists who are expert witnesses for law cases, and they write up these massive reports, and they get paid a lot of money to do it. But in a normal clinical situation, how we used to do it, we would say to them, send us the patient. We will do our initial consultation. We'll review what we think.

We'll send you back a report on what we found and where we think cost could be involved down the track. And this was just it was just a a a it wasn't a detailed scientific report. We weren't planning on being an expert witness anywhere. We're just giving our advice and opinion. And we would charge them a couple $100, one for the consultation, and then additional money for the report, and we would get paid for it.

That was that was best. We didn't have to wait until they won the case before we got paid. We got paid straight away. We got paid for the initial visit, and we got paid for the report. Yeah.

And then down the track, sometimes it might have been two, three years later, they may have got their payer, and that patient always came back, always got their orthotics and other treatment from our podiatry clinic. So you are you're playing a short game and a long game at the same time.

That's really interesting to hear about that.

And if so if you haven't done this before, just just do it. You've got you've absolutely nothing to lose by doing it, and it's a little bit it's it's fun. The other thing I wanna tell people is just if you want to make contact with these sort of people, you've you've tried emails, maybe you've you've sent something out to them, is go to networking lunches. A lot of the chamber of commerce lunches, you will find there's always gonna be lawyers there, and there's always gonna be accounts. That's where they hang out.

And the reason they hang out there is because a lot of them do business with each other. So if you happen to go there, you're talking to an accountant, just keep going back to those same networking lunches, and you'll find you'll get friendly with these people. Then you can start saying, hey. By the way, Jim, I I sent something out to you a month or so ago. And if they go, oh, I didn't get it.

She'd go, well, this is who I sent it to. And they go, oh, no. They're not there anymore. So you go, okay. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna send something to you next week.

I'm gonna drop it in. And that can be the next part is you've done the email. You've done the registered mail. You've gone to networking lunches, and you've got to know them a little bit. After that, if you're getting on good with them, take them out for coffee, take them out for lunch.

Because the if they're really friendly with you and they're referring patients to you, it will be worthwhile.

That's a that's a great plan. I think it it benefits not only your clinic, you're also giving them a lot of value as well.

Yeah. And the the last thing I just wanna say on this particular subject is just maintain the contact. And this is with whether it's professional, nonprofessional, semi professional, or semi professional. It's just maintain that contact. Just because they've sent one person to you doesn't mean you're gonna be top of mind.

If they've never used a podiatrist before and they send a client, and they might get some really positive feedback, they got it. Was fantastic. You need to don't don't think that just because they sent one, they're gonna keep sending them. You need to stay in touch with them, whether you send them out your newsletter or you just send them some other information. And this is why it's beneficial going to a networking lunch.

It's because if you're there, even if you can't go every month, if you're going every couple of months, at least you're you're being seen shaking hands, kissing babies, doing all that sort of stuff. Being like a politician.

Well, you're saying top of mind. Right? It's Yeah. If you're just like in your office, in your clinic, and no one sees you. Right?

Like, you're never gonna be top of mind. You're not gonna be seen as kind of a valuable member of the community. You have to get out there. Like you said, shake hands, kiss babies, do some politician networking type stuff that really gonna be an important member of of the community and be seen by these folks that will help you, you know, potentially grow your practice.

Yeah. And I know there was a when I moved to Cairns, there were, like, say, 100 doctors or something at the time. And I took me about three or four months, and I saw everybody. I went to every single GP. The amount of them that said to me, one, I've never met a podiatrist before, And I went, oh, okay.

Or they said, oh, I met one five or six years ago, but I've never seen them since. And then after that, I was getting the referral. So it works the same way with lawyers, accountants, financial planners, anyone in investment finance, is once you've maintained that contact, once you've connected with them, is keep the connection going. Don't rest on your laurels and think it'll always be that way.

That's great advice.

That's all I had to say on this subject, Jim.

Alright. Well, I think that's really valuable stuff. I think people, you know, if you're not out there connecting with this seventh, you know, pillar of accountants, financial planners, lawyers, it's a great it's a great opportunity, and definitely people should take advantage of that.

I think so as well. Okay. Jim, I look forward to talking to you next week.

Sounds great, Tyson.

Okay. See you later. Bye.

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