How We Grew This Functional Medicine Franchise From 2 to 6 Locations In 12 Months

It’s True… The Riches Are In The Niches

With functional medicine, there are so many paths to go.

Diabetes, Thyroid, Autoimmune, Memory care, etc etc etc

I’ve tried numerous times with other companies to go broad and it always bites us in the butt. We found that when we marketed for things like Autoimmune, it wasn’t niche enough.

The patients had all sorts of symptoms, so it was very tough to sell… We often found ourselves having to do additional research for all sorts of conditions, symptoms, etc just to understand what they’re going through in an educated way and present a program of care to the patients. When you factor in trying to train staff with a scalable sales & marketing method, it becomes very challenging.

Additionally, though, the patients coming through from the advertising were often not very severe. It was mixed at best and just made it more challenging to ensure that we were in front of qualified prospects who needed our care.

There’s a saying in marketing that the best thing that you can have is a starving crowd. It’s tough to sell programs of care to patients who don’t desperately need or desire what you’re offering.

But those dealing with a serious problem that are dying for a solution are far easier to sell to. As we tested all sorts of different niches for these locations, we really dialed it down to 1 best performing niche and 2 that seemed to do quite well.

Keep in mind though that this was also reflective of their product and sales process. We found the best results to be with Thyroid marketing, second best with Type 2 Diabetes. We also tested a broader campaign for Autoimmune which never seemed to hit well like I was mentioning and another campaign for Weight Loss.

I’ve seen weight loss work well for others, so I concluded that this was just more based on them and their service. However, we definitely found that Autoimmune was too broad and it was better to target some of the individual autoimmune conditions like Hashimotos with Thyroid, etc.

Watch our insightful video detailing the journey of our client’s functional medicine franchise’s rapid growth from 2 to 6 locations in just 12 months!

Patient Recruitment Advertising

The challenge this franchise was having before we started working with them was consistent advertising results.

1. They had no way to consistently, predictably, and scalability acquire new patients for their growing number of clinics
2. The patients whom they did attract often were on Medicaid and Disability with no means to afford their expensive treatment options
3. Every other marketing solution they tried in the past fell flat on deaf ears

For these guys, if they couldn’t add more patients, it wasn’t hard to bring on more franchisee owners.

And the practices just weren’t as profitable and high-producing as they could be.

They had been through the gambit… Wasting dollar after dollar with ill-producing marketing endeavors. And still didn’t have a predictable system in place.

Of course, the niches as I mentioned before played a huge role in scaling functional medicine franchise up. No one in the functional medicine space was harnessing (and still isn’t fully) niche marketing like this.

It’s far easier to speak deeply to a select few than to a broader audience.

When we also optimize the advertising, as I was describing, for the audience that is most likely to convert into our ideal patients, it sets everything else up for success. But that’s not all.

We looked under the hood at their current sales process and tested a few offers to land on the one that was hitting the best. Before care, these doctors have patients go through thorough lab testing, like a lot of other functional medicine doctors. We crafted an irresistible offer that aligned with their sales process and had patients speak with the doctors over a consultation for free.

We also added additional value by gifting patients a free copy of the founder’s best-selling book on the conditions these patients were signing up for when they showed up. This was giving these patients answers and drew a strong crowd of ideal patients to us. The funnels were also setup in a way to drive up lead quality and ensure we were speaking to the best-fit and qualified patients.

We ran both Google & Meta ads to off-channel funnels, where patients opted in and gave us their phone number.

They were then directed to intake applications to screen them out for severity and then online calendars to book a call. After they booked, they were required to watch thorough educational content while they prepared for their appointment.

We call this Patient Recruiting because we position the office as only accepting a certain type of candidate and just like top hiring funnels, we screen people out at each stage. I’ll get to the sales side in a moment, but this whole process bleeds through there too to create a strong patient experience that has these patients begging to be accepted, rather than hard-selling.

The Legs That Advertising Walk On

These guys did an incredible job innovating with a killer product, and pricing model which I’ll share more about in a second. But this marketing that I just mentioned is just as important.

Good marketing is what allows you to scale profitably. To put 1 dollar in and get 2, 3, 4, 10 dollars out. Some offices are comfortable growing a modest 5% annually or not even growing at all…

But for those who want to grow a lot more, you have to have good marketing. And I truly believe that in a market like functional medicine, we’re still at the ground floor

This is where there’s a huge opportunity to service a lot of patients and start a really big business before everything gets involved

To really capture that market share, you have to be marketing. And of course, that’s not to mention, how many literal thousands of doctors I’ve spoken to who have experienced “bad” marketing

I’m referring to the:

• Broken promises
• Feeling of pouring tens of thousands of dollars down the drain
• Having a full schedule with no one showing up
• Speaking to people with no money – wasting your time… Thinking you’re priced too high and not of value
• Calling people who opted in for your service only for them to hang up on you
• Etc etc etc

We positioned them strong, niche specific and all of these things make a huge difference. But where I see so many offices also drop the ball is thinking that the sales element doesn’t matter and isn’t as important.

Great marketing should make selling easier. I attribute this setting process though to be a hybrid of marketing and sales. It helps the marketing so much and is vital.

• It reduces your cost per acquisition by maximizing the number of leads who schedule, appointments that show, shows that convert
• It’s an opportunity to get a credit card on file to ensure they show up
• Is an opportunity to start the sales process, build a relationship, and bring these people further along in their level of awareness
• It’s an opportunity to push them to content and prepare them for the appointment to reduce skepticism and “T-up” the close

Without this, I generally, see offices struggle with the above problems

• Low schedule rates
• Low show rates
• Low conversion rates
• Low return on investment

Pouring money down the drain… Frustrated and upset. To do this properly, we had a high volume of calls with strong texts and emails that positioned them uniquely and authoritatively amongst others. We built out an entire setting team just to assist with their offices.

The team screened the patients and held a motivational interview with everyone who scheduled online or didn’t (to schedule them). We went into their pain, problems, goals, and desires, what they’d tried in the past and so much more.

We set financial expectations and scheduled them by getting a credit card on file to secure their spot. Some were screened out, but those who weren’t had proper expectations and homework required before the appointment.

In the same way, we sent them content after they booked online, here we redirected them to that along with their intake forms to ensure they went through it before the appointment.

The Wealthy Doctor Framework

Most doctors have a heart to help people. They struggle to see their true value and charge for what they’re worth. You may have no problem selling friends and family into care plans. But have you noticed a difference when you are talking with strangers or first-time patients?

Why is it that they don’t convert like referrals?

Why are they more skeptical and less bought into what you offer and how you can help them?

Well after studying over 10,000+ consults that our doctors and some of our internal team have taken, we’ve found a formula to convert cold leads just as if they were a referral. The goal with the advertising and the structure we created was to make these online, cold patients as warm as possible before they spoke to us.

This helps to require less sales experience and a less thorough sale for sure. But we also still want a strong process here to get the best results, highest return-on-investment and ultimately to serve as many patients as possible…

This was a big challenge for these guys because with a franchise, we have doctors jumping on board from all walks of life and motivations. As we went, we learned the importance of this and how we had to better structure things and staffing to make this work

We brought in health coaches/case managers who were more apt and willing to learn the sales process than some of the doctor/owners. With that we embedded a strong process to convert these patients into care.

To do this at scale with staff requires serious attention. You need a strong script in place, lot’s of training, recordings, etc etc

When we started off the founder was flying out to these clinics frequently to shadow them and train them up. As we’ve gotten more sophisticated, we’ve started recording these conversations and auditing them virtually without the need to travel. We put in place strong financing companies to help these offices convert and framed up the intake assessments in a way that helped to make it easier to sell.

Strategic Business Model

Strategic pricing set the business model up for success so we could ensure that they could cover their marketing, staff, and other expenses while being profitable. Once again, I see a lot of offices have hesitation around this or just not price in the most strategic way. They look at their time and decide what they’re comfortable charging.

But never think about the longevity of the practice

• Are you factoring in marketing expenses?
• Staffing? Employee benefits? Bonuses? Time off?
• Sales commissions?
• Net take-home profits?
• Research and development? Expansion? Consulting?

Most offices just end up charging per visit or for an hour of their time and end up suffering from low retention of patients and low total case values. As a result, their service is limited to the hours they work and not the value they provide.

It can work great for referrals, but can be very hard to scale, and attract good staff. And truthfully it limits your ability to service patients at the highest level. With Novis, they structured a comprehensive plan that went beyond just the hours they worked. We offered patients the opportunity to buy into an entire treatment plan that included all sorts of things to add value. And reduced the actual cost to provide… Allowing us to be more profitable while helping patients at a higher level…

All while working less!

Plans run a few thousand dollars on the front end and then have a backend recurring membership model to keep patients in our ecosystem long-term. Our service was built around the outcomes, with various in-office services and medspa-like offerings to keep patients coming back and ongoing support and guidance…

We tested various pricing structures in each location to find the sweet spot, but ultimately this was the framework we found to most support our growth, high level of service, and long-term profitability.

What Gets Measured Gets Improved

This is the scoreboard that shows us how we’re doing and where the gaps are to improve. Keeping this in check is vital for scaling!

We set up a weekly reporting mechanism to measure all sorts of key metrics in the business, incentivized staff according to the outcomes we wanted (like qualified shows, closes, etc), and focused regularly on these metrics.

When you’re running multiple offices and have a lot of rods in the fire, you need to be able to look at a central place to see how you’re doing at any given time. This directs your focus and your team’s focus.

At every level in our business, we’ve found that scaling to the next level requires first getting better and more thorough data. For those wanting similar results with a functional medicine practice or similar high-ticket medical practice, book a call on my website.

We offer big guarantees of as much as $100k/mo and have some of the most advanced advertising, selling, and product-related services to build out these practices at scale. After working with over 339+ offices including our own ones, we’ve just about seen and done it all…

Book a call now. Limited availability to 1 office per niche per market. And I seriously believe that there is no better time to build these types of practices than now. This market will evolve and get more competitive over time though.

Disclaimer: Results may vary. A call is required to determine eligibility for any guarantees.