Stop the Scroll: Effective Growth Strategies for OT Practices Without Social Media Overwhelm"

More about my guest:

Doug Vestal is the founder of Freedom of Practice where he helps OTs build successful private pay practices through his comprehensive course and mentorship program, Private Pay MBA.  If you didn't catch it from his last name, he is my husband and was my original business coach who helped me start and grow the Functional Pelvis.  

He worked on Wall Street for 15 years in NYC and Paris before transitioning to working with OTs where he brings a distinct blend of financial acumen and healthcare entrepreneurship.  He has a PhD in statistics and applied probability and he is the author of the forthcoming book "Financial Freedom for OTs: your stress-free guide to money."  The best job he's ever had is being an amazing father to our two kiddos.

We discussed:

1.) Do you think OTs should use social media to grow their private practice?
2.) When OTs use social media, what mistakes do you see them often making?
3.) How would you recommend OTs leverage social media and should they hire a social media manager?
4.) Why do you think OTs feel the need to be using social media?
5.) What should OTs do instead of using social media to grow their practice?
6.) Any last tips/advice you'd give OTs looking to start or grow their practice?

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Transcript

Lindsey Vestal (00:00):

I'm joined today by Doug Vestal, who's the founder of Freedom of Practice, where he helps OTs build successful private pay practices through his comprehensive course and mentorship program, private Pay MBA, if you didn't catch it from his last name, he is my husband and my original business coach who helped me start and grow the functional pelvis. He worked on Wall Street for 15 years in New York City and Paris before transitioning to working with OTs where he brings a distinct blend of financial acumen and healthcare entrepreneurship. He has the PhD in Statistics and Applied Probability and is the author of the forthcoming book, financial Freedom for OTs, your Stress-Free Guide to Money. The best job he's ever had is being an amazing father to our two kiddos. I can't wait for you to hear today's episode. New and seasoned OTs are finding their calling in pelvic health. After all, what's more a DL than sex peeing and poop? But here's the question. What does it take to become a successful, fulfilled, and thriving OT in pelvic health? How do you go from beginner to seasons and everything in between? Those are the questions, and this podcast will give you the answers. We are inspired OTs. We are out of the box OTs. We are Pelvic Health OTs. I'm your host, Lindsay Vestal, and welcome to the OTs and Pelvic Health Podcast.

(01:35):

Doug, thank you so much for coming to the OTs Propel Health Podcast. Talk about something kind of controversial, a little bit racy, and that is OTs and social media. Thank you for being a guest today.

Doug Vestal (01:49):

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to be talking with you.

Lindsey Vestal (01:52):

So let's just hit it out of the park with the most, I guess pressing question that I have for you. Do you think OTs should use social media to grow their private practice?

Doug Vestal (02:05):

I'll answer it from two different angles, and the first is that if you were just starting your private practice and it is just you, then I do not think social media should be the place where you're spending a lot of your time and a lot of your effort. There are much better ways to reach your ideal client than posting on social media, and we can get into why that is the case. Where you might want to consider social media is if you have other things that you are selling. Perhaps you're doing mentorship, you have courses, you have a much broader audience than just something local. Or if you are opening multiple locations and you have lots of different therapists working for you and you need to fill their schedule, but for the vast majority, I'd say 90% and 95% of OTs, I want to give you permission to put social media down and focus on other stuff.

Lindsey Vestal (03:13):

Wow. So refreshing. I think that's very counter intuitive to perhaps what most people think they should be doing. The information that's just so prolific out there, I think we always feel like we're supposed to be catching up doing another reel, doing another post. And I'm just going to take a huge sigh of relief here because what I just heard you say is that for the vast majority of OTs trying to grow their private practice, we should not be focusing on social media.

Doug Vestal (03:43):

Yeah, exactly. And do you want to know why?

Lindsey Vestal (03:46):

Yeah.

Doug Vestal (03:49):

Okay. Let's imagine you actually had a different kind of business. Let's say that you weren't an OT in public health, but let's say you were a plumber, right? Let's say you had a plumbing business, and so you needed clients who have a plumbing emergency. Basically they need something done. So there are a couple of different ways you could go about it. And let's just say that there are two different plumbers. So plumber A goes and speaks to and develops relationships with local real estate agents. They develop relationships with property managers and they develop relationships with homeowner associations. Then you have the second plumber, plumber B, and what Plumber B does is prints out these signs and puts those signs in the ground at traffic intersections. So at the freeway exit, so plumber A has gone to exactly where their ideal client is hanging out, right? It is local real estate, it is homeowner associations, it is property managers where they know their service is in demand. Plumber B is just hoping that somebody driving through that intersection happens to stop, look to the left or right and go, oh, you know what? I was just thinking I needed a plumber. So which one do you think is going to be more successful and have a healthier business?

Lindsey Vestal (05:21):

Absolutely, the first one.

Doug Vestal (05:23):

And so social media is the same. Doing a lot of social media is a akin to that plumber putting up signs on the side of the road because it's not targeted. You don't know who's driving through it. Do they need it? Do they even want it? And will they even remember you by the time in which they do need a plumber, right? It's likely no on many of those fronts. And so you could spend all day driving around town printing out these signs and putting them in the ground and not get really much response. And it's the same with social media. We can get into the influencers and all of the vanity metrics, but at any one time, only three to 5% of your followers are seeing what you post anyways. So it's a very low sort of visibility. And then the second is that most people are not on social media to find those types of services.

(06:19):

And so it's not really something that they're going to engage a lot with. And so you're really much better off establishing those in-person relationships. The equivalent of contacting the property manager, the equivalent of developing a relationship with the real estate agent and homeowners association. Those real life in person in the flesh connections are going to be the thing that grows your business, not sort of spending all of this time and anxiety in the mental health that comes with being on social media all the time for very, very low output and low results. At the end of the day,

Lindsey Vestal (06:59):

I have to say that I would've never expected a plumbing analogy to hit home as strongly as it did, but it made total sense, and so I really appreciate that refreshing take on it. So if social media may not be the best place for OTs to be growing their private practice, what should we be doing instead?

Doug Vestal (07:22):

Yeah, it is really, if we think about it, there is three main ways that you're going to attract clients, right? Number one is there is a referral source that is going to speak highly about your services. It could be a doctor, it could be an allied healthcare provider, it could be someone that's in your professional network. So that's the referral source. The second is getting out directly inside of your community, doing community workshops, doing community events. And then the third is really those people who have been told they need to see a pelvic floor therapist. So they get on Google and they type pelvic floor therapist near me. So those are really the ways in which clients are going to find you. And so we want to have strategies in place that target each of those three categories. So building referral relationships, doing community networking and marketing through workshops and community events, and then working on your SEO. So that is going to bear much more fruit and long-term fruit than getting into this cycle of posting and then having to keep feeding it without any results coming in at the end of the day. So I always go back, this is what we did with the functional pelvis, focus on those in-person relationships.

Lindsey Vestal (08:48):

Is there any merit? So let's say I'm doing all of that. I'm building the in-person relationships. I'm really nurturing and going deep with a few practitioners that I know are like-minded. Would there be any reason for me to be on social media? If I'm doing all those things,

Doug Vestal (09:05):

I would still be on social media, but my stance is how much effort do you put into it and how much mental bandwidth does it consume for you? And so it's important, I think, depending on your population, to have some sort of social media presence, to have the Facebook business page, to have a business account for your IG to even have a small YouTube channel. But those are kind of more just placeholders and you can seed them with information. You could seed your IG with nine really high quality tailored post or reels and then not go back to it. Because what ends up happening at the end of the day is people will find out about you, and then people are naturally curious. They'll look up, oh, do you have an IG page? They'll look up, are you on Facebook? And so you want to be visible there, but you don't want to necessarily spend all, what we see is the hours and hours of constantly scrolling and posting on social media. If you are using social media, you need to ask yourself, are you using it as content production or are you using it as content consumption? And a lot of people will be on social media for the content consumption, which is a whole nother mental health rabbit hole that we can talk about as well. So to answer it more succinctly, yes, be on social media, but don't feel the need to constantly be updating and constantly posting. You see so many people do.

Lindsey Vestal (10:40):

So almost use it more as social proof than anything.

Doug Vestal (10:43):

Exactly. Yep.

Lindsey Vestal (10:44):

Okay. Okay. So for those listening to this episode, I hope they're finding it as refreshing as I am, but for those that have identified, so I get it, that makes sense. I'm using social media sparingly. I'm maybe scheduling my post out weeks or months in advance, so it's just not consuming my daily thought process or maybe even making maybe distracted from the real work of building in-person relationships because worrying about keeping up with all of the other social media posts. So if I'm in that category, what mistakes are you often seeing OTs make when they are using social media?

Doug Vestal (11:22):

Yeah, I think one is just posting too much. And I say that because for the students that we work with, they have a lot of anxiety around social media. There's a real need and feeling of keeping up with the Joneses. They see a lot of other people posting a lot of material. And I'll say right now, just because you have a large social media account, following does not necessarily mean you have a successful business. There's plenty of people with over a hundred thousand followers who are still trying to make ends meet. And so the likes, subscribers and stuff like this does not necessarily give you an indication of any level of success. The other thing I would say is that they're not really using it in the strategy that I prefer for small business owners. And so it's a bit of a mistake as well as an opportunity.

(12:15):

And the way I like to recommend people use social media is number one, start to unfollow all of your professional accounts that you're following. I think a lot of people get into the comparison game. A lot of therapists follow other therapists, and so they see the content that they're putting out, and then they feel like there's a race being run and they have to start running to catch up. But nobody's stepping back and asking like, well, what's the prize at the end of this race that we're engaged in? And so unfollow those therapists for make a list of your favorite ones. You can go back in six months time and follow 'em again, it's not permanent or anything. And then follow all of the local businesses. Really, when you open up any of your social media feeds, it should be people in your community. What is the advantage of creating relationships with people outside of your community that are never going to be able to refer to you?

(13:10):

So use social media as that tool of connecting with other local businesses. And what you want to do is you want to engage with them. So their stuff post thoughtful comments, and then eventually over time you can start to direct message 'em and go, Hey, that was a really great post. My clients are really similar. Would you ever have any interest in grabbing coffee? And it's a great way to build a professional friendship or start a professional friendship doing it in this really targeted way because you want to leverage it to help you build referral sources because there is a lot of impact and a lot of value you can get from getting relationships who are seeing many of your clients and start referring to you, versus trying to find each one individually one person at a time.

Lindsey Vestal (14:01):

That's awesome. That's awesome. Another question that I see comes up a lot, particularly in your private pay MBA Private Action Academy is should OTs be hiring a social media manager? What's your take on that?

Doug Vestal (14:17):

I'd say for the vast majority, there is no need to hire a social media manager. It is going to, like everything in your business, you should be measuring the return on investment. So if you are hiring a social media manager and there are $300 a month, $800 a month, thousand dollars a month, what metrics are in place? What tracking is in place that the people who are booking and paying your bills for you to pay? The social media manager actually, were a result of the social media manager's actions. And this is where things get really dicey and dodgy is there's not a ton of tracking that is available. And so as a business owner with limited time, limited budget, limited ability to fight all the fires that we need to fight without being able to say, yes, this was a really great use of my funds.

(15:19):

For me, it's a really tough sale. And I know some OTs, and I have OTs in my program who go, oh, they contacted me through IG and everything. And so it's easy to think, well, that source was from ig, but we go back to the thing which is somebody recommended you, somebody found you on Google, then they looked up your social media. And because it's so easy to contact social media, that's just their communication channel. It might not have been the original way they found you, it's just the way they decided to communicate with you. And so that's where understanding as part of your client intake, where did you first hear about my practice? Was it a referral from a friend? Was it a Google search? Was it a online directory? Was it a social media post? And really getting granular with that. I would do that and implement that ahead of time before ever even considering a social media manager, because it's fine if you want to trial it for a couple of months, just make sure you're really looking at the right metrics. But going back to it to what I said in the beginning, for the vast majority of OTs, there's simply no need for it unless you're really, really super big or you have other goals in mind.

Lindsey Vestal (16:32):

Awesome. I think that's such a good reminder that just because they contacted us through IG doesn't necessarily mean that's how they found us. And you're right, we're quick to jump to that conclusion. And so I do think giving pause to answering that question, how did you hear about me? Where did you find me are helping us future cast to double down on maybe where our marketing efforts should be, because we know that that was successful in that instance.

Doug Vestal (17:00):

Yeah.

Lindsey Vestal (17:02):

I am so curious as to your take on this, and we could guess, and I could guess in so many ways, but just given the fact that you are just interacting with your students all the time and giving them feedback on all their marketing materials and everything, I'm so curious as to what you think or why do you think OTs feel the need to be on social media?

Doug Vestal (17:27):

I think it goes back to the vanity metrics a little bit. You see your peers doing it, and they must be riding a rocket ship to the moon. And so it's easy to get into the comparison game, and people only post their wins on social media. It's always the highlight reel. And it's also something that seems feeling like an imposter is a really real thing, and there's various ways in which it manifests and people respond to that feeling very differently. And so some people may have a ton of imposter feelings for even filming themselves, speaking, filming a reel, or even just putting their photo on social media. Other OTs can feel very intimidated going in and talking with doctors and stuff. And so I think what ends up happening is because it's something that you can do behind a screen that doesn't really require a lot of in-person interaction, you can kind of post it and then set it down and move on, and you can do it from your home. I think a lot of OTs find that it feels the gap in avoidance that they're facing for doing more public facing stuff. So because it seems like everybody's doing social media and everybody's super successful, you kind of get the internal pass, no, I'm not wasting my time. This is actually fruitful. See, all of these other people are doing it. And at the same time, it keeps me in my protective shell from having to offer a community workshop or go in and speak at a doctor's office.

Lindsey Vestal (19:07):

And do you think that's mainly introverts or people who feel some sense of imposter syndrome that are typically feeling that way, feeling like it is a little bit more protective and easy to be on social versus offering community events?

Doug Vestal (19:21):

Yeah, I think so. Look, it can go either way. Some people can be so introverted that they don't want to do anything with social media, and so then they get into analysis paralysis and it has to be perfect and redoing all of their posts many, many times. But yeah, I would say it's many times when I talk to OTs, the ones that are doing a ton of social media are not also doing the in-person stuff.

Lindsey Vestal (19:49):

Okay. Yeah. So it seems in your experience, it seems like it's one or the other, and it's a clear win to be focusing on those in-person interactions and having those leverage building referrals within our own local community.

Doug Vestal (20:04):

Exactly.

Lindsey Vestal (20:05):

Okay. Doug, do you have any last tips or advice that you'd like to give OTs looking to start or grow their private pay practice?

Doug Vestal (20:15):

Yeah, I think really begin with the end in mind. Who is your ideal client? Who do you want to see? What service are you going to be providing them? What is the major pain point in their life that you are solving for them? And I always go back that many people are not necessarily excited about coming for therapy. They come to therapy to get a certain result. They come because they want to lift their kids without leaking. They come because they want to have sex with their partner without any pain. And so the more you can focus on their deep desires and then go, okay, I have my ideal client now. Where is my ideal client hanging out? Who is currently interacting with my ideal client? Because every business owner runs, it doesn't matter what business you're in, every business owner runs into the same problem, which is, where are my clients?

(21:09):

Where are they and how do I make sure they know about me? And so really first, getting dialed in on who your ideal client is then allows you to sit back and reflect and go, okay, in my community, where are those people hanging out who is currently interacting? Because you'll have a lot more success. Not trying to figure out and go and reach everyone, but being really, really targeted of going, well, I know this functional medicine provider sees my ideal client. I know this fitness trainer sees my ideal client. I know these home birth midwives see my ideal client, and really targeting them from the very beginning versus going super broad. And so that would be my number one piece of advice before you do any filing of paperwork, before you even have a business name, right? It all starts from your client. So really get that dialed in and everything else will flow from there.

Lindsey Vestal (22:04):

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about this stuff. Obviously your respective really resonates with me. You were my first business coach over a decade ago when I started the functional pelvis, and this approach that you take that just feels, I think counterculture in a lot of ways, but yet really deeply resonates with the way that I enjoyed growing my private pay practice is just, it feels really authentic, and I know that so many of the students that you work with feel the same way. So thank you again just for being able to be so articulate, to share all these perspectives with us, given your broad background and yeah, you being able to leverage it to the OT community, we're so grateful for you.

Doug Vestal (22:49):

Absolutely. It's my pleasure. Thank you.

Lindsey Vestal (22:51):

Thanks for listening to another episode of OTs and Pelvic Health. If you haven't already, hop onto Facebook and join my group OTs for Pelvic Health, where we have thousands of OTs at all stages of their pelvic health career journey. This is such an incredibly supportive community where I go live each and every week. If you love this episode, please take a screenshot of this episode on your phone and post it to ig, Facebook, wherever you post your stuff. And be sure to tag me and let me know why you like this episode. This will help me to create in the future what you want to hear more of. Thanks again for listening to the OTs and Public Health Podcast.