How Guardian Recovery Scaled From 3 to 21 Locations | DJ Prince

How did a boutique Florida treatment center grow into a 21-location, multi-state behavioral health provider? In this episode, we sit down with Guardian's Chief Strategy Officer DJ Prince to break down the real strategy behind scaling rehab center marketing — from digital-first admissions to building a business development team from scratch.

We cover:
• Why Guardian moved from small boutique facilities to larger, centralized 70-150 bed campuses
• How shrinking reimbursement rates and inflation are forcing treatment centers to rethink margins
• Why lifetime value (LTV) matters more than cost per lead in addiction treatment marketing
• How AI is disrupting digital marketing channels — and reshaping business development
• The future of behavioral health: predictive AI interventions, BI systems, and clinician support tools

Whether you're in treatment center marketing, healthcare operations, or just curious how addiction recovery businesses scale responsibly — this conversation is packed with real, tactical insight.

Interested in becoming an advertiser on Recovery.com: https://providers.recovery.com/expand-your-reach/

Check out Guardian Recovery: https://www.guardianrecovery.com/

0:00 — Intro: The Rebrand Story Behind the Tattoo
0:53 — What Guardian Does & How It Grew to 21 Locations
5:08 — Scaling Quality Care Through Reimbursement Rate Cuts
14:18 — Why Guardian Kept the Plymouth House Name Alive
16:06 — From Admissions to Chief Strategy Officer: A Personal Journey
26:06 — Overrated vs. Underrated in Treatment Center Marketing
35:06 — AI, Business Development, and the Future of Behavioral Health

#RehabMarketing #AddictionTreatment #BehavioralHealth

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Six months before we did a pretty extensive rebrand exercise, somebody sent me a post of an alumni who had a very large tattoo of the Plymouth House logo. I believe it was on their calf. Um, and that was a real discussion point on do we want to mess with that level of brand loyalty and commitment as we go through this process? Then it really was a discussion point is like, how do we deal with you know, messing with a location and a brand and a name and a logo that somebody attributes to saving their lives?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Tell us a little bit about Guardian, how long it's been around, who you serve, um, the locations, all of that stuff. Give us kind of the backstory of where you're at right now, at least.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

I'm a chief strategy officer at Guardian. I've been with your organization uh close to a decade. Um I started as marketing director, which was a focus primarily on digital. Um throughout the years, it's gone from marketing director to VP of marketing to now chief strategy officer. We um we're at 20, I think coming up on 21 locations across the country. We are in six soon-to-be seven states. So we're in Florida, uh, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire, Texas, Colorado, and coming soon here to Wisconsin uh and Kenosha in the near future. We started off as primary adult substance use disorder treatment. Um, but as we've expanded, we've really turned into a behavioral health care platform. So we do mental health treatment for adults and adolescents. We have a unique purpose-built adolescent program in New Jersey, too, that only does adolescent treatment inpatient residential. Um we are all outpatient mental health now, but in the near future, we're going to be opening our first inpatient mental health uh resident residential location as well. So, so yeah, I mean, at this point, um, we haven't gotten into any of the uh like really niche like gambling addiction or sex addiction or um eating disorder. Like we haven't done any of those specializations yet, but just general adult substance use disorder treatment, mental health treatment, adolescent treatment. Um yeah, that's that's us. And yeah, when I started, you know, nine, 10 years ago, I um I was brought in because Guardian has really always done business development very, very well. Um, but because of this expansion, and to give you an idea, when I started, we were just opening, I believe, our third location. So we were just in Florida, we had uh Maine, and we were just opening our first location in Jersey. So in you know, nine, eight or nine years, we've grown really, really quickly. And they brought me in to really focus on digital, um, because that was my background, always was. And the team knew, like, hey, we can't just ignore this this area of the marketing channel if we want to grow the way we want to grow. And um, and that's you know, been my focus for the last years. Recently, it's it's shifted to just more uh high-level organizational strategy, which I've really, really enjoyed. Um but yeah, that's that's that's where we're at today.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

When you think about all the treatment centers out there, and when you look back at when you were just at those three locations, what was the thing that everybody at the organization was saying that you were trying to change? Why what made you different? Why would somebody go to Guardian compared to like other treatment centers?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Our founder, Josh Scott, he always says he's a product of really good treatment, right? So when he needed good treatment, good treatment was there and it saved his life. So in our early days when we were just an intervention practice in Delry Beach, Florida, uh doing outpatient services, we were always client first. Like that was our North Star. If it improves the client outcomes and experience, we do it. If it doesn't, we don't. Simple. Um, sound simple. As you grow, like those questions become difficult sometimes when you're trying to, you know, balance business growth with client experience, but we've always taken the client experience and client outcome route. So when we started, that you know, a couple locations in Florida, one location in Jersey, we were boutique, high-end luxury, had a network treatment, you know, mostly private pay. And we had a really good product. Like when you know, interventionists across the country were dealing with individuals who had the means to go to you know exclusive expensive treatment, they would send them to Guardian because we had a really, really great product. Like people get sober at Guardian and they stay sober. Um after those first couple occasions, we wanted to differentiate by offering that same incredibly high level of treatment um to a ever widening demographic. So it's easy to hire amazing clinicians and have a great program when you have a really high cost of treatment. Can we do it on a Medicaid budget? Can we do it on in a network budget? Um and that that's what we set our challenge to be is like we want to be able to open up programs for the masses in the areas that need it and not discount or uh detract from the client experience or the clinical program or the staff expertise. And it's our challenge and mission and goal to deliver that same level of care to everybody.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Yeah, you talked a little bit about as you expand, as you have more locations, more offerings, it's challenging to make the quality also stay in line with that. Cause as you mentioned, the reimbursements, reimbursement rates are different.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

And you want to provide the best quality care that you can, but how do you do that with those changing reimbursements? What is the way that you guys were able to keep the quality high, but still remain profitable and grow?

SPEAKER_01 6:16

In order to do a Medicaid program or an in-network program and be able to maintain that quality standards, we had to do volume, right? So we couldn't, where we're used to running maybe a 20, 30, 40, 50 bed program out of network, those programs that we're opening now, Medicaid in it and out of network in network programs are 70 beds, 90 beds, 100 beds, 150 beds. Um, so we realize we could do it if we leverage the economies of scale with a bigger program. What also we've been able to leverage again with those economies of scale is as we've grown, we can centralize functions for the organization that lower the cost, right? So, like if a program wanted to open up in one of our Medicaid markets now, and they didn't have centralized admissions that could cost share across multiple locations, they didn't have, you know, a billing company that we owned and that can share the cost across locations. If they didn't have all those factors, it'd probably be really tough to do. So um, yeah, that that's part of it is you know, being happy with slimmer margins, but knowing that it's part of our mission to deliver this great care, um, being able to operate high volume facilities and like that's not an easy thing to do, and have the infrastructure on the administrative side to, you know, operate like an organization that can share costs, you know, across the, across the organization.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Yeah. Yeah. So in order to be comfortable with the tighter margins, you really needed to make sure that you had some centralized operations, like you said, with your call center and your billing, but also that you're able to focus on on doing more volume, which means you have to be better at your acquisition and the ways in which you do it. You can't rely on one way. It can't just be BD, which makes sense why they brought you on uh to come at it from a digital perspective. And I'm guessing that trajectory wasn't linear, that there's probably some bumps in the road. And when you think about maybe the hardest season that your organization has faced, like what do you think of?

SPEAKER_01 8:23

The challenge that I've I've laid out for you, which is like great care running very, very efficiently, that challenge becomes exponentially harder when there's rate changes. It becomes exponentially harder when there's inflation and staff cost goes up, which is by far the largest piece of our expenses. So, you know, over the last five or six years, like inflation has affected the world at large and our industry is no different. So um, you know, staff costs have gone up significantly and reimbursement rates haven't followed the same direction. So um, even though we've gotten bigger and we've gotten better and more efficient and smarter with our operations, there's external challenges that we're up against that we have to navigate. Um, you know, one hard, very hard week. Um, you know, there was a payer in one of our markets um, you know, last year that decided they were going to pull out. You know, we had an in-network contract with them. The rates were sustainable. They were 80 to 90 percent of our clients that were coming in had this particular uh payer. And they said, yep, we're we're leaving the marketplace. Um, so all of our plans are going to this other payer. And that other payer's rate was less than 50% of what that first payer's rate was.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

So now you said 80 to 90 percent.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Wow. So imagine like our entire forecast, our entire model was built on a rate that 80% of these patients have, and now that rate is more than cut in half. So, how do we operate this facility now for literally half half the amount? And this isn't a, you know, again, this isn't an out-of-network high-end, you know, private pay facility. This is an in-network, you know, pretty much like a Medicaid facility where every dollar needs to be very strategically spent and allocated to make the facility operate and sustain. So, you know, those are the challenges we're up against. It's it's less about, you know, in especially in the Medicaid and network markets, the acquisition piece, although that is challenging. Um, a lot of times it's how do we just even operate this thing sustainably, even if even if we all of our beds were full, how do we operate this thing sustainably?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Um What'd you do?

SPEAKER_01 10:36

We had to look at the levels of care we're offering. We had to look at, you know, for example, you know, if if we're only operating detox res, right, we're capturing a small uh window into this person's treatment journey, bringing another patient in the door has its own cost per acquisition, right, to tackle on there. So if we didn't want to assume that cost per acquisition and we needed to grow revenue, well, what what do we do? So can we add on more levels of care? Can we, you know, have that person continue on to outpatient treatment? Can we open up a um a you know sister mental health company because most people who are leaving addiction treatment are living with mental health diagnosis and then offer a mental health solution for those patients as well? You know, so how can we, you know, get more from the same patient population? And how do we look at our operations? Right. Like, you know, we don't want to sacrifice care, but you know, can we do with a group size of 25 people instead of 20 people? You know, like and going step by step and doing that cost analysis across the board. Um, again, our North Star, we're not taking away from the client experience. So we we would rather, I think, on you know, we'd rather close down a location than give bad treatment and and have people leaving harmed. Um but like luckily for us, we haven't had to make that decision and we've we've found ways to make it work. So um, yeah, you know, I I think going back to two what you know what you were saying, um in those locations where margins are slimmer, like they don't operate on an acquisition standpoint, this uh or an acquisition strategy the same way that an out-in-owk location does, right? So like in some of my markets, I can have a double-digit, you know, CPA that's sustainable. In um a location where my rates are Medicaid rates and my in-network rates are getting slashed in half, like I can't spend thousands of dollars on a cost per acquisition, you know, on Google Ads to get someone in the door. So um that's another challenge is okay, you know, if we don't have the ability to, you know, use a good percentage of the channels that we're comfortable using in other markets, how do we do patient acquisition? So it's operation efficiency, it's you know, can we grow lifetime value from the patients who are coming in the care and at the same time offer them services that are going to help them in their recovery journey? And can we rebuild our marketing channel blended mix to have a fit rate with that market? That's a long answer.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

But yeah, I mean, but it's gold, right? So it's if you're trying to be flexible in a very changing market and prices, inflation is going up, but you're not seeing the same thing happen with rates, then you have to again have centralized processes, right? So that you can get some costs back that way. You need to diversify the way in which you're getting folks and also figure out other ways to serve the same person because the real challenge is the acquisition. And okay, once we've once we've got somebody within our care, how do we help them longer? How do we help them on more part parts of their journey? So you you don't have to continue that cycle with as much volume, but you still need volume, right? You're gonna need more beds if you're using that and have good business efficiency. It's like it's like when people say, What's the best way to get in shape? It's it's the things that are not complicated. It's hey, eat well and move your body, but it's hard to do, right? DJ, there's a story about somebody who went through your program and then got a tattoo of the program before you did a rebrand. Could you tell us that?

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yes. So six months before we did a pretty extensive rebrand exercise, somebody sent me a post of an alumni who had a very large tattoo of the Plymouth House logo. I believe it was on their calf. Um, and that was a real discussion point on do we want to mess with that level of brand loyalty and commitment as we go through this process? Um, then it really was a discussion point is like how do we deal with you know, messing with a location and a brand and a name and a logo that somebody attributes to saving their lives. Like, you know, that's that's something to be loyal about to a brand. So that was actually a lot of the the reasoning behind doing the co-brand route for a lot of those legacy locations. So, you know, if it had uh existing equity, like people had tattoos of it on their bodies, um, then we did a co-brand, Guardian Recovery Plymouth House. Uh if it was a newer location, maybe like Outpatient, where people like, you know, still got great treatment, but they didn't really feel like this strong bond, we call it, you know, just Guardian Recovery New Brunswick Counseling Center or Hoboken Counseling Center, something like that, where we really put the Guardian brand front and center. So, but yeah, it was just it was like so uh so timely that I got sent that post right as we're talking about brand and and how we should be thinking about this. But um yeah, it was definitely uh something to contend with when we went down that exercise.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

Yeah, and you kept the name, but you changed the logo, and so now this person's tattoo is vintage. Right. Okay, so it's the exclusive one. So we're already got great takeaways for this podcast. If somebody has a tattoo of your logo and name on their body, consider the rebrand uh consequences. That's right. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Um DJ Tell or offer free cover-ups. So we've been talking a lot about Guardian as the organization, but let's backtrack a little bit and talk about you. You came in as like a digital marketing director, but but what led you to that point to be able to like come on to Guardian and help support them?

SPEAKER_01 16:55

I'm in recovery. So this year will be, well, this year was 14 years.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

So congratulations. Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Um, I was I was a product of good treatment myself. So I came to South Florida where Guardian is is headquartered in uh 2012, got got clean, and you know, did a couple different jobs here and there, just you know, in that time, like if you were living in Florida, you were probably working at a telemarketing place, like selling ADT or something that was like really not exciting. So, you know, normal recovery jobs. And then I found my way, um, luckily enough, because I had some telemarketing experience for like five months into working at a treatment center doing their emissions. Um, and that I really, I really loved. You know, I was like, okay, this is something that like I enjoy. Um, I like the work we do. I like talking to people about recovery and treatment. And that really gave me like the first exposure to like how the treatment process works from the business side. In that first treatment center, it was like a startup, it was you know founded and funded by some like private equity guys out of out of New York. The treatment center didn't last, but like I learned a lot. And um I was always a techie guy, like I love technology. I I like just I love anything techie. So like as I was doing admissions there, I was like, you know, DJ, why don't you do our IT? You know, can you like reset the modem? And then can you like do all these IT things? And then like eventually I was also the IT guy. And then from there, it was like, what about websites? You ever built a website before? Because our website's not really working, and like, you know, you know how to reset the modem. Maybe you can can fix the website. And um yeah, I I just started learning on my own, you know, just just YouTube videos and you know, how to build a WordPress website and how to do this and how to do that, how to make a Google Ads campaign. And that organization, um I just started learning as much as I could about digital marketing and I really, really loved it. Um, I say this a lot, like I really like puzzles. Marketing is a lot of puzzles. Um and yeah, I I was thrown into the fire. Like substance use disorder, addiction treatment marketing, especially in South Florida, like it is cutthroat, thunderdome. Yeah, it is like the Mad Max style, like most competitive, the most competitive market. So I uh immediately was like thrown into the fire, which was good though, because like I I learned digital marketing in probably one of the toughest industries that exist. So I learned like to be really, really strategic with every dollar that was spent, every decision that was made ultimately from that organization. Um when I closed down, it was like my baby. But by the end, I was like, I had done the website, I had run all of our campaigns, I had built the call center flow, we had started building a CRM. Like I'd done all this stuff there. Heart was broken when it closed down. Um, I actually did my own like, you know, freelance, you know, website stuff for a little bit. And um I was kind of like opposed to going back to treatment because I was like, oh, I'm like so, I was so sad that like everything I built kind of like went away. Um and uh you know, kind of like I forget the Mafia movie was like, you know, just when I thought I was out, you know, they pumped it back in.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Pull me back in.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Um, there's a treatment center in in Florida that like you know was doing really well. And like their one of their like HR recruiter people found me and they were like, just come talk to us, meet with us. And like the offer was good. So I went and I worked there for a little bit. And um, this is a funny story. So this place that I was working at, probably like an hour and a half drive from my house, so which is like a decent commute. Um, so an hour and a half there, hour and half back. I I was doing good, you know, the place was was doing great. Um and the guys from Guardian, through a friend, like reached out to me and I was like, you know, guys, like I'm kind of happy where I'm at. Like, you know, it's it's kind of going smooth here. Um they're like, no, no, no, just come come meet with us, come meet with us, come talk to us. Um, and I was like, all right, where are you guys at? And they sent me the address. And it was like from where I was living at the time, the condo, I could like see the building, like it was walkable. And I was like, oh man, I was like, I was like, all right, I'll come meet with you guys. So I went in there on a Saturday and I met the, you know, I met Josh and Isaiah and a couple of the other team members there. And we clicked right away. I was like, you know, these guys, they really believe in good treatment, like their hearts in the right place. Um, they're smart, you know, they have good goals. Um, I can, you know, ride a scooter to work if I want to, which I did do for a little bit. So I took the job of guardian, and yeah, it was kind of history from there. You know, it was just self taught at the first treatment place, you know, doing my own thing, which was cool because I got to learn a bunch of different industries outside of treatment, learn some more stuff in some other areas, go back to another like national treatment provider, work there for a little bit, and then ultimately, you know, take Guardian from really what was all of a BD play. Guardian really didn't have anything digital to you know, what. It is now where we're about 30%, 20 to 30% monthly admissions digital. We do about 11 to 1200 admissions a month, like brand new people who have never been to Guardian before. So yeah, it's been a journey.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Yeah. Wow. When you think back at starting with admissions and listening to people who are calling in, what do you think about people in marketing starting there and spending time listening to calls and spending time getting that voice of customer data? Do you feel like that was a kind of a foundational thing for you understanding the marketing side?

SPEAKER_01 22:36

I think that my own recovery experience and connection to like people in recovery and understanding that side of it on that intimate level is not a requirement, but it definitely is a leg up. I think. I think working in admissions and hearing what people are asking, what they're looking for, what they're seeking, um, the questions they have. Like I'm able to get in the headspace of someone seeking treatment or their family, because I mean that is a piece that I think that I didn't have just as someone in recovery, like what's the family going through, which half the time that's who's really making the treatment uh search and and and the treatment decision. So I think having those conversations with family helped me put myself in all of those head spaces when I'm building a marketing campaign or I'm building a page and I'm understanding what needs to be prioritized in what order, what's most important, what needs to be said, what does like what probably doesn't need to be front and center? That definitely, definitely helped. And like a lot of times the questions are different. Like from a family or a client, you know, the client may be like, Well, what am I doing every day? Can I have my cell phone? You know, uh can I smoke? Can I smoke? Right. And the family's like, how much is this gonna cost? Like, this is you know, my son's 10th triumph and treatment. Is this gonna be the last one? Like, what's your outcomes? Like, like, um, what's the aftercare plan? You know, things that the client may not be thinking while they're in active addiction. So admissions, I think, definitely helps there a hundred percent. Cause like I've had those conversations and I could answer those questions maybe on the website or on the landing page or on the marketing collateral, even before someone calls in and then give them that reassurance that like these people know what I'm going through and gives them like that motivation to call.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Yeah, absolutely. When I first arrived in this industry, that was what I spent the most time doing was listening to calls. And I'm very glad that I did because it completely changed the way that I thought about it. You know, I came from the fitness industry, and there's a different set of problems that are connected with that. And when you hear the voices, and it's not a user or not a patient, but it's a human on the other line, man, it really changes the way that you show up. And it also inspires you to figure out how to solve these kinds of puzzles when things come on, because you now have a name attached to a story and to like a user journey or a a person's journey.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

I think back when I was working in missions, this was a small, small treatment center. So like it was really where like if I was on the phone with someone and they were local, like I was getting in a tech van to like drive to this person's house and like do the intervention, you know, and get that person into treatment. So like that, that experience I think really, really helped because like it that there was no disconnect. Like I knew exactly what it took to like sit down with somebody, talk to them about treatment, get them in board, and like get them in the front door. So extending that to like the first touch we had with them when they see us show up and again in marketing collateral online or wherever, like it matters.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Yeah, and you talked about writing a call flow script for your admissions team. How do you do that if you haven't spent time bringing people into treatment? Yeah. If you haven't spent time getting punched in the face over and over again doing some sort of telemarketing and understanding the complexities of talking to somebody over the phone who maybe doesn't want to talk to you or doesn't want, is unsure about this. So I I get it. I think that makes a lot of sense. When when you think about the industry right now and where we're at in this current time, what do you feel like is overrated? And what do you feel like is underrated when it comes to um treatment centers?

SPEAKER_01 26:20

I've seen this a lot of, especially on the smaller operator side. So someone um entrepreneurial, usually product of treatment, you know, in recovery themselves. I'm gonna open a treatment center. Awesome, great. We need more treatment. Um, as long as your heart's in the right place, you're gonna build a great program. Well, like do it, you know, great. I think what they see is they try and follow the playbook of like a guardian or another large facility that may have budgets to, you know, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google Ads or on different marketing channels, recovery.com, whatever. Um, and think that they're gonna fill their facility with like a single channel strategy. Um, I think Google is probably the biggest one you hear of. It's just like, oh yeah, we're gonna open up, we're gonna run, you know, PBC campaign on Google Ads, and we're gonna fill this place up. Well, if that's your strategy, like I I'm sorry for you because it's not gonna work long term. I think it's a good, a good bridge if you don't have the alumni uh census for you know, follow-up and alumni readmissions when they have it, if you don't have the brand established locally where you're gonna have people in the community to reach out, if you don't have the business development relationships, they're gonna start referring into you know, paid media strategy is a good bridge. But ultimately the goal should be to move away for that. Like our strategy is always how do we reallocate budget to the cost per acquisition, the lowest cost practices and channels that from a business standpoint generate the highest lifetime value, right? So um alumni referrals, hands down, always the best one, right? Like when an alumni refers to us, the cost per acquisition is essentially zero, just whatever we invest into our alumni program, which the return is amazing, right? It helps people, helps us. Um, and those people stay in treatment, they stay because they've had, you know, a friend tell them how good their experience is, and that really works. You're not gonna have that day one, and that that's a reality. Um, but I would say is like overrated is just thinking that Google Ads is gonna solve all your problems. Um underrated, thinking about lifetime value as the true focus of your marketing efforts, not just cost per acquisition. So I think the fallacy I used to think about a lot of was like just where's the lowest CPA, right? So what's costing us the less to get someone the door and let's just focus on optimizing that, which is not wrong, um but it's short-sighted. So what we built at Guardian, um which was through a really expensive Power BI build-out, which the reality is with how quickly AI is moving, probably could be built out for pennies in the next couple months, just using, you know, a really good LLM to set the stuff up for you. But understanding what admissions to which are your facilities from what channels are actually generating the highest lifetime value. You know, if someone's if BD on paper looks great because they're getting a lot of referrals in, but maybe those are like two-way referral relationships with partners and they're coming to you just for a detox and then going back to them for res and PHP and IOP, um, that CPA may look great, but maybe because of how I don't know, uh out-of-pockets deductibles, like your revenue from that client is probably really, really low. And even though the CPA looks great, it may not be what's going to really grow your organization revenue the way you want. Um, versus, you know, you may look at like a Google Ad CPA or even recovery.com or any paid source, and maybe that CPA looks higher, but this is a client who's coming to you for the full continuum, and then they're now committed to you as alumni because they had a longer stay with you, and that's your starting of your alumni network to build either a readmission or a referred by alumni. Um, and maybe you you have ancillary services like mental health support or other medical support, and you know, now you have someone who you're like a more um multi-touch healthcare provider, not just like a single location, single instance of care provider. And even though the cost on the front end may look really high for cost per acquisition, you know, the revenue is tenfold on the other side. So the benefit of that too is it's better for the client. Like the people who are coming into our care, they want to stay with us for the full continuum. You know, most of the people who are leaving addiction treatment are leaving with a mental health diagnosis and need medication management from a provider who understands addiction, who isn't going to prescribe them a narcotic or something. Like so, you know, they want an alumni program because that's how they stay connected to the community and helps us. So the good thing is, is we never find that our business goals and our client commitment need to be in conflict. In fact, more often than not, they're in concert. Um and that was a really long way to answer that question. I'm realizing now, but but I think that's that's it, is is like don't just look at the CPA as the the end all be all of you know what's what's driving it. It's really what your LTV looks like. And that should be how you're establishing your marketing strategy.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Yeah. So overrated, relying on one cost per acquisition strategy, probably Google. Yep. Unless you're new to a market, you're starting out, you're trying to build up your alumni and your business development, and you don't have any credibility within the market yet. And then underrated is not focusing on customer LTV, lifetime value, and instead just thinking about CPA, which can be short-sighted, and also make you lose track of the other ways in which you can uh help a client the most, right? Whether it's outpatient services or a different level of care or whatever, right? Another another track like a mental health to substance use or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

So what advice, you've been in this now for over a decade, right? What what advice would you did you get early on that actually turned out to be wrong when you think about look back at your career in treatment center marketing? What what ended up being wrong?

SPEAKER_01 32:27

So um as a digital guy, which I think still think of myself as a digital marketing guy.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Restarting that modem.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Yeah, exactly. That's that's it. All from from unplugging that thing and plugging back in. Um I think I was um biased into the stability of the digital channel uh away from business development. So I always in the beginning saw business development as the unstable channel. You know, these are people. People have you know emotions and they're sometimes unstable. And, you know, managing people is hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my professional career. Um, so I always saw digital as the stability, right? Like that was the bedrock, is like if we just grow this and this thing like is firing at 100%, we don't have to worry about like the the the people on the business development and the referral side, because like that scared me because like I couldn't manage those with the same like scientific strategy that I can manage this one, right? Um but that was really wrong, and it was wrong for a number of reasons. One, um that the stable digital channel is not stable, right? That's that's something with the entrance of AI, uh, that has been a huge disruption to the digital channel, right? So like Guardian in October last year probably dipped 20, 30 percent on organic admissions, whereas Google went from uh featured snippets over to AI overviews, like the click-through rates for us just plummeted. Um if someone's going to Google at all, maybe they're going to ChatGPT, maybe they're going to Cloud. And like if you think someone's gonna be having a conversation with Claude and they're gonna ask a question about recovery and in your cited, they're gonna click over to your site. I don't think that's gonna work. I don't think that's a short-sighted strategy. I think you have to really think how else are you gonna get in front of people online. Anyway, I think that what we what what ultimately happened was our business development folks was a stable channel. As we're seeing all these disruptions and changes in digital and how search works and um what AI is doing to digital marketing, we've doubled down on business development. Um two years ago, I think our business development count was maybe 10 to 15 reps, right? Like 35, I think, getting close to 40. I'm fine with that number going to 100. Um because I think if I what I found is if I build a good enough um first, you have to have someone leading that team. We have someone in his organization, Ross Bacon, I'll give him a shout-out. Best thing that ever happened to Guardian Recovery, business development. You know, guy's amazing, handles the team per like everything you would want from a sales and business development team leader. That's what that's what he is. Um, and what I found is like if you have that that person, you can build a scalable, replicable, and like efficient strategy to get you know uh a sales cycle and and customer development, customer journey built out for your BD folks developing referral sources, like you can make that just as sustainable, if not more stable, as the digital channel that used to think was the bedrock. So I think that was it. It's my my my the fallacy in the beginning was like digital is like concrete and this is wishy-washy. Um, minute, it's it's almost the opposite now. You know, digital. I'm like, well, I don't know what tomorrow's gonna happen because I don't know what is gonna happen to Google search. I don't know what's gonna happen. Is the AI models? Are they gonna enable ads? How's that ad gonna work? How are they gonna do the recommendation engine for local? All those unknowns, right? And this I know, hey, this is a playbook. Like I know who our referral sources are. All I got to do is get really, really quality, good lead list to RBD folks. I had to give them a good system to develop those accounts. I have to give them a playbook to develop those relationships. And like without fail, a certain percentage of those are going to refer to Guardian. And like I can bank on that.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

So yeah, that's uh so you you overcame some of your own digital biases to be able to say, actually, let me rethink the stability of business development so that I'm I'm more realistic about it, right? That's I think that's hard to do, especially when your skill set is aligned with one acquisition strategy to say, let me broaden my worldview. So hats off to you for that.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

It was it was actually the other thing I would say too, is it was actually fun. And it's been fun because like I've been doing this for a decade, right? Like, I know this, like even though things change, like foundationally it's it's a lot of the same. Uh with BD, what we noticed was like no one, not no one, but there's few operators in our space that run BD, like a real B2B sales team that you would see in other industries, right? Like pharmaceuticals or SaaS or like these guys have like concrete like account development strategies and follow-ups and automations and like really, really good CRM build-outs. Like, I haven't really seen a lot of people in our space have that. So like it was fun because I feel like it was a big undeveloped opportunity, and that's what we've been doing at Guardian. It's like, let's just build like the best B2B system, like at any like, forget about in our industry, just in general. Let's build like a world-class B2B system. And that's actually been fun because it's been something different, you know.

SPEAKER_00 37:54

So yeah. Yeah. When I first got into treatment center marketing, I felt like I'd entered a time machine because so many things that have been tried and tested in other industries were absent.

SPEAKER_02 38:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Um, within within our, especially within content marketing, uh, especially with a lot of stuff I was seeing in digital marketing, I was like, why don't you just do this? This is what other organizations have been doing. And you found that too. You're right. Like the pharmaceutical drug pharmaceutical drug reps and stuff have an extensive BD thing and they it works for them, but they also have really good processes. When you think about the future of behavioral health, you know, what do you think behavioral health leaders should be thinking more about for the future?

SPEAKER_01 38:41

Um I think what is really cool with the way technology is developing is we can get insights into business operations, client outcomes, like KPI reporting like instantaneously and it can be established now for pennies, like literal pennies. You you can develop systems. And um, you know, 10 years ago, we were looking at reports, you know, a month and three years, financial reports three months ago. Like I can tell you today, based on who's in our census, what our expected rev is going to be, what our cost is gonna be, um, what our payer mix is, you know, a certain location. Like I I can't operate now without those systems. So I think the future is on an operational side. Like you need to, if you're not investing in a BD or a BI system build-out where you have real-time access to the data in a way that's easily manipulatable and like synced across your systems, and you're gonna lag behind, right? If your EMR, your CRM, your your Rev cycle management system, um, you know, your accounting system aren't in you know, feeding into a data lake or at least some system where they're queryable by an AI that you can get real insights from, like you need to be doing that yesterday. Um, the beauty is like when Guardians set down on the path to like build these systems a few years ago, it was very expensive, right? Hundreds of thousands of dollars of development hours building a data lake, you know, making identifiers across systems, you know, pulling in data sources with MCP connectors and AI, like that's gonna cost like nothing to build it. And some of it you can build now, like very, very easily. So I would say on the business operation side, like that's where it's gonna be is like you need to be able to have real-time intelligence to keep up with the market. Um on the client side, and I'll just I'll keep on, I guess, on the AI side, which is you know, we have started to layer on uh AI, you know, clinical uh enhancements for our clinicians, not on yet like really choosing a patient uh treatment journey or or or clinical recommendations, but more on the clinician like optimization time piece. So, you know, ambient note-taking, transcription, you know, uh note form like note completion, all that kind of stuff, what that helps is you know the clinicians didn't get into the business to like write, you know, five hours a note to appease an insurer who just wants to deny, right? Like they got this to on this to help people. So if we can help ease the burden of the documentation piece and they can spend more time with a client, like that's gonna be huge. Like if it's 30 minutes more a day, or even 15 minutes more a day, they get to spend one-on-one with the patient as opposed to spending the time on notes, you know, that's a real win. Like that might be another three, four hours of time, you know, in that person's treatment journey of one-on-one therapy that makes a real difference in their outcomes. Um we have built a pretty cool system too, which I think this is the future of like predictive interventions when people leave treatment. So we um we've taken like our EMR, our CRM, we do outcome studies and we put those all into like a basically a predictive um AI to say, like, based on what someone reports on their outcome study, where they went to treatment, what they struggled with, what their treatment progress was like, who needs the most high touch follow-up on the alumni side. And that's what uh dictates the cadence for our human like alumni reps to call on people and check on them and their families. You know, so if someone's scoring a 10, you know, maybe they were a multiple treatment episode opiate user who, you know, left AMA and you know reported really, really negative results in the last three outcome studies, it's gonna score them as a level 10. Like this person's probably headed to trouble. So we're calling them every day, we're calling their family. And maybe someone who'd never went to treatment before, did their treatment, was a star person in treatments, doing aftercare, you know, hitting all their milestones. Maybe they're on a once every month cadence for follow-up because we know they're stable. The win for us as an organization is we can help someone get back in the treatment. It's another revenue opportunity, which is great for us. But even better for the client, like if we can intervene before something terrible happens, like that's a great outcome.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

Yeah, they're letting you know they're struggling without having to call.

SPEAKER_01 43:33

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

And it kind of feeds into your first point. It's about having systems set up so that you can actually capture that data and make good decisions with it. Um, because if you weren't tracking post-treatment outcomes, then and you didn't have their in-treatment outcomes, then you wouldn't know if they're struggling comparatively. That was a lot of sense. Uh this has been an extremely helpful conversation, super dense. I think anybody would uh learn a lot from not just Guardian story, but your own story. Thanks so much for joining me on Recovery Reach.

SPEAKER_01 44:04

Thanks, Lynn. Appreciate it.