Beyond Hormones, The Business of Wellness
Running a hormone or wellness clinic is rewarding — but let’s be honest, it can also feel overwhelming. That’s where Beyond Hormones: The Business of Wellness comes in.
Hosted by Jody Layne, co-founder of Accelerated Medical Practices, this podcast is here to help providers build thriving, profitable practices without losing sight of why they started. With over a decade of experience in marketing, sales, and business development — and after working with hundreds of clinics — Jody brings both expertise and encouragement to every episode.
You’ll hear candid conversations with clinic owners who’ve been in your shoes, expert interviews with professionals who share tools and wisdom to help your practice grow, and Jody’s own insights from years of working behind the scenes in the hormone industry.
If you’re ready to feel more confident, more supported, and a little less alone on the journey of business ownership, you’re in the right place.
Beyond Hormones, The Business of Wellness
Ep #71 - The 90-Day Rule That Actually Grows Your Hormone Clinic
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Ever looked at your marketing spend and thought, "What am I even doing this for?" Jody has too. More often than you'd think. Even after thirty years as a marketer and a lifetime as an entrepreneur.
In this solo Monday episode, Jody breaks down the single biggest mistake she sees hormone and functional medicine practice owners make with their marketing: switching tactics before they've had time to work. She walks through why consistency — not the "right" tactic — is what actually separates thriving practices from ones running on fumes, how to track the KPIs that tell you whether to stay the course or make a small adjustment, and three completely free marketing actions you can start this week using nothing but the questions your own patients ask you every day.
Jody also shares a story from her twenties running fundraising for the Muscular Dystrophy Association — and a "Thursday clinic" ritual that taught her something about staying connected to purpose that she still uses to run Accelerated Medical Practices decades later.
This one's for you if you've ever tried something in your marketing, given up after a few weeks, and decided it "just doesn't work for your practice." Jody thinks it wasn't the tactic. It was the timeline.
Topics covered:
- Why tactic-hopping is the #1 marketing mistake hormone clinic owners make
- The mindset shift needed to invest in marketing before you see a return
- How to track KPIs without a marketing degree (or a ton of extra time)
- Three free, no-budget marketing actions you can start this week
- Why your lead follow-up sequence should run six months, not six touches
- Jodys Muscular Dystrophy Association story and the "Thursday clinic" ritual
- A weekly journaling exercise to reconnect with why you started your clinic
- The marathon mindset for building a business that lasts
Want more frameworks like this? Join The Accelerator: https://accelerator.acceleratedmedicalpractices.com/
Connect with Jody:
https://acceleratedmedicalpractices.com/
https://www.instagram.com/acceleratedmedicalpractices/
https://www.facebook.com/acceleratedmedicalpractices
https://www.linkedin.com/company/accelerated-medical-practices/
This podcast is powered by Accelerated Medical Practices, where we believe hormone and wellness care should be both life-changing and profitable. If you own or run a clinic and are interested in being a guest on the show, please complete the form here and let's connect! Or email Jody at Jody@AcceleratedMedicalPractices.com.
🚀 Grow your clinic with proven systems at AcceleratedMedicalPractices.com
For more Insights and Tips on Growing Your Hormone Clinic, subscribe to THE AMP Report sent every other Thursday and follow us on social media for "almost" daily tips!
Last BUT DEFINITELY NOT LEAST, is your looking for the fast track to growing your clinic, check out The AMP Accelerator - A free membership site filled with on demand course content to allow you to learn what you need, when yo...
Have you ever thought to yourself, what am I doing? Why am I bothering with this business? I mean, I work so hard, I'm not getting the results that I want. If you've ever thought some version of that, then stick around for this episode because I made it for you. And I'm actually going to be talking to myself in this episode too, because I struggle with those same thoughts just like you. Welcome to Beyond Hormones, the Business of Wellness, the podcast for hormone and functional medicine providers who want a thriving, predictably profitable practice and maybe a little less stress along the way. Hi, I'm your host, Jody Lane, and I've worked with lots of clinics in marketing, sales, and business development, and I have seen what works and what doesn't. And here's what I believe hormone and wellness care should be available to everyone who wants it. And while providers know the medicine, many struggle with the business side of their cash practice. And that's where I come in. See, this podcast is here to share real strategies, real stories, things you can implement in your practice right away. So I am so glad you're here. Come on, let's go. Hey guys, welcome to Beyond Hormones, the Business of Wellness podcast. I'm Jodi, and let me start off by saying if you're frustrated with your clinic, more specifically with marketing your clinic, then I want to talk to you. Listen, nobody fails because they picked the wrong marketing tactic. They fail because they quit on the right one. And the only thing strong enough to keep you from quitting is remembering why you started in the first place. Now, if this doesn't make sense to you yet, stick with me because I'm going to make it make sense and I'm going to show you how to use this philosophy to grow a really strong clinic. I'm going to spend the first half of this episode proving that to you with numbers, with tactics, with KPIs, with the actual mechanics of why quitting early is the single most expensive thing you can do in your marketing. And then I'm going to spend the second half telling you where you can get the strength not to quit. Because the tactics alone are not going to get you there. I learned that the hard way. In a job when I first started my career that had nothing to do with marketing, nothing to do with hormones at all. Now, after almost three decades of doing this, here's the one thing I know for sure. The difference between a business that's thriving and one that's running on fumes almost never comes down to which tactic you picked. It comes down to consistency. If you are consistently taking the right actions to grow your business, you will eventually become successful. Now, a caveat here: if you're doing all the wrong things, consistency is not going to save you. But if you are intentional, you're doing the research, you're making the plans, you're executing on them, you're working with professionals, and you're staying consistent, you are going to get there. As entrepreneurs, I mean, honestly, just as successful people in general, we want results faster than most actions can deliver them. And nowhere does this show up more than in marketing your business. So after all this time that I've been doing marketing, I have also run a clinic. So I know that out of everything you do to manage your practice, marketing just might be the most frustrating one because there are a hundred tactics to choose from. There are a million people online telling you with total confidence that their way is the right way. And it isn't always for you. So marketing can feel like a moving target. And a lot of practice owners respond by just not doing it. That is the kiss of death. If you don't market your business, you will not grow. Plain and simple. You might survive, you'll get a patient, you lose a patient. You get a patient, you lose a patient. This could go on for years. But eventually, you will suffer for not marketing. Now, if your goal is to just work a couple of days a week and cap your roster at 200 patients, then you know, word of mouth might be genuinely enough for you. But if you are someone that wants to grow, especially if seven figures or more is the goal, marketing is not optional. And if you have somehow grown without it, that could be the worst thing that's ever happened to you because now you believe you don't even need it. For all you longtime listeners, you know how much I love working in the hormone clinic space. And I want every one of you to have the best clinic possible. So if it's okay with you, I'm gonna pause this podcast for just one quick second and share quickly about a product of ours that I think is going to make a real difference for you. And it's called Practice Automation System. Now, first I want to share something that I had to learn the hard way. If you're struggling to get patients, your marketing probably isn't the problem. It's what happens between when someone raises their hand interested and actually gets something on the phone. That's where the problem lies. That's where most clinics are losing money and they don't even know it. Does this sound familiar? A lead fills out your form, your front desk is busy taking care of patients, so they get back to them in a few hours or maybe the next day. They call the lead once, they don't pick up, so they leave a voicemail and they move on. The person never calls back, the lead goes cold, and your ad spend just vanishes into thin air. Practice Automation System is the solution that we built to solve this exact issue. Within five minutes of someone filling out a form, the leak gets a text. They get nurtured by email for as long as it takes, and your team gets assigned follow-up tasks based on how much time has gone by so that they never let anything fall through the cracks. We have used this foundation of this system inside my own clinic, where we grew to over a thousand patients, four providers, and 23 staff members in just seven years. So you know what? We know this works because we've used it ourselves and we have helped clinics all over the country roll it out too. To find out if Practice Automation System is the right fit for your clinic, just go to accelerated medical practices.com slash automation. That's acceleratedmedicalpractices.com slash automation. All right, let's get back to the show. Now, marketing does three things for you that are really important to keep in mind. First, it builds your pipeline for potential new patients. Second, it keeps your existing patients confident and loyal so they don't leave you. And three, it builds your brand as a whole. Before we go any further, just I want you to sit for something, sit with something for a second. Be honest with yourself. Are you actually avoiding marketing because it's frustrating? Or are you doing a little bit of everything and calling it I've tried it all when really none of it got the runway to work? Think about it. Here's the biggest mistake I see slipping from one tactic to another before the tactic has had a chance to work. If you don't give a tactic, a quiz, a webinar, whatever, enough time to build momentum, it's not going to produce results. And that is the exact definition of frustration. Picture this. You go all in on a webinar. You create it, you design it, you promote it, you run it three times, you get zero patience. So what do you do? You scrap it. You pivot to a lead magnet, you try an ebook, you build the landing page, you run ads for a couple of months, nothing. So you scrap that too. Then you try happy hours every Thursday for a month. Also nothing scrapped. Here's my point: each one of those tactics probably would have worked. A matter of fact, they would have worked, but you have to run it longer than you're comfortable with. Being bored with a tactic is not a valid reason to abandon it. As a matter of fact, getting bored with a tactic is actually more like a sign that it's about to start working. Something that goes hand in hand with consistency is your willingness to invest. I hear this all the time from providers who come to us completely stuck. They have no growth, no clarity, no idea what to do. And then they tell me, I have no money to spend. And look, I get it. If you genuinely have nothing to invest in your business, you don't. But you're in a hard spot because growth takes some kind of an investment. It's either money or time or both. So when money is an issue, you have to invest your time. You've got to make phone calls, you have to speak at events, you have to ask every single patient for a referral. You can grow on a dime, but you've got to get creative, get in action, and figure out how you're going to manage your patient load and your grassroots marketing. Now, I know I'm not telling you anything that you don't know, but it's important that we pay attention to it. Now, here's something that I see also very, very often. It's providers who do have something to invest and they don't see the results because they spread their investment across a dozen abandoned tactics instead of committing it to one. Let's just say that you put $500 into a webinar and the webinar adds and you get nothing. So you move that $500 over to that ebook campaign for a couple of months and you get very, very little back. Oh, and by the way, $500 is probably too small a budget anyway to steal real traction. But then you spent a few hundred more dollars into those happy hours. Now you've spent what, $1,500? And but you haven't actually gotten any result because you haven't spent enough time in one tactic to produce a return. All right, let's move on to something else that can truly make the difference between a campaign that kills and one that rocks. It's tracking. And yes, I know you don't have time. It's what I hear from everyone. I don't have time to do the metrics. You're the provider, you're the HR department, you're the payroll person, the operations manager, you're everything. And I get that. But listen to me, please, you can't afford to not make time. And it doesn't have to be hours. It's 30 minutes a month once you've set everything up. Think about it like this. All the times you spent money on marketing and you made a decision about it based on just one metric. Maybe that one metric was how many consults you got booked, or it was how many patients you signed up. And it cost you a lot of money because you had the chance to improve and you missed it because you didn't have visibility into what wasn't working. See, tracking is probably the single most important thing you can do to make sure that your marketing dollars aren't wasted. We call that tracking KPIs, key performance indicators. And all that means is just writing down somewhere, it could be in a notebook, what your tactic actually produced. Let me give you an example. Back to the webinars. Let's just say you're doing the webinars, you want to track your ad spend. How much did you spend? Your impressions, how many people saw it, your click-throughs, how many people clicked to get to the landing page, the webinar signups, the webinar show ups, and how many people booked a consult. If you're spending anything on a campaign, you want to know that it's performing. And every time you check your numbers, you're not looking for a 500% jump week over week. You're looking for which number is moving in the wrong direction and fixing that one thing. And then make a small change, not sweeping ones. If you overhaul everything at once, you're just not going to know which change actually moved the needle. So let's just say that your impressions are strong, but your click-throughs are weak. That's your headline or your landing page copy. Don't redesign the whole page, tweak the headline the first week, see what happens. Then tweak the button copy the next week, see what happens. Change the photo the week after. Small moves that you watch closely, but you've got to have those KPIs written down so that you can see how those minor little changes are changing the outcome. Now, if this sounds familiar, it is because it's the exact same principle that you use with a patient who has terrible sleep and sugar habit. You don't just tell them sleep more and eat cleaner. You have them track their sleep scores, their food logs, because it's incredibly easy to blow past 400 grams of sugar in a day without noticing. Marketing works the same way. You have to track it to fix it. So ask yourself honestly at this point in the episode, do you actually know your numbers on the tactics you're running right now? Or are you deciding whether to keep it or kill it purely based on a feeling? Now, I don't want you to walk away today with just a new mindset. I want you to walk away with something you can actually do to make some changes in your clinic. So here are three actions that will cost you zero dollars and will improve your marketing starting this week if you do it. All right, here's the first one. Grab a notebook, put it on your desk. Every time a patient asks you a question during an appointment about their hormones, their sleep, their body, their food, whatever, write it down. Don't write down repeats, just write down the questions and the unique questions that come in new. That list of questions is going to end up being your entire content calendar because the questions your patients ask are the same questions your prospective patients are typing into Google, Claude, and ChatGPT right now. All right, two. Once a week, answer one of those questions out loud into a voice memo on your phone. Walking your neighborhood, driving to work, whatever works. Get it transcribed and turn it into a Google My Business post. Google My Business is one of the most underused tools available to you and the one that can get you found faster than a lot of other tactics, and it won't cost you anything. And we like that, right? Not sure how to set it up. Okay, I got you. If you don't know how to set up your Google business or you don't know how to post, send me an email at Jody, J O D Y at accelerated medical practices.com. I have a cheat sheet that I use for my clients, and I will be happy to send it to you if you need help. Oh, and here's the bonus, by the way, for answering those questions online that most people don't know. It's also where the AI platforms like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are pulling answers from when your prospective patients are asking them the health questions. So instead of being frustrated with AI, feed it the information. If you can commit just 15 minutes a week, you are going to improve both your search visibility and your AI visibility. All right, here's number three. Take the same question that you just answered and repurpose it. Post it to your social. There's tools like Canva that literally give you the templates. You don't even have to be a graphic designer. It's a five-minute job and it's 100% free in Canva. And if you've got a list of patients or prospective patients, send out a newsletter and use those same QAs in your newsletters. Make it interesting to the people that want to open that newsletter. Don't worry about selling them anything. Don't worry about sharing the events. Just throw all of the informational educational content. And if you want to throw some kind of a sale or an event at the bottom, then go ahead and do that. Then I want you to do this every single week for the next three months. If you can just start there, you know what's going to happen? I hope you guessed it by listening to me rant on this on this episode. You will start to get consistent. And if you can keep that content consistency going, you will begin to see the fruits of your labor. It's going to be slow, but trust me, it will work. So take on the challenge. All right, let's talk about follow-up for just a minute. I have created a whole webinar about this called Why Leads Don't Convert. I go into way more depth about how you need to follow up with leads. And if you want to watch it, it's 100% free and you can watch it on demand at accelerated medical practices.com slash leads. But the bottom line from that webinar is this if you're running any kind of lead magnet, anything where someone gives you an email address or phone number for something in exchange, that's a lead magnet. Your follow-up sequence, if it only runs for a few weeks, it's not enough. People are giving up on leads far too soon. So say you're spending $45 per lead and you follow up six times over a couple of weeks. In a world where people are bombarded with marketing messages constantly, six touches is not going to be enough unless that person is literally ready to go right then and there. So I want you to sit down and I want you to write six months worth of follow-up messages. Yep. I said six months of follow-up messages to that original lead magnet. And then I want you to put that into place, drip those messages over the course of the next six months because you don't know when someone is going to be ready. They may have filled out something to get your ebook or watch your webinar, but they weren't really ready. And when they are ready, let's say they resurface four months later and you're not front of mind, they're going to start their search over again. You don't want that. What you want them to do is reach out to you. All right, let's talk about the part underneath all the tactics. What does it take to be someone who can sustain this kind of consistency? Even if you have an agency or a staff member handling your marketing, you're still the content driver. You're still the one who has to show up. So you really need to be committed. Let me tell you a story. In my early 20s, I worked for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I was a fundraiser in the Tampa Bay, Florida area. And I had a personal fundraising goal. I mean, it was like a real number of money that I had to raise and hit every single year. And it was a hard job. I had zero training. I had to get creative, sponsorships, community events, whatever I could come up with that would work. But every Thursday, part of my job was to go to the clinic that the money we raised supported. That clinic had these two doctors who closed their private practice one day a week to see muscular dystrophy patients for free. We had a donation closet filled with walkers and leg braces and chairs for whatever families needed. And my job on that Thursday was to call the patients back from the waiting room into the exam room and then sit with those families while they waited for the doctor and ask them what they needed and hear their stories. Now, as a 26-year-old, it was jarring. Moms were crying, stories of resilience and despair. And it was honestly the most motivating thing I've ever experienced to that point. I'd walk out of that clinic and I'd walk into the office the next morning ready to call another company and ask for another $1,000 because I then remembered exactly why I was doing this. So here's what I want you to do. At some point, you decided to open a hormone clinic. Maybe you were an ER physician, tired of only seeing people at the end of their road. Maybe you came straight out of medical school knowing that there was a better way. Whatever it was, you decided to do this for a reason. And it is human nature that buried in the day-to-day minutiae, you forget that reason. So I want you to build your own version of my Thursday clinics. Here's the exercise to try. Every Monday morning, get into the office 15 minutes early, before the office gets loud. Or do this at home if that's easier for you. But open up a journal and finish this sentence. I started my hormone clinic because some weeks you'll give an answer that's truly inspiring. Some weeks it won't. It doesn't matter. Just do this consistently every single Monday and just be present. Be present to why you started this in the first place. Your commitment to helping people, it's real. And it's very easy to lose sight of it when you're staring at an ad account that's spending money with nothing to show for it. There is no shame, by the way, in wanting to make money and wanting to help people at the same time. You get to want both. Now, if you have a staff, tell them what you're doing. Read your whys once in a while out loud at a team meeting. Get real, get authentic, share with them what's going on in your head. And you know what? Consider having them write their own, maybe monthly instead of weekly, but have them write down why they are in this industry? Why are they in this job when there are thousands of other jobs they could have? See, when you're present to your why, everything else you have to deal with becomes more palatable. Every frustration, every overwhelming task gets easier because you're doing it for a reason. All right, last thing I want to say. Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. I know it's cliche, but I'm actually a marathon runner, so it's very real to me. The six seconds of joy that I feel at the finish line are incredible. I won't pretend though, that's why I run. It's not. I run. For the consistency of doing it every single day, for the relationships that I've built with the people that I get to train with, for the feeling of checking the box that says, I did the miles I was supposed to that day. And if you are 100% focused only on the end result goal of your business, you're going to lose. Maybe not the goal itself, but the satisfaction of getting there. Every step in building your business has to bring you some joy, even the parts that you dread. Quarterly reviews with staff, sitting down with your marketing company while they explain why you spent more than you made, none of that is fun. But none of that is as fun as sitting across from a patient handing them a treatment plan that you know is going to change their life. But if you can connect a why to every one of those other tasks, let's take employee reviews, for example. The person across from you hearing your feedback, maybe they grew up never being told they did a good job. And now you telling them what they're doing right is a genuine turning point for them. Maybe the growth advice feels uncomfortable to deliver, but it's the thing that helps them improve their career for the next 20 years, wherever they end up. That comes back to you one way or another. Find the purpose in the parts that you don't love about running your business. That's what makes consistency sustainable. All right, before you go, here is exactly what I want you to do this week. Number one, start your patient question notebook today. Look, you get questions constantly from your patients. This is not going to be hard, but write down those questions every appointment. Two, record your first voice memo answer this week and turn it into a Google My Business and a social post. Three, if you have a lead magnet, block time this month to write six months of follow-up messages, not just three weeks worth. Four, this Monday, journal your I Started My Hormone Clinic because. And if you've got a team, I want you to read it to them. Have them keep you accountable for doing this work. Do the marketing work for the next three months before you decide it isn't working. Track it. Adjust in small pieces and remember why every single week. Look, I hope that you have enjoyed this episode. And I hope that listening to it, you get to take away just a little piece of advice or a small tactic that you can put into practice today that is going to make a major shift in your business. Thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions about how to do any of the things we shared with today, please reach out. I would love to meet you. See you on the next episode. Thank you for listening to Beyond Hormones, the business of wellness. I hope that you're walking away with fresh ideas and real strategies you can use to grow your practice with profit and purpose. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to follow the show so you never miss a conversation. And if something you heard today resonated with you, do me a favor, share this episode with a friend or colleague. It's one of the best ways you can support the show, and it might be exactly what they need to hear right now. If you want even more tools and support, go ahead and head over to accelerated medical practices.com. Until next time, keep doing the work that matters. Your patients need you, and I am cheering you along every step of the way.