Ep #74 - The 3 Hidden Leaks Costing You Patients While You're Still Growing

You can add ten new patients this month and still be losing ground. That's the uncomfortable truth Jody opens with in episode one of a brand-new six-part series on the marketing and sales gaps quietly draining revenue out of hormone and functional medicine clinics.

For thirty years, Jody's job has been telling business owners that more customers is the answer to slow growth. In this episode, she flips that script. Using the image of a leaky bucket — one hole for lead follow-up, one for patient experience, one for retention — she shows exactly how a clinic can spend more on marketing every month and still fail to grow, because the water is pouring right back out the bottom.

Jody pulls from real stories along the way, including a formative lesson from her mother's fax machine, the "date your patients" philosophy she borrowed from her own nineteen-year marriage, and the retention tactics — including a thirteen-touch patient automation and a monthly event called Wellness Matters — that she built at her own hormone clinic in Orlando.

This episode kicks off a new run of Thursday episodes dedicated to marketing, and it sets up everything that's coming: how to actually diagnose where your bucket is leaking, and what to do about each hole, one at a time.

Topics covered:
— Why "get more patients" is often the wrong answer to a growth problem
— The three follow-up categories most clinics fall into, and why the middle one doesn't work anymore
— A simple hour-long exercise to map your entire patient experience
— How to build a retention system that keeps patients for years, not months
— The real math behind patient lifetime value and word-of-mouth growth

Connect with Jody:
www.acceleratedmedicalpractices.com
https://www.instagram.com/acceleratedmedicalpractices
https://www.facebook.com/acceleratedmedicalpractices

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! 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

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 everybody, welcome back to Beyond Hormones, the business of wellness. I am Jodi, and today I want to start by challenging something that almost every one of you believes, probably down to your bones. And if I'm honest, it's something that I've spent the last 30 years believing and teaching to. Here it is. If your clinic isn't growing the way you want, you just need more patients, more leads, more ads, more referrals, more people booking that first call. And I look, I get it. I'm a marketer, so my entire career has been telling people the answer to more revenue is to get more customers. That's kind of my job. But here's something that I've been thinking about over the last several months, and I really want you to sit with over the next 20 minutes or so. But you can be bringing in tons of new patients every single month and still be losing ground. You could be losing prospects who almost said yes, or losing patients you already have. Definitely losing some time, maybe even losing capacity, and your ad spend keeps climbing while your calendar looks busy, but your bank account doesn't reflect it. So more patience is not always the answer. Sometimes it's not even part of the answer. All right, I want you to brace yourself because I'm about to hand you an analogy that is so overused in this business, but I promise that I'm gonna use it for a purpose. So just bear with me, even if you've heard it a thousand times. Because this is the fastest way that I know how to make my point land. All right, here we go. I want you to picture a bucket. You know where I'm going, right? With this bucket, there are three holes in it: one near the top, one in the middle, and one at the bottom. You can pour water in as fast as you want, but if those holes are big enough, the bucket is never gonna get full. Sound familiar? You could stand there exhausted, hose in hand, wondering why nothing is changing. When the answer was never pour faster or pour more. Yes, marketing is the hose. It's important. It creates the opportunity, it gets the water in the bucket, and you need that. But what happens to the water after it goes in the bucket is a completely different job. And I bet most of you listening to me today have never really sat down to think about what actually happens after the water goes in. So that's what we're gonna do. For the next six weeks on the Thursday version of this podcast, we're going to go deep into the marketing and sales gaps that are quietly costing your clinic hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you're gonna be talking about gaps that you probably haven't really looked at or sat down and thought about. Now, today's episode is number one, and we're gonna start with what I think is the biggest gap of all the belief that a growth problem is merely a problem of getting more patients. So let's go hole by hole. Three of them. And I want you to be honest with yourself as we go through this because no one's grading you, and you're only going to get the most value if you're truthful. Hole number one is what happens after the lead comes in. Now, here's the biggest mistake I see people make. Not just in wellness, but in marketing in general. Businesses want to shortcut the getting patients part. They buy the ad. Oh, it's always about the ad. They run the medicampaign, they build the referral program, whatever it is. And by the way, none of that is wrong. Those are legitimate lead generating tactics, and you need them. But here's the question: after the lead comes in, what actually happens? I think it falls into one of three categories based on all the people that I've been speaking to for the last, like, I don't know, 10, 12 years. I the first category is called the nothing category. The lead lands in an inbox and it's on somebody to just remember to follow up. Category two, it's the little bit category. And this is where probably most of you live. There's a form on your website, maybe an automated reply, hopefully a task gets created for someone to make a follow-up phone call and maybe a couple of drip emails go out afterwards. Now, five or seven years ago, that little bit actually worked really, really well. And I hate to be the one to say it, but it's true, it just doesn't work anymore. And here's where I want to stop and tell you a story that has, well, nothing to do with hormones at all, but stick with me a second because it does connect, I promise. My mother was a legal secretary back in the day at a law firm that did mostly real estate closings. I loved going to her office, was very invested in what she did. And I remember the day they got a fax machine. It was like a national holiday. She was thrilled. I mean, like genuinely giddy, because documents that used to take a day or more to arrive by courier would now show up instantly. Modern miracle, right? Space age technology. My mother at the cutting edge of 1980 something. What she didn't clock until it was way too late to go back was that the fax machine didn't actually make her life easier at all. It just meant everybody on the other end of every deal now expected things to move at fax machine speed. Closings that used to take a week or more started closing in two days. Her workload didn't shrink because the tool got faster. No, no, no. It multiplied because now speed was just the new normal, and everyone downstream adjusted their expectations to match it. That is exactly what has happened to all of us in 2026 with all the technology and especially with AI. Everything is faster and easier to do. So everyone is doing more of it all the time, which means your prospective patients' inbox, DMs, texts, and social feeds are buried. If you think two to five follow-up messages are gonna close the lead, I'm sorry to tell you, but you're just wrong. The only people that messages, those short amount of messages close were the people who were gonna say yes anyway. So here's category three. And I'm gonna give it a name here called the all-in category. This is the one that I want all of us to live in every day. Now, I've been in sales a long time, so there is an old saying that everyone's a yes until they're no. And I believe the same thing is true about marketing. Until somebody unsubscribes, they are a yes, or at the very least, a maybe, and you need to treat them that way. Here's what all in looks like. When someone opts into a lead magnet, let's say an ebook, your first five to eight follow-ups should be about that ebook. Highlight the parts they may have skipped. Tell them what inspired you to write it, stay in the world they signed up for. Then, if they don't convert into a consult, don't let them go. Move them into a long-term nurture sequence. We created one here at AMP. When I say we did, it's what we built inside of our practice automation system, which we created because after running my own hormone clinic and watching leads go cold in real time, we knew how important it was. So we created a six-month sequence built and refined from actual patients that we back at that clinic almost lost. Now the sequence is not daily, it's not even weekly, it's just steady. And the messaging isn't about the clinic at that point. It's about them, the cost of putting off their health, permission to focus on themselves so that they can take care of everyone else. Now I want you to do a quick gut check. Pull up your follow-up sequence right now in your head. Which category are you actually in? Is it nothing? Is it a little bit, or is it all in? All right, that's number one hole. And it's probably leaking the most water right now without you even noticing. But let's get into hole number two, and I'm gonna start with a question. Hey listeners, whether this is your first episode of Beyond Hormones or your 50th, I hope you can tell by now how much I love working in the hormone industry and sharing my tips, experience, and guest stories to help you succeed. Your success is truly my personal joy. So if you don't mind, I want to take a quick moment to share a product of ours that I know will truly help many of you build the clinic you have been dreaming of. It's called Practice Automation System. Now, here's something that most of the clinics I've spoken with that have scaled past seven figures have quietly figured out. Most marketing doesn't fail trying to get leads, it fails after you've already reached them. According to studies, up to 87% of people don't pick up unknown calls anymore. Isn't that crazy? But deep down, I bet you realize it's true. I know I don't answer unknown phone calls, do you? So that means even if your front desk is being incredible and calling them as soon as they come in, there's a good chance they're not gonna reach them. And if that's all you try, your marketing dollars just vanished. Not because your advertising didn't produce, it's because your message didn't get through. The practice automation system is what we built so that doesn't happen. To reach someone these days, you need to nurture them. They used to say it took five to seven touches to reach someone. Now it can be as high as 20, 30, or even more. We help you text them within five minutes, nurture them automatically for weeks and months. The pipeline keeps moving even when your front desk is busy. I spent years running and growing a hormone clinic in Orlando where we grew to over a thousand patients, four providers, and 23 staff members. So we know this works. You know why? Because we used it ourselves well before we turned this into a product. We're not guessing what hormone patience needs because we experienced it. To find out if Practice Automation System is the solution you've been looking for, go to accelerated medical practices.com slash automation. That's acceleratedmedical practices.com slash automation. All right, let's get back to the show. Are you committed to your patients having a truly extraordinary experience, whether they walk in the door or they call in on a telehealth call? I already know your answer. Your answer is yes, right? Of course it is, because you're in this field because you actually care about people. But guys, here's my follow-up question. Have you ever sat down and intentionally mapped out what it takes to create that experience? Be honest, because I bet a way fewer of you said yes to that one. But here's the good news. This one's an easy fix. It takes maybe an hour on your calendar and just a handful of really honest questions. Ones like these. What does a prospective patient see the first time they interact with you online? What happens when they try to book? Who answers the phone and do they know exactly what to say? And how do they handle it when they've got someone in front of them? How are people welcomed through the door the second they get there? Is your staff actually trained on every treatment you offer? So if a patient asks a question, they get a complete answer? What's the handoff from your front desk to your provider to the patient liaison? Does your patient get anything tangible when they walk out the door after they sign up for a membership program? Is it just a login to a portal? Is it a welcome packet? Just a stack of papers? A gift? Walk through every single touch point thoughtfully and write down what's not perfect. And trust me, it's not all going to be, and that's totally okay. Then just fix one friction point a month if you are slammed, but try to do two or three a month if you've got a little bit more bandwidth. Most of you are gonna have somewhere between 10 and 15 friction points. So you could have this whole thing solid within a year, but you've got to start somewhere. Now, here's why I think you should do this more than just nodding along as I'm talking about it. Hormone therapy is going mainstream, and that is fantastic news. More people are searching for solutions faster than ever, and they are finding you. But it also means that more providers are opening their doors every single month in your city, in your specialty, going after the exact same patients that you are. Competition is only going up from here. When there were only two or three hormone clinics in a market, patients would stay with you out of sheer lack of options. But that world, well, it's kind of gone. Today, if a patient feels even a little unsure, a little unwelcomed, or a little confused about what's happening in their care, there is another clinic, just one Google or ChatGPT search away, who is happy to take them on. The experience is no longer a nice to have. It's the thing that decides whether your patients stay under your roof or quietly books a consult somewhere else next month. The clinics that win here aren't the ones that are just the best at marketing and lead generation. They're the ones where their patients feel very taken care of, safe in their clinic every single time they interact with you. And remember, you could be spending upwards of $100 or more just to bring in that one patient through the door. And then they are, they have compared you to every other clinic that they looked at before they chose you. So every moment they spend with you needs to keep earning that spend, or someone else is going to happily earn it instead. Last one, and honestly, this might be the one I care about the most because it's the one most owners will skip entirely. Not because they don't value their patients. Of course, you value your patients, but it's because nobody ever handed you a name for it or a real reason to prioritize it. Lead generation marketing gets all the attention, but retention quietly determines whether any of that marketing was worth the money. Every consultant, every marketing agency, every business coach on the planet these days talks about systems until the word has lost all meaning. But don't let that overuse fool you into thinking it's not important. A system, really, is nothing more mysterious than this. You take a goal, you write down the exact steps it takes to get to that goal in order, on paper, not in your head, where it can quietly get skipped when you're slammed. And then you repeat those steps the same way every single time, automating whatever pieces you can so they happen on schedule without you to remember to do them. Think about your morning routine. You don't get up and try to figure out what do I do first? Do I brush my teeth or do I make coffee? No, you just do it. That's a system built so well you don't even notice that it's running. It's a little bit more simplistic than that, but I want you to build that kind of a system in your business, something that just happens without you having to think about it. A retention system is this same idea. Pointed at patients you already have, a defined, repeatable way of continuing to communicate with them, engage with them, inspire them on purpose, on a schedule, whether or not anything is currently wrong. And I want to be really clear about why this matters because it's more than just a nice thing to do. A strong retention system is one of the single highest leverage things you can build for your clinic's profitability. It costs a fraction of what acquiring a new patient costs. It compounds every single year with when a patient stays. And on top of the revenue that you're going to receive, it takes an enormous amount of day-to-day stress off you and your staff because you're not wondering whether that patient's going to renew and they're gonna, this is gonna be the time if they don't actually rebook their next appointment. All right, let me try to make this real for you because I think this piece matters so much. I'm willing to tell kind of a personal story. So, my husband Jamie and I have been together for 19 years, and we are genuinely best friends. We have a great relationship, but I want to be honest with you, that didn't happen by accident, and it isn't guaranteed. During a rough patch we had about five years ago, I read the book The Five Love Languages, and one phrase from that season of my life stuck with me ever since. Continually date your spouse. Now, here's what that actually means. When you're in the courtship phase of any relationship, you are without even trying in retention mode. You're checking in with that person, you're showing up perfectly, you're making the other person feel chosen on purpose constantly. And then life happens. Maybe you have kids, you have routines, you're exhausted. And without anyone deciding to stop caring, the checking in stops. The intentionality quietly disappears. Not because the relationships stop mattering to you, but because nobody kept doing the small, little, deliberate things that said it mattered. And that's precisely what happens with patients. And I want you to think about this for a second in relationship to your own personal relationships. In that courtship phase, before they sign up, you're all over them, right? You're nurturing them, you're following up, you're calling, you're making them feel like they're the most important person in the world because you're trying to earn their yes. The second they say yes and hand over their credit card, from most clinics, the intentional courting just stops. You do great clinical work. The labs, the follow-up, the symptom surveys, that's the relationship equivalent of still living in the same house and splitting the bills, but not being that intentional dating part. But the deliberate, I see you, I'm glad you're here, moments quietly vanish, exactly like they do in a marriage. That's coasting instead of dating. And patients, they feel that absence in the same way a partner does, even if they don't know how to name it. So you do need to date your patients, not just manage them clinically, although, of course, do that too. Actually keep choosing them on purpose after the sale. Now we always talk about the clinic that I ran in Orlando, and we had one retention tactic for a very long time. It was a December patient appreciation party, and it was a great party, but it was not nearly enough. So we built small touch points across the whole year. My favorite was a 13-touch automation that kicks off the moment someone signs up for a hormone program. It's emails, texts, staff tasks to do light check-ins spread across a full year, and none of it is a sales pitch. It got a blog link about insulin resistance, fun, healthy recipes, a referral program reminder, a simple how are you feeling check-in, a nudge reorder for the refills. Then we also built something that I'm very proud of called Wellness Matters. It was a monthly event that was done in person before COVID and then, of course, moved online afterwards, where we brought in outside speakers who had nothing to do with hormones directly, but everything to do with our patients' broader desire to learn about wellness. We had acupuncturists, we had an IV therapy provider, we had a representative from a functional lab, we had a pharmacy come speak, a supplement company. We recorded everyone and posted them so patients who missed it could still watch. Everybody loved it. Then another thing we did was once a quarter we ran testimonial days, but we treated the patients coming in like they were guests on a sitcom. We had a craft table, we had goodies, we had prizes for them just for being there. We made it into a whole thing. Yes, we were getting a testimonial, but the patient was reminding themselves why they loved our clinic so much. And it was definitely a great retention tool, as much as it was a gift for our business. So yeah, I'll be honest. All of that retention stuff, it takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of budget. But if it's the difference between a patient staying one year at a $3,000 profit or staying five years at $15,000, the math isn't even close. And that's before you count the bonus. Happy patients bring their friends. Every clinic owner I know brags about how they love their word of mouth and it's how they get most of their patients. And I love that for them. I also know that if you put a little bit more intentionality behind Behind taking care of the patients they already have, that word-of-mouth engine would be so much bigger and so much left to chance. All right, so here's where I want to leave you. If all you're focused on is bringing in new leads and new patients, and you haven't stopped to ask what happens after that patient signs on the dotted line, you're likely spinning your wheels, wasting so much time, wasting revenue, and making your life harder than it needs to be. I want you to remember the three holes: lead follow-up, patient experience, retention. And don't leave this episode with just a good feeling. I want you to leave with a real action plan. So here is my next 60-day broken down into three two-week blocks planned for you that will just take five hours a week. All right, weeks one and two. Fix hole one. Pull up your actual follow-up sequence and be honest about which category it's really in. Then write an all-in sequence for your top lead source. Five to eight touches, emails, and texts to whatever they opted in. And then a long-term nurture sequence for anyone who doesn't convert. Okay. Then weeks three and four, tackle hole number two. Block that one hour and walk through your entire patient journey from start to finish, from the first click to walking out the door. Write down every friction point you find. Then go just fix two or three. And you know what? Bring in some members of your team if you've got them. More people in this exercise is definitely better. All right, then we've got weeks five and six. You want to fix hole number three. Design just one retention touch point you can actually sustain. Doesn't have to be 13 automated touches on day one, but it can be one meaningful check-in, a quarter, just to start. Just get something intentional on your calendar for patients that you already have. Turn your marketing spend down slightly while you're building these three things. If you're spending thousands on ads, but you have none of these things in place, just take it down a little bit, then turn it back up after the work is done and watch what happens. Those same marketing dollars will be working so much harder because the bucket doesn't have holes in it anymore. Now, I'll be honest with you, building all three of these from scratch while you're also running a clinic can be genuinely hard, especially if you don't have the support staff to help you out. So I just want to say that if at any point you want help putting exactly what we talked about together into place and more, then just go to accelerated medical practices.com slash automation to learn more about our practice automation system. And if it makes sense, just grab a time to do a demo with me or my team. No pressure at all. We'll walk you through and just it's an open door if you want to see it and just see whether or not something that works for you. For now, I just want you to sit with this. More patience. We're never going to fix a leaky bucket. Now we know that. But over the next few weeks on this show, we're going to go hole by hole together and figure out exactly where yours are and we're going to work on how to fix them. All right, guys, that is it for today. Thank you so much for being with me. I really appreciate it. And I will see you on Monday for our 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.