Will Power Podcast by Will Humphreys
Freedom isn’t just possible—it’s the point.
If you’re a healthcare leader or entrepreneur tired of burnout, constant busyness, and feeling stuck in your own success story… this podcast is your reset button.
Hosted by Will Humphreys—former physical therapist turned serial entrepreneur, speaker, and founder of Virtual Rockstar—The Will Power Podcast dives deep into what it really takes to build a business that serves your life, not the other way around.
Expect raw coaching moments, unfiltered conversations, and powerful lessons on leadership, business, and family—the real pillars of lasting freedom.
You’ll laugh, learn, and walk away ready to lead with love, live on purpose, and never give up your freedom.
Will Power Podcast by Will Humphreys
Future of Physical Therapy Marketing: AI Agents & Patient Reactivation with Carl Mattiola
What would your practice look like if you never had to worry about marketing or lead follow-up again? In this episode of the Will Power Podcast, host Will Humphreys sits down with Carl Mattiola, co-owner of Breakthrough Marketing, to discuss the seismic shift AI is bringing to the world of physical therapy and private practice.
Carl reveals how Breakthrough is using AI "Agents" to handle the most time-consuming part of running a clinic: lead conversion and patient reactivation. From reducing 16 hours of manual follow-up to just 30 minutes, this conversation explores how technology is helping clinic owners reclaim their time while scaling their impact.
Key Takeaways:
- Content is a Commodity: Why high-quality copywriting is now accessible to everyone through AI. If you know how to prompt it correctly.
- Meet Your New Digital Employee: Defining AI Agents and how they act as 24/7 virtual assistants for your practice.
- The Power of Reactivation: Why your past patient list is your most valuable asset and how to automate the "checking in" process.
- Human-Like Interaction: How AI is now capable of having complex, compassionate conversations with patients that are nearly indistinguishable from human staff.
- Solving the Staffing Crisis: Using automation to handle high-volume responses that would otherwise overwhelm a short-staffed team.
Virtual Rockstars specialize in helping support or replace all non-clinical roles.
Learn how a Virtual Rockstar can help scale your physical therapy practice.
Subscribe here to our completely free Stress-Free PT Newsletter for your weekly dose of joy.
Hey Rockstars, what would you do if you didn't have to do any more marketing? What if there was a way to automate the way that we get new clients? How would that look? To build a business, as they say, the hardest part is finding the clients and hiring the people. So what if you could automate finding clients? Well, here today we get to speak with Carl Madiola, who is one of the owners of Breakthrough Marketing. It is the premier business. I used to be a client of theirs. I have so much trust with these guys. And this discussion is going to blow your minds. So pay attention all the way through because you're going to learn about how AI is going to solve one of your biggest headaches. Enjoy the show. Okay, Carl. So you guys at Breakthrough are the leaders of marketing. There's no doubting that. Like you guys have been around for as long as I had my private practice. How is artificial intelligence shaping your industry?
SPEAKER_02:It's really changing everything. It's hard to answer that question.
SPEAKER_00:It's at this point, it's like How isn't it?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's such a broad question. How isn't it? Exactly. And we're just like in the beginning of how it's unrolling, right? So I think the like at a high level, if I'm trying to talk about this, content, you know, content is marketing, right? And um content now is kind of completely commoditized. So when when it talks about copywriting and creating and writing, you know, over the years, you know, being a student of marketing and having worked with tons of practices and helped tons of companies with marketing, um I've spent a ton of money on copywriting. Great copywriters, these types of things. Chad and I both studied it very deeply. And today, you know, in a couple seconds, if you write the right type of prompt, um and I'm just talking about, and this is just the very basics of what you can do, you know, you can put together something that's really, really good and really, really compelling. Now I'm gonna say most people just going in there like, make me something for this, it's not gonna come out so great. But um, if you do it right, um it happens in seconds, and you know, when you build it into a tool, um, it can create campaigns, it can create the right wording, it can do all the research for you to understand, like if you're targeting neuropathy patients or whatever it may be, um, you know, you're gonna be able to get really, really high quality content um done in, you know, I don't know, one one hundredth of the time for one one hundredth of the cost. So that's probably the first thing I would say. Um, and so we're utilizing that um and we're encouraging people to utilize that on their own as well. Um, we make it easy by building it into the platform though. So um when people want to create campaigns, it just does it. Um and yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Because the the because how you prompt it really it's so funny. I had someone tell me at a conference, uh, Carl, recently, they were like, a college degree, no, it was like this. They said learning how to prompt AI is what a college degree used to be 50 years ago. Like it's maybe not that dramatic. I don't know if I believe that statement completely, but that's what I was told at a business conference, and and it goes along the thought process of learning how to leverage AI for anything starts with learning how to prompt it. So when you guys encourage people to use AI for copywriting, which is the marketing term for the words we put down in anything we send out, whether it's an email or a post on social media, how how do you recommend if someone was listening to this and they don't know anything about AI, how do you prompt AI so that it produces the words for like a uh an email to recruit physical therapists or for new patients? Like, how do you go about knowing how to prompt AI?
SPEAKER_02:Um Well, I mean, all of the different models out there, all of the companies who who've built things have pretty much put out uh guides on how to do this right. Um so I wouldn't have one in front of me, but like if you look up um, you know, for Chat GPT, they'll have one. Anthropic, that one's probably the best with Claude, especially for copywriting, it's it's probably the best.
SPEAKER_00:So Claude, so Claude is the name of the AI software. This is just a website, Claude.com.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, if you just Google Claude, um you'll get there. Um Gemini's pretty good too. Claude, I would say, is probably the best for copywriting. Um, but if you ask, you know, how to write a prompt, um if you just go into Chat GPT and ask how to write a prompt and how it should be structured, it's gonna tell you. But usually, like some of the tips are like give it a persona first. It's like you are an expert in physical therapy, marketing, copywriting. That alone will help a lot. Um, and then from there, it it just will you'll wanna start with um the overall, like, here's what your goal is, um, here are your rules, here's the context given, and things like that. But it if you just go and um if you don't know anything, the easiest thing to do is to to work with it to like be like, okay, write me a prompt to do this, and then go from there. That's the easiest way.
SPEAKER_00:What a mind-blowing concept that like as people are learning how to use AI, that they should use AI to learn AI.
SPEAKER_02:Use AI to learn AI, yeah, for sure. That's the easiest way. And we've built, you know, I mean, that's that's the basics, and so we can make a lot of things really easy. Um, and you can then build agents using lots of prompts that are like collected together and data that that that the prompt that you know AI can connect to and um uh perform tasks for you as well. So those are the two things that are gonna get, I think, you know, commoditized and you know, streamlined for people is content creation and um and then any manual processes. So the biggest thing that we've done that's made the biggest impact is patient conversion. So um for us for years it's been the biggest challenge practices have faced, and it's been breakthrough's biggest challenge because we would run a bunch of advertising or you know, send reactivation campaigns and we would get tons of responses. And if people aren't there to respond, which often in a practice people are just too busy to be able to do that, um, or if the team isn't quite trained on what to do and say, um, the result can be not great. And even sometimes the result can be so big and overwhelming that it makes the staff mad, and then that makes things not great for the owner. Um, so it's been really challenging for us. And so what we did was we built an agent that automatically responds. Um what is an agent?
SPEAKER_00:Just I'm kind of I'm listening through the ears of people with my audience and our industry. So what like you're building an agent to solve this thing called patient conversion, but what is an agent?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I guess I would define it as um you kind of look at it as like like your own employee in a way. It's some it's something. It's like a digital employee, yeah, or a digital virtual assistant in a way. Yeah, that's what it is. And it could do things for you on your behalf, could do certain tasks that are specific. Um, and uh yeah, there will be many agents used in many different ways to serve many different purposes down the line. The one that we built is designed to take people who are leads for physical therapy practices or chiropractic practices and turn them into patients by having conversations with them. And then it's also designed to basically update the systems on you know your practices' behalf so that you don't have to do that manual work. So it does those two things for you. And so I'll tell you like we used to run, we run these campaigns, we've been running them with practices for years, um, and on average our practices, and we I'm talking about like some are you know big, right? Like that have lots of locations, some are small that are just one employee. But on average, when we first rolled this out, we rolled it out to 20 practices. Um, on average, before they started, they were spending 16 hours following up with people to get them on the schedule, and after it was less than 30 minutes.
SPEAKER_00:So whoa, so when you talk about following up to get them on the schedule, are you talking about people who like there's a fax that comes in back in the day, and they're just the work it takes before they show up?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, in this case, it's more digital than that. So for us, it could be somebody who registered for a workshop or somebody who um signed up as a lead, like I'm interested in in getting an appointment or a shock shockwave or some sort of cash off or anything like that, or or just like I mean, then the best use case is like reactivating people. So just we'll text people, you know, and ask them, oh, how uh Will, how how have you been? I haven't heard from you in a while. You experiencing any pain in your body, it kicks off a conversation, and the agent will have that conversation, is trained based on all the data. And I mean, we have we've had I don't even know how many conversations have taken down or went down over over time on through our two-way text. So we used all that to train it, and so it asks the right questions, it does the right things, and it does it 24-7 and can put people right on the schedule. So it just saves so much time, it's crazy. So when somebody sends a campaign out like that one, for example, um, you know, I was just talking to a practice today at six locations sort of in your area in the in the Phoenix area. Um, and they had, I think like over 200 people respond. So two, I mean 200 conversations took place in a day.
SPEAKER_00:In a day.
SPEAKER_02:Over text messages. Yeah, and so the agent, like if the agent weren't there, their team could have never handled that. And that's a decent sized practice, too. So um, yeah, it's the other thing that it's doing is things are becoming possible that were totally not possible for a small practice before. It's pretty exciting.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so you're talking about in that case, you're talking about like the things that would normally take manpower, all these people responding to communications, it just takes this one AI agent that you guys have created and designed based on like years of countless data, by the way. I mean, we before I sold my practice in 2018, we were we were working with you guys a year or two before that. So, I mean, I know what you're talking about, because for people who aren't familiar with Breakthrough, you guys are the marketing experts. You guys helped us build out systems that were truly marketing efforts, initiatives that were more than just like going to a doctor and bringing lunch. It was so much more based in having a community relationship directly with our customers. So whether it was the biggest promotion ever, which is the thing that you guys teach, or whether it was email campaigns or whatever back in the day that were like more cutting edge, that's all evolved into this AI agent that takes all that data, has these conversations trained not just on your background of data, but the clients that the practice has. So does the clo does the patient know that they're talking to an AI agent? Is that something that you guys have to like tell them, or it's like something they don't they never ask you to leave it up?
SPEAKER_02:We leave it up to the practice. It's a great question. It's super controversial, and like rolling this out has been mind-blowing to see how people respond to it, like from the practice side. I mean, like I I I didn't want to do it like for years. So I two years ago we started working on this, like, and I I knew it was possible, but I was like, I don't think they're gonna adopt this. I don't think the physical therapy practices are gonna, I think they might not be okay with it. So anyway, we started like hacking it together, building it just to test it to see what could happen, and then I brought it to a boot camp, one of our events. Yeah, that was a good one. I love your boot camps, they're fun. And uh I asked people, you know, like we we did a live test. So we signed everybody up, we texted everybody who was there, and they all had conversations, and literally every single person who was there at this whole event was like, Yeah, I would use that. So that was the moment where I realized, um, okay, this is something. But it is, you know, some different people have different, you know, concerns, and some people want to be transparent, completely transparent, in which case the first message will say, Yeah, I'm uh an AI agent, namely. Yeah, or whatever language they want to use. Um, and um others will say it, well won't say it, but will say it if if people are gonna others want to completely be like, no, this is just an extension of someone who works for the company and keeps it completely under wraps. Um, but do people know? Absolutely not. Okay, like very it's very rare where we'll find out. Like, I'm talking like out of a thousand conversations, maybe one person will realize it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Carl, it's funny. I my to kind of validate what you're saying, I talk so much to my chat GPT, and it's got so much information on me now that like it's multiplying its value to me because it's learned all these different things about me. I have conversations like many people do, a common practice now you'll turn on chat GPT and just talk to it and you know, source ideas. My wife made me change the voice from a woman to a man because she was feeling like it was taking too far, it was going too far. Like, literally, I was like, I don't have feelings for Ava. She's like, who's Ava? I'm like, that's my that's the name I came to meet. So, but it's like, so like, you know, there's all this like controversial stuff that people are gonna have to decide for themselves, but it's coming no matter what. So, what about what's required on the manpower side? Because I'm guessing although most of this is fairly automated, the practice still has to have a human involvement in overseeing it or running it or something like that.
SPEAKER_02:What does that look like for I mean it's way less than without it? Um so I mean, like today in private practice and in PT, you know, you're you're it it's a totally different environment than when we started, um, where you know the the biggest challenges are probably declining reimbursements and staffing, right? Like we don't have enough team to serve all the patients coming in. Um but with that said, um, you still need to communicate with your patients and you still want to at least focus on reactivation. Um, and many practices still probably you know less than half, but you know, 40% right now are get, I guess, are still somewhat underutilized. Meaning they could they could take more patience and that would be a good thing for them. Um, and either way, because everyone's so short-staffed, because everyone's spread so thin, because margins are are are lower, automation becomes like the most important thing. So, I mean, it's the we've been focused on that for the last four years, but once this came into fruition and the ability for us to do these things, it's made the biggest impact for sure. So, I mean, we're trying to do things um that are gonna take things off people's plates. Um, it's still gonna take some people's time, it just depends on how much volume you want to come in. So, um, I mean, think about it. Like, you have someone who had a conversation with an AI agent, they um gotten all the way to the point of I want to schedule an appointment and here like it it will ask them like what's the best day and time, it will get that, and it will say someone from the staff will reach out. That's the point we're at right now. But we're in the middle of two integrations with EMR companies, one with Prompt, which we've pretty much finished and you know, are are are rolling out here and that's exciting. Yeah, with Rain Tree um as well. And um at least with one of the two, we're gonna end up being able to put people right on the schedule. So there will be no time necessary at all after that. Um, but right now it's a very small amount of time. Um, and I'm talking, so like you run one of these campaigns, let's say you know you're spending 16 hours a month trying to like responding to people, in that case you're probably talking about like I don't know how many conversations. Each conversation took seven minutes. I'll do the quick math for you. Like before AI, it took seven minutes. So um if we're talking 16 hours, we're talking like 137 conversations are happening each month, um, and you're taking that down to 30 minutes.
SPEAKER_00:So unbelievable.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so 30 30 minutes for the whole month. So because it's because it's quick to to just reach out to somebody who's already said, Oh yeah, I want to do this, put them on the schedule, that's really it. So um, yeah, it's a it's a it's a it's a big change. And there's a lot of other things we've worked on to try to like just take time out of marketing. That because that's the biggest thing. It's like everybody knows they need to be marketing, they want to be doing it. Um they whether they need more patients right now or not, or whether they believe in the idea of like, okay, I need to make myself oversubscribed so I can actually um you know focus on you know better insurance or foc people with better insurance or or cash or things like that to try to improve their profitability. One way or another, everybody knows they need to market. It's just like, do I have the time to do this?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Um, it's always going to take a little bit, but now I mean like we've really, really uh whittled it down to as little as it could possibly be.
SPEAKER_00:You know, this is powerful because the hardest part of any business, as one of my mentors told me years ago, is the business development side or biz dev, and that's that's a term we use to define the marketing for new clients or patients in our case, or and hiring. It's basically the same thing. Biz dev, you're marketing, getting your message out to bring in new patients andor hiring, and then sales is the act of actually converting them into either clients or employees. Have you guys looked at this from a recruiting perspective yet? Or I'm sure it's crossed your mind. No.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:No, I mean it people ask us to get involved in recruiting. I just want to stay focused on what we're best at. Like I know, I know we're best in the world at marketing for physical therapy practices. Um I I know that for a fact. There's there's we've been doing it for so many years. We weren't. I don't even know if other companies.
SPEAKER_00:I couldn't even tell you other companies to kind of green.
SPEAKER_02:So like we just want to stay focused there. And and, you know, like like our our we got into this because we believe physical therapy uh should be, you know, the first place people go, or like at least conservative care should be the first place people go before, you know going to. pain medication, surgery, or you know, other other treatments. So like that's why we care about this. We want to get the message out that um, you know, physical therapy can and should be the first thing you try and it can work, you know, better than some of these other things. And it can save you from really bad stuff, right? Like from really bad things happening. So yeah, we like to stay focused um on marketing and you know we'll likely help some other markets as well. But but with with this with what we do.
SPEAKER_00:Focused on that. Dr. Benjamin Hardy wrote a book out came out just actually this year called The Science of Scaling. I'm just looking at it and it's one of my favorite books ever written because he co-wrote his first three with Dan um Sullivan, you know, the 10x is easier than 2X. So Benjamin Hardy broke out on his own and now he's got this book The Science of Scaling and his he talks about knowing what a business should focus on is called the signal. And like the biggest problem we make is that we try to make our business about too many things. So you guys have clearly mastered that lesson because it helps you scale and especially with AI being something that can scale I hope you guys get massive with it because not only will your company grow but it's it grows the industry like you said. I believe the biggest problem in our industry is our mindset of money. I believe that fullheartedly that the way that physical therapy leaders think of money, usually the healthcare providers themselves because we're indoctrinated in school to think of it as like this evil, this necessary evil versus this great opportunity. The other biggest problem we have and this is industry wide is our marketing to the public the way that we message ourselves to people the fact that my mother still doesn't know what I used to do as a PT in terms of being a massage therapist like the fact that she had to like figure that out with effort is a real reflection of the failure of our marketing as an industry. So as you guys master that for the for the PT owners and in particular what excites me as a physical therapist who's been passionately engaged for over 20 years is the way that you're going to communicate the industry across the board because when patients have better experiences and know it, that's the best way we can change our perception. So I think it's exciting that your global impact is tied directly to the direct success of your clients. It's really cool.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah thank you appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Not really a question there. I think it was just a really cool statement. And uh yeah so like what's your vision? Let's get into that side of it. What's your vision for what you're developing using these um these proprietary AI agents?
SPEAKER_02:What's our vision? Um well I mean we just want to make it as easy as possible for practices to um create a full schedule um automate their marketing completely so that they don't they're completely hands off and they don't have to think or worry about it. How cool that's we want to make sure that it's something that they can personalize and they can today and that's one of the stories I was going to tell you that I I didn't get to yet but um yeah like uh so this becomes your employee right like you can name it right like you can name her uh most most most are using Emily um because that's the original name we started using I chose it because I I've did a little research and I've heard it's the most disarming name there is Emily is the most disarming name I don't know if it's true. I don't know I probably got it from AI but um anyway it's working it's working quite well but people are used sometimes people name it after somebody in the practice some people try to pick something that there's no one named this at the practice. But anyway Emily or the agent in general is the most micromanaged employee of all time in physical therapy I can promise you that. And it's it's so interesting to see all the corrections that people want to give uh when they're not worried about somebody's feelings on the other side which is so funny with the with the physical therapy market it's like you know it's you you're you're in this too um in in a similar way where it's everyone's so compassionate like overly compassionate probably to the point where you know it's it's very difficult for them to um at times for you know to to to uh give feedback to their team in a way to you know so psychologists have named this do you know this no psychologists have named this go look it up on YouTube it's called the healer mindset uh maybe mindset's not the right word it's some it's a it's an actual diagnosed like way of thinking and it's it's named after the group of people who most commonly utilize it as you know and so the healer mindset has a couple things in common I think people who are listening will really get a kick out of this very compassionate for sure always burning out super victim mindset like no one can change the world but me I'm just so tired and I mean by the way this is me.
SPEAKER_00:I'm making fun of myself this has been me my whole life so this thing about like giving and giving until there's just nothing left they they struggle with setting boundaries people with this particular diagnosis. It's not a diagnosis like a disease by the way it's just like you know if you're if you're a person. It's just a tendency. So for those of us that we have strengths and weaknesses the weaknesses is that we typically struggle in saying no and setting boundaries and people pleasing to an insane level. So so Emily doesn't have that Emily is just talking that people can just like all these PTs who are like quietly worried about hurting feelings don't worry about feelings anymore. They can actually like direct her to do things they need her to do they do and it's it's crazy like I didn't expect that.
SPEAKER_02:So it it it put us in a position where we're like oh okay like we need to build this in a way where everybody can train it separately um yeah to their own preferences but then it it even comes down to the point of like this person of the practice wants it to say it this way this person wants to say it this way and these types of conversations never happened before like if anybody ever managed somebody to that level they would be so successful. I'm telling you like when it comes to conversion it never happened so I I'm excited about it to be honest because we're getting all the feedback and that's the thing like once we put this out there in the beginning made lots of mistakes there was dumb types of things happening um but every time you like give it new instructions it never happens again. You don't have to retrain it's like it just gets better and better and better and better. And that's the thing that's most amazing about it to me is like you don't have to retrain like it it's in it's in and it just keeps like it just keeps cruising in in one direction like a better and better and better direction. So um yeah it's pretty exciting and the stories of of of things that people have tried and and thrown at this thing to see if it could throw it off are so funny.
SPEAKER_00:Oh man I so listen you said you kind of hinted at a story that I want to hear about the personalization side. Quit via email on a Friday night or talk about how they don't have time to go home and work out and how that's your problem. Like that's that's a really powerful thing right there to have that there's all these like like soft elements of benefit that you can't really objectively put together but if you know you know like there's a lot of really cool benefits of having this person step this AI agent step in.
SPEAKER_02:So tell me the story tell me the story that you were thinking of earlier about the personalization there are so many I'm I'm just I I have to I have to think through it. I I will like I'll I know one that I'm excited about that happened this week I had um which is not a funny story this one is more um just like surprising there was a a physical therapist going to a different practice that had an injury and had a conversation with this agent and it convinced them to leave that practice and come to this practice. Yeah so I was like oh my god so they like that teeth that team sent the whole thing to me and I'm like or to to my team and I saw it and I'm like oh my god that's amazing so that's a cool but funny stuff I mean you know I I I remember somebody saying they got into a fight with a raccoon they hurt their back because they got into a fight with a raccoon or something like that and she responded with that's intense and like it just like it it just rolls with the punches in a way that you know are probably better than most people would you know getting like surprised and how am I going to deal with this so um yeah that is so crazy. Um so right now you're at what stage in in the rollout like is it completely done and you're rolling it out oh no it's it's it's live now yeah we were in beta two months ago um where we we came out of beta so I mean it's live um and it's included with our product like we we're still trying like we don't charge for it on top of it what we do at this point just because I know isn't that crazy uh I I that might change but like right now like I sort of I believe that like eventually um all software companies are going to need to um evolve to offer things like this and it's just going to be an expectation of what's included.
SPEAKER_00:So what's your core software because obviously you have like tell me a little bit of that because again my last experience of you guys was was not any software it was a hundred percent coaching.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah you guys have evolved you can't you can only help so many people when you're doing that so now you're you're helping people through automation which is I I think I would have killed to have been a therapist you know with that yeah I mean my background is is in building software products I mean that's my main background um and for those of you who are listening he worked directly for Elon Musk or he got hired by Elon Musk at one time so yeah you're yeah for a little bit a long time ago and uh I uh yeah so I I came into this not as a physical therapist um I had a good experience in college and just remembered I wanted to help this market and I talked with lots and lots of practice owners um about what the biggest challenges were and at the time it was the consolidation happening with physician owned practices and hospitals um bringing in ancillary services and part of that being PT and and you know physician referrals drying up for a lot of practices so that that that's what brought me into it was like okay I I can help solve this because all people are doing is like say do a better job marketing to the doctors which it's so one size I knew it was not gonna work. So you know I'm and and I think that's how I met Chad I mean I met Chad just doing my research and you know Chad had had to solve this in the most old school of ways like through direct mail and newspaper ads and things like that. Yeah um and did a great job with that um and we sort of hit it off and decided to try to tackle this together um and uh that's that's how it got started. We started with with teaching because we thought that was the fastest way we could we could help people and it struck a chord. We grew really fast we had lots of people coming to our events over the years. But yeah the I knew that we were going to build what the best practices were into a platform to automate people's marketing and make it super easy for private practices and that's what we did. So today we have an AI powered uh practice growth platform the the main thing that people start with is patient reactivation so oh yeah it will lowest hanging fruit in marketing and people make the mistake like some people make the mistake of not communicating with their past patients on a regular basis. Some people make the mistake of trying to do other things before they're doing that. I don't care if you're just getting started or you've been doing it for a long time you still have some sort of a list and you can still mark to that list and it's still going to be the highest return you can possibly get of anything else. So yeah like your your most valuable asset in your practice is your past patient like list um for sure. Yeah um and uh yeah so we help people reactivate patients through email and text campaigns directly to them um in a lot of it for for anything you could imagine all of it's pre-done pre-built any type of campaign you can think of is there for using so it's kind of like a CRM then is that regarding yeah it's a CRM and marketing automation system but but when we focus on reactivation yeah it's gonna do it via text it's gonna do it via email there's two way text in there and then the agents managing these things for you so um that's that side the other side is going after the cold market now that's a more challenging thing to do. Takes more time we do that through uh workshops and different types of direct offers like you know it could be a voucher offer for Shockwave or laser or something like that. And you can do that through advertising on you know different platforms like Google or Meta Instagram Facebook and you can do that yourself with our platform and the agent will actually follow up with all the leads for you or you can do it um through us we can advertise as well so we're integrated with we're integrated with Meta we're integrated with Google all the data pulls in and now now we're integrated with the MR as well so all of this happens uh a lot easier than it would in other ways and again all the campaigns um we make it easy so that they're all pre-built out and they follow all the best practices that we've been teaching over the years like direct response and using patient education um and the right language in order to bring people in.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah so I finally get it Carl this is really big because you know um putting the pieces together having been a previous client of yours before I sold my business seeing that evolution now as you guys are in this world of helping people market leveraging both best practices and technology the connection between those two is something I learned a while back something that you know it's probably tattooed somewhere in your body but for people who aren't familiar with marketing there's a phrase that we use called the fortune in the follow-up the statistics would shock you guys and I wish I had some studies to pull up off the top of my hand because like when I when I actually started learning the statistics and guys like Alex Hermosy who are kind of known for marketing and sales these days they go ahead and reiterate newer statistics using their own initiatives. It's like honestly guys it's like 80% or more of the people we capture happen after like the fifth reach out it's like volume negates luck. The fortune is in the follow-up it's all of these things that take time but also skill that I see now where the AI agent comes in. The AI agent comes in is your scalable follow-up fortune maker. Because that's what it's doing. It's like all those things you teach on the on the event side and then your CRM the patient outreach what once it gets that point of like there's a lead and someone's actually like expressing a little bit of interest all that follow up and how you follow up is automated.
SPEAKER_02:That's I don't know it has more context than a person ever would that's the that's the other thing is like it knows what's been going on for you Will it knows that you came in for this this long ago it knows that you know you maybe interacted with this campaign and it had this conversation um and it can it it can use that um and uh that can be powerful. Yeah that's almost so powerful that it's almost scary it's not but it's a little like you do imagine it has to be done right but yeah it's uh super powerful yeah I think what's scary about it is the potential of it.
SPEAKER_00:You know what I mean? But the actual application you have is nothing but exciting in the sense that it's like wow it can actually digest all that information at such a scale that a small private practice again if I was starting out having this as a weapon for me to grow would have been awesome.
SPEAKER_02:And it will know it will know like everything about your practice your team like and be able to answer all those questions.
SPEAKER_00:And the more you use it I'm guessing the better it gets the mature it's is it one of those things where like the more you use it the more it keeps learning.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah because you learn what to like you you you do get to train it a little bit. I mean we've got it pre-trained on what's going to work the best for conversion but um when it comes to like what you want it like how you want it to behave about your practice and how to talk about certain things you you can certainly go in there and train it to improve on those things.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah okay so let me ask you this if uh is it is there a different does this AI bot I really don't know the answer to this question it might sound like I'm like loading a question but I'm wondering what the difference is between small singular locations versus your guys that have a hundred locations when it comes to utilization of a product like this are they using it very differently or is this like best practices on scale and it doesn't matter the size?
SPEAKER_02:No, it doesn't matter I mean because the the big practices are all run in lots of smaller locations and essentially it's it's really the same thing. The only thing I will say is once they get really really like big enough it still makes sense to centralize your follow-up like the follow-up at this point it's the follow-up to your follow up so the person like managing the agent then it makes sense to centralize it um having like one person overseeing it's just the same as like you know we've got one practice that has I don't know like 30 locations or whatever and um you know before we had the agent they had you know a team of people already in place that does the follow-up essentially for all the locations it wasn't done you know at the front desk of every single location which can get crazy um so yeah that's what I'm saying essentially like if you if you you can start to centralize a little bit as you get bigger it can make it a little bit easier.
SPEAKER_00:Man that is so exciting well listen Carl this has been so phenomenal um what advice would you give to somebody who's just kind of like started their own practice and they don't know anything about marketing like what would what direction would you give them kind of maybe leaning on this a little bit but maybe not like what would you give to just started?
SPEAKER_02:Just started um I mean I we have lots of free content so the first advice I would have is to go take advantage of our free content come to our event or something. I mean you'll learn so much so fast. If I have to unload in in a couple seconds here and I've had to I've answered this question a million times so I can like I can do it pretty quick. The first thing you want to do is make a list of everyone you know and send send them a message saying you're gonna s you're you're going to launch your business and um you're gonna start sending content and if you're not interested in that content click the opt out button. That's how you have your first list. And I I've done this with a ton of people usually people can at least whip up like A hundred names. Sure. And I can get you started. Just people they know. Yeah. And then I the the first thing I have them send is a single question that's just something like, Hey, Will. Um, and this is one to many, not one to one, but like send something out and says, Hey Will, um uh I just started this and I'm doing this business, I'm doing some research. I wanted to know if there's any aches or pains going on in your body. Lots of people will respond, and then you can kind of have a conversation from there. So that's that's that's the easiest way to get a few things going. Then from there, what I tell people is, and and the mistake a lot of small practices like just getting started make, is they want to like run Google Ads or do something complicated, like run their own Facebook ads, and they shouldn't be doing that. They should be keeping it simple. When you're trying to grow your list, if you have no list, you need to spend one of two things it's time or money on building, you know, building your list up. So we generally, and I I, if I were that person, I you don't have enough patience to treat yet. So what you should be doing is spending your time, not your money. Um, and to do that, you want to go out and create relationships with other businesses who also share the same like ideal type of customer. It could be a gym for you if you're like CrossFit, like whatever, who knows? It could be like a country club, I don't know. Um, and then you can host a workshop on whatever those people complain about in terms of their injuries the most, and you can start to do that on a regular basis. It gives a ton of value to that business, um, and it will build your build your practice. And I know a ton of people who've been successful that way. So that's that's the advice I would give on how to get started, those two things.
SPEAKER_00:That's so brilliant. I love the simplicity of it. And what's interesting is when on the recruiting side, which is where more people spend time asking me questions on things, there's it's it's not that different. Um, the front end is very different because you know, most people don't know a hundred people that could potentially work at their clinic.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:It's more likely they're gonna know a hundred people that have physical bodies that might be in pain. But to build the list, I always tell people the same thing about like, yeah, your your list, your network is your net worth when it comes to recruiting. It's like you gotta you gotta have that list of people you know and nurture. So again, it's all marketing, it's all about messaging, it's all it's just target, it's the different targets. Totally. But it's so powerful that this is if there was one thing, again, that our people struggle with, it's the mindset of money. The second thing is marketing as an industry, but that begins with the the healthcare providers who get zero training or support. And that's why I love you guys. When we were coming to you before we we met, you know, your your team, we were going to doctor's offices and knocking on doors. And and and listen, I had practices that weren't like struggling for new patients. I I had two locations that just geographically drew so many patients in. But just like my mindset was that I had to like own these relationships with doctors that totally felt like I was at cause, where like if they needed something, I had to jump. And then later, because I started holding you know the different like marketing things that we would learn, events. Yeah. It it it and this is true, Carl. By the time we were done, doctors were calling me to market to me because in smaller towns, which is where I specialized, we owned the community relationship, not the other way around.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so that that was cool because it shifted the power dynamic. Our business was growing just because we were the only game in town in a couple of our cities, but just the fact that the doctors were like, hey man, how's everything going? Like they're checking in with me, that energy shift alone was freedom. And then other locations that were more competitive, no no one could compete with us because most PTs don't know any of this stuff. So that's where I think breakthrough comes in as an educational piece. So um I'm sad to see that the coaching isn't as big as it used to be, but I actually believe that in the end it won't matter.
SPEAKER_02:We're still doing a ton of it. We just don't charge for it.
SPEAKER_00:Like you said, if you're starting out, just get familiar with breakthrough.
SPEAKER_02:We're doing a ton of coaching still. We we we just we don't charge for it, essentially. It's just free content. And we have a ton of others like now. I mean, like our community is really strong. We have practices or practice owners who are in there who have retired even that are just still hanging around to help help each other out. So it's a really cool thing, and that's one of the good things I think about the um, I forget the caregiver mindset probably that you know takes place in this market that I sort of just like really love. And it's part of the reason I love this market is because everybody really wants to help each other. And um, yeah, so I mean we we have a lot of free stuff. Um definitely come to one of our events.
SPEAKER_00:Um and how can they learn about all this stuff? That's a nice segue into your your how do they get a hold of you business. Like, how how can people learn more about the free stuff? How can they learn more? I guarantee people are gonna be like, yeah, I just want to learn more about these AI agents. How can they learn about all of it?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, you could just go to getbreakthrough.com and get breakthrough.com. Gotcha. Yeah, G E T breakthrough.com. And if you go there to our website, you're gonna be able to find um a number of ways to a number of forms to fill out if you want. Um so uh to to to sign up to to chat with us. Um you can learn more on the website itself as well. Just learn by by going and checking it out. Um if you're interested in our free content, you know, just go ahead and fill any, you know, fill out any of the forms you see on there. There's lots of free things that we give away, or check out our blog, um, or or follow, follow us on our our podcast, the Grow Your Practice Podcast, um, that that Chad Madden runs. Um and you'll hear more and more about what we're doing. Uh, we do have an event coming up in Orlando, um, which I'll see you at well, hopefully. That's right. And um, yeah, it's in it's January 15th, I think, to 18th, is if I'm guessing right. Um, and we're gonna be talking about marketing, we're gonna be talking about recruiting, we're gonna be talking, we have experts in all kinds of things, lots of experts in in the cash space as well, um, in terms of like how to have cash add-ons in your business and things like that. So I'm definitely come. It's gonna be a huge party. We have mechanical bull, it's western.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, no way.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be a good time. We've got a lot of great speakers, and uh it should be some should be super fun.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, let me let me let me rephrase that last part for Carl. It's gonna be super worth it. I I listen, guys, I get nothing for saying this. I've was a client of theirs. I've been in the B2B space with them. If you've been living under a rock and you don't know who Breakthrough is, take my word for it. This is a company you need to know. It this is one of those connections and relationships that will offload you in a way where you can focus on what you love and not have to worry about what we call the hardest part of the business, the biz dev, the high the getting new clients part. If you're struggling with that on any level, please go to getbreakthrough.com.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and if you want to come to an event, feel free to just email me. Email me at Carl at getbreakthrough.com and I'll get you a free ticket if you're listening to this.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my god. Guys, that's that's a big thing right there. Thank you, Carl. That's very generous of you. No worries. All right, guys. Rockstars, thanks for tuning in. As always, this is Will Humphreys reminding you to lead with love and to never give up. Until next time.
