May 17, 2023
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Bethany Fishbein: The worst thing is sitting in your practice feeling helpless like this is happening to me. Why is my schedule so slow? The bones seem to not be ringing and there’s nothing I can do about it. And there’s a lot of power in doing something about it.
I am Bethany Fishbein, Welcome back to the Power Hour Optometry Podcast. I am the CEO of the Power Practice and Host of the Power Hour Podcast. And no guest today, this is just me talking about a topic that has been on the minds of a lot of people, which is how to get more patients into your practice. It’s kind of a funny thing because what we’ve seen across the country with a lot of the clients that we work with, is that people had an amazing first quarter of the year. When we look at our client numbers. They were up an average of 18% year over year, first quarter of 23 over the first quarter of 22 and things were good and practices were busy and there wasn’t a whole lot of concern about how to get patients on the schedule. And then for a lot of practices, April hit I don’t know the exact reason yet but all of a sudden the well dried up, and practices that were booked out a couple of weeks in advance, all of a sudden aren’t booked out so far in advance anymore. And the ones that weren’t booked in advance to begin with have open spots in the schedules for summits, open schedules like they haven’t seen in quite a few years. And obviously, that’s cause for concern when things are going so well. You just want them to continue going well. And then all of a sudden when they don’t. You’ve seen success, you’ve smelled it, you tasted it, and you’re not willing to go back to an empty schedule. Not being as efficient as you could be not filling up your days and not generating the income that you now know your practice can. So we started to get a lot of questions about what can I do to fill the schedule? And for some practices, these are new questions, and for other practices, like new practices just starting out. It’s an all the time question. So my hope today is to give you a whole bunch of information, different ideas on ways you can attract patients into your business. So here we go.
Number one, I don’t know that I’m gonna number them all the way through but for an established practice and cold starts, bear with me for a couple minutes here. Everything else is gonna apply to you but for an established practice one of the easiest ways to get more patients on the schedule is to put some effort into reactivation of patients who haven’t been in in quite some time. Right now a lot of practices have automated recall systems through a patient communication platform. So they’re sending your patients a text or an email a month after they missed their appointment maybe it 18 months since their last visit two years since their last visit. And some patients will respond to those, and some patients those just kind of blend into the woodwork they hit the delete without even reading it or considering it. So a reactivation effort allows you to do something different to email or to text all of your patients with some kind of new information about the practice. It’s been a while since we’ve seen you we just got in brand new glasses line, we have a new instrument, we have a new associate, we have new staff members, whatever the new information is to engage them. This is something different. Take a look. Take a read and it’s not going to generate a zillion appointments, but it’s going to generate some and when the schedule is empty. That’s what you need to say that can be blanketed to all of your patients. For certain patients, especially those with a condition that has a higher degree of necessity for an annual eye exam. So these are your diabetics, your glaucoma patients, somebody on a medication that needs to be monitored when they’re overdue. We’re going to up the effort a little bit, and this is where a personal phone call from a staff member can make a difference. They’re calling they’re saying the doctors named, “Dr. Fishbein asked me to give you a call. He noticed it’s been two years since your last exam and we need to be seeing you every year. We’ve got an appointment open Thursday or Friday. Which of those is better for you?”. Staff members are not going to be super fans of making these phone calls. But a lot of us have young staff in the office that would do anything rather than pick up the phone especially to call somebody who didn’t call in for the appointment and might reject them, but you can make it fun you have a list. If they get a certain number they get a present you heard the episode a couple of weeks ago on mini-games, give them motivation to call we’re gonna make this many calls a day Doc sit down and call with them just to be part of it. And those in addition, we’ll get patients in reactivation.
Second thing is when your schedule is slower like that, and you have open availability. One of the things that you can do is take advantage of that and block schedule, create blocks in your schedule, where you’re not going to see patients. And you’re going to use that time for other things, maybe to do some of the activities we’re going to talk about in a couple of minutes. So if you’re usually scheduled to see 16 people for exams every day and all of a sudden you only have 10 or 11 or 12. If you do nothing to your schedule, those 10 people will take up exactly the amount of time that 16 took up a month ago. It’s just human nature. Maybe have a few minutes in between, but it’s a very rare person that can use those few minutes for something productive. So it’s better to say, “Okay, I’m looking at the schedule. I only have 10 people coming in a day. You know what, I’m going to take a half day and use that time to either work on something that needs improvement in the business or to work on efforts to generate more patience for the practice”. So take advantage of the downtime blocks of management time in your schedule, and then start to put it to good use. One of the ways that you can use that time is to work with your staff to create an in-office event and put effort into promoting it. We talked about emailing your patients for reactivation telling them about something new. So having an event in the office gives you something to talk about and gives you reason to reach out to people a couple of times. It also generates some excitement and a difference in the day-to-day routine for your staff. So this can be something like a trunk show where you have a vendor for eyeglass frames come in or a couple of vendors regular frame vendor a sunglass vendor, bring their whole line in, your staff dresses up you can have food and little snacks, and some kind of full mocktail some people do it with alcohol and invite people to come in. You’ve got your regular schedule for exams, but you’re also inviting people to come in and see the collection on that day. It should result in a good day, which if your schedule is really slow, you will welcome a good busy day. But the other thing that it does is because you have something to talk about. It’s making you post a couple of times on your Facebook, your Instagram, it’s making you send an email letting people know that you’re having this and then there’s reason to send a follow-up email a week later and don’t forget it’s today email the day of which just helps keep your practice front and center in your patients minds in that focused management time. It’s also a good opportunity when things are slow to remind the docs who refer to you of that relationship.
A lot of optometrists do have doctors in the community who refer to them. Maybe it’s a primary care doctor who is uncomfortable prescribing eyedrops with steroids or who’s referring diabetic patients for routine exams. Maybe it’s a an optometrist who does mostly primary routine care and will refer the specialty contact lens fits or low vision or myopia patients. Either way, when you remind that doctor that you exist, you are more likely to get a referral in the next couple of days or weeks than if you don’t. It’s the reason why all these reps are visiting your office. All the time because their companies know that effect. Where when you see them, and you’re reminded, especially if something that you don’t routinely do or think about all the time, it’s like Oh, yeah, and almost inevitably, you will use their product in the couple of days after the visit. That’s why they do it. And it works. So when you have that time, it’s a good opportunity to call one of the referring doctors tell them about a patient that you saw. Thank them for referring do they need anything else? Maybe you stop by their office, if it’s a great relationship, you go for coffee, maybe you have lunch, and you will see referrals start to come in, in a couple of days after that. It’s also an opportunity to develop new referral relationships with doctors who don’t necessarily refer haven’t referred yet. One of the things it’s proven to be fairly effective is to make a laminated sheet that has your practice information on it. It has the services that you provide, particularly those that are relevant to the doctor that you’re visiting. So if you’re going to a primary care doctor’s office, you’re going to have diabetic eye exams, emergency eye care, you know, regular glasses and contacts blah, blah, blah. If you’re going to a pediatric practice, you’re going to have information on myopia. If you’re going to a rheumatologist, you’re gonna have dry eye like whatever your stuff is that’s going to benefit this doctor’s office. And then you have the insurances that you take on the back because for a lot of especially primary care, urgent care referrals, they are looking in network for the patients. For specialty services, you don’t have to have that on the back. They’re referring for the service outside of the insurance plan. But you make a sheet. It’s got your info, your services, insurance, and any true unique service proposition. Why should they come see you instead of any of the other places that they could go to or refer to, for a brand new practice, it might be that you can always guarantee that you’ll have a same-day appointment, which is pretty high value for patients who need a form for the DMV, they need their eye check for their driver’s license or for a school sports physical or whatever. Is it a unique service that no one else does? And then you bring those usually with some cookies getting in the door for the staff to just introduce yourself and drop off materials, primary cares, urgent cares, minute clinics, specialists office, pediatricians, ophthalmology, school nurses, like whoever you can think of, instead of sitting around wondering why your practice isn’t as busy as you want it to be. You are out there doing something about it, generating business for the practice while you’re there, not while you’re at the offices while you’re in your office with this time to spare.
Something else that helps is to update your Google business profile. Did you ever notice that when you change your office hours, or you change something about the business which most of us don’t do too often on the Google business profile, all of a sudden it feels like people are calling or they’ll notice it, they’ll get a notification. So you can put up a blog post update photos, make sure your office hours are updated. If there’s a holiday coming up in your close for Memorial Day, update your business hours, something on your business profile. And I have marketing guests who can talk away more intelligently about this than I can but doing things like that helps Google realize that you are alive and active business, that your profile is active and you rank higher in the searches and get patients bbecause of that as a result. While you’re working on your digital online reputation and social media profiles.
Something else you can do is to participate actively participate in any of the local Facebook groups that are people in your community having conversations with each other. So almost every community has at least one probably multiple Facebook groups. And this is a place for people to post. Sometimes looking for recommendations, the most notable thing I see is when someone hears a loud bang, and they have to post about it, and then everybody else chimes in that they heard the loud bang too. But people will sometimes when they get over the shock of the loud bang ask “Do you know an eye doctor that’s good for kids?”. And if you’re there and you’ve participated on the page enough that your name is known, or even if you haven’t, you are absolutely able to and should write in “Hi I am Doctor whatever from my office. We love seeing kids I totally am happy to take care of her. Here’s the link to schedule for an appointment”.
Now we’re talking Facebook. One other thing that you can do is post something on your office page that’s likely to be actively shared by other people. So one of the most prolific Facebook posts we ever made was actually done in a moment of desperation. It was Girl Scout Cookie season, and I knew that all these cookies were out there and we had had a patient come in that for whatever reason not when he left all of us had the munchies. And we’re kind of desperate in the office for Girl Scout cookies. So I posted on Facebook, something about “Is anybody in the community selling girl scout cookies? If you can bring them here, we’ll buy a box.” And all of a sudden, that post starts getting shared. Anybody who saw it was sharing it tagging the Girl Scout parents, and people were starting to come in with cookies. So we got our cookies. And we also got our post seen by a whole lot more people than would have ordinarily seen it. And so now most years Girl Scout Cookie season when I think of it, we do a similar post with the same result. I’m not necessarily recommending it, but I do know some people who have created fake Facebook profiles to join some of these community pages, especially those that they wouldn’t necessarily be a part of. Usually, we didn’t do this but there is a group in our community called “Brown Moms of Middlesex County”, and this is a group of Indian parents South Asian and Indian parents who had formed a Facebook community, and we had no idea that this existed and learned about it because we asked a new patient how they found a practice and they said that they found us somebody had recommended us on this group. And all of a sudden within two weeks we must have seen six or seven people referred by a post in this one group. So these kinds of things can be powerful. It is much better when it is real, like real actual patients doing this. I’m not saying that you should make up various ethnic profiles to be able to participate in every possible group and promote your own practice. But it is good to be part of the conversation. Hear what people are talking about, and chime in when you can. By way of participation in the community, you can also be part of your community in person, and the more people that you go out and talk to and meet in person. The more interactions you have, the more chances you have at getting one of those people to become a patient. So if you’ve never done it, or if you have but it’s been a while. It’s a great opportunity to go out and meet your business neighbors. Any type of businesses around you. You can go visit. We did this in a new practice, and we’d got little chocolate truffles like a little box with a ribbon and a sticker with our logo, and the chocolates were from a local business. So we were supporting a local business by doing this which felt good. And we made little eyeglass keychains and a little thing for our business card. And it was just a chance to say at that time. “Hey, We’re new here. Just wanted to say hi if you’re looking for an eye doctor, we’re right across the street, right across the parking lot right down the street. We would love to take care of you come in and see us,” and you have to do a lot of it. You can’t go to one business and do this and then run back to the office. And wait and hope that individual calls.
But as you meet more people, some of them will come in. So you can go to nearby businesses. You can go to school nurses, we’ve done this for years. You make a little basket of contact lens cases and one of the little trial-sized contact lens solutions. Can we give this to the nurse’s office in case a kid has a contact lens emergency their lens comes out they didn’t bring their stuff with them. Now the school nurse has something and on the basket is your office information. So whether they’re actively referring or even if it’s just something that they themselves, see every day, you never know when that school nurse needs an eye exam. Are they going to come in with their own family? We did the same thing when we opened at hotels. If you’re in an area that has a lot of nearby hotels, you’re going out bringing the case in the solutions. Do you ever get people traveling who tell you they forgot their contact lenses? Here’s a couple of care kits this used to be easier back in the day when there was closets full of care kits. That’s not so much the case anymore. But at that time, usually it was a “Oh, great thanks!” and you never know maybe you’re gonna get an occasional traveler with a corneal ulcer or an eye emergency which is fine but more importantly, you’re starting a conversation with an employee or a manager at the hotel. And then you can ask them “Oh yeah,yeah, we’re five minutes away. Do you guys have a vision plan here? Oh, yeah. Great. We take that”. Oh, you know, whatever and it just starts a conversation you guys know from going out in the world that all around you conversations about eyes are happening everywhere. Like you can’t go out to eat without the people behind you discussing their presbyopia and somebody else talking about their macular degeneration and somebody’s wondering if laser eye surgery actually works like you hear these conversations everywhere. So when people have the opportunity to talk to someone about it, who knows something and a lot of cases they will jump at that. So school nurses, businesses, hotels, senior centers, people have done an eyeglass adjustment screw tightening kind of event at senior centers, or as you’re going around to these you can offer to speak if you enjoy or don’t hate public speaking. So you can go in person or send a letter to schools. You can send it to the school principals, telling them that you love educating people about their eyes and if they’re ever looking for a speaker for PTA for parents for an in service for the nurses and in service for the teacher to talk about vision problems related to learning, somebody to speak for a career day in the classroom, or even just to help teach a science lesson if you’ve got the room and you’re scheduled to do it. It’s an opportunity to get out there and meet people. Can you speak at senior centers to talk about understanding your eyes as you age the ins and outs of cataract surgery whatever stuff you want to talk about.
A lot of these groups are looking for speakers, will absolutely take you up on it. And it’s another chance to build a relationship that at worst. You’ve provided education and you’ve provided service to your community. And at best you’ve done that and generated some business for your practice. If you have a full schedule all day every day, this is probably not a practical use of your time to go out and spend a few hours in the morning educating at a senior center. But if you if you’re looking to build your practice and you have the time, it’s absolutely a great thing to do. If you are busy all day, you can have the opportunity to speak at a Srvice Club, Lions Club, a Rotary Club, Knights of Columbus, I don’t know all the others but there are service clubs out there that Lions, their philanthropy, their charities for visually impaired and hearing impaired people. So a lot of what they do is centered around eyes, and glasses and vision. So if you’ve done something cool, like you did a VOSH trip when you were in optometry school, you’ve done a mission trip. They would absolutely welcome you to come to their meeting. Spend 20 or 30 minutes show slides with the cool pictures of all the people lined up outside and the next day in the room with their patches until a couple of cool stories. And it’s again just a chance to meet people and I would say if you meet nice people in a service club. It’s also an opportunity to join the club. And be active not just for the reason of getting patients from it. But to be part of a group that’s giving in the community. It’s pretty cool. There are also clubs specifically for networking. These are local networking business clubs. And they get an eye doctor and accountant and whatever and they all use each other services and a lot of them meet in the mornings before regular business hours. It’s all working people and they are actively seeking members and seeking people to refer to the other side of that coin is that you then have to use their services if you want them to use your so it’s like a whole strings attached kind of group which has worked really well for some people and hasn’t worked as well for others. staying in a community, you can do a community event or participate in something as an office. Again, to just increase awareness of your office and your brand. And practices do this. They get all the staff members there is an event that somebody cares about maybe a staff member had breast cancer. So you’re going to do a breast cancer walk or pride event or a walk for domestic violence is something that somebody on your team feels passionately about. And this is volunteer stuff you’re offering the people on your team the opportunity to participate in this if they want to. And if they want to, you go out together. You’re there as a group. If the event doesn’t have its own T-shirts, you can get matching service T-shirts made up. And it just puts you out there. The worst thing is sitting in your practice feeling helpless like this is happening to me. Why is my schedule so slow? The phones seem to not be ringing and there’s nothing I can do about it. And there’s a lot of power in doing something about it. Even if it’s a slow process that’s gonna get you one or two patients at a time, especially in a new practice. Those one or two patients at a time make a difference.
You can also get involved with other local businesses who are looking to build their own customer base. I mentioned that we did those little chocolates from a local chocolate company and so when we use their chocolates, we put it on our Instagram we tagged them on our Instagram. We hoped that they would put a picture and tag us on Instagram, just to get your name out to someone else’s customer base. So there are a couple of ways to do this. One of them is you can find a local business that has a complimentary customer base for your product. So let’s say there is a golf supply store near you. Can you do something in a collaboration with them to talk about Sunwear different color glasses to use for golf? And obviously you have to know what you’re talking about and I don’t so I’ll not talk too much about golf. But if you go and speak to them and you let them know you know we’re looking to build our patient base and we’re looking for people who are really interested in golf. We’ve got these great lines of Sunwear that are specifically made for golfers. Would we be able to put a display in your store with some information or maybe a video would you be willing to post a video on your site? So we put a display in your store and then you could put a display of golf things that they sell in golf stores in our office and be able to refer people back and forth. So anything sports-specific golf, cycling because those patients see eyewear as gear for their sport or for their hobby, which has an entirely different price limit an entirely different budget, and an entirely different level of necessity in their head than just another pair of glasses.
You can also collaborate with local businesses on an event so you know this is going to come out Mother’s Day is just past but if you have a hair salon in your plaza, if you have a nail salon if you do any esthetics, treatment, and maybe there’s a flower shop and a nice little restaurant, you can work with them to put something altogether so that maybe people can enter their mom in a contest or somebody who’s been a mom to them or enjoy themselves however they want to get in. And if you’re posting this on your office, social media, tagging all the other businesses, they’re posting it on their social media, tagging all the other businesses including you and now you’re getting exposure to all of their followers. So you’re putting together a package where a mom gets a new pair of glasses, an IPL treatment, maybe haircut, nails done, and a gift certificate for lunch. And everybody’s getting different moms to enter. So you’re building the potential base of people that you can market to. As you get to know the other business owners around you, especially when there’s like a restaurant or a spa or another business that just have like a full-service model. Ideally similar vibe to your practice. You can talk to that business owner about putting their employees in your glasses. A lot of them they’re small business owners too. Maybe they don’t have a vision plan. Or maybe, you know, they don’t have any benefits for their team. They want to do something for their team. So maybe you work something out with the business owner, to have everybody in the cosmetic dentistry office, wearing eyewear from your practice because people are there who are your target patients. These are people who care about their appearance care about their health and are willing and able to spend money on that. So for a lot of our practices, that’s an ideal patient. So if you can get your stuff into their space, even if it’s just that when their patients come to the spa to check in and they’re like “Wow, those are really cool glasses. I got them at your office.” It can help drive patients to your practice and maybe you work something out and then you can get your staff the treatments or teeth whitening or whatever from them. And it lets both of you provide a benefit to your staff while using each other’s teams to market to each other’s customers.
Also, you can use your space so if you’re in a shopping plaza or a strip mall or a street anything that has like a walk-by drive-by traffic, if it’s within the rules for what you’re allowed to do from your building association or whatever, you can do something to call attention to your space. We’re talking about this a couple of weeks ago I was speaking to a client about getting new patients, and they just opened a practice a couple of months ago. And after that call, I’ve gone out to lunch with my husband, and we’re in the little shopping center. And there’s a crumble cookies in there that’s been in there for, I don’t know 6-7-8 months and we’re in the shopping center all the time. But on this day, the crumble cookies had easel and a whole like bunches of balloons out in front of their store. So as we’re driving by, my husband says “Oh is that new?” And this has been there for for long enough. It’s not new, and we’re there periodically, but because it looked different. It drew attention to its storefront instead of being something that we drove by the same way we’ve driven by it all the time. So if the rules allow, you can have a signboard put something different on it. Put balloons, streamers, maybe you’re promoting event, maybe my favorite you have one of those wavy arm car dealership thing, probably not that extreme, but I do like those, but something that calls attention to your space and just makes people realize that you’re there. And what you’re doing with all this is you’re building what I used to call the next eye doctor theory. That not everybody you run into or attract or meet is going to need an eye doctor, right that minute. They might have an eye doctor, they might have just had an eye exam, but through repetitive messaging. You’re reminding them that you exist and you are an eye doctor and you exist and you are an eye doctor, and a couple of months later, you still exist. You’re still an eye doctor, and maybe they’re still going to their doctor that they love. But when that doctor retires when they can’t get in for a convenient appointment, when their plan changes when that doctor’s office screws up and pisses them off. You want to make sure that they know you and they know you’re gonna be there next eye doctor. And so reminding the community and even reminding the people that you know and you’re interacting with on a daily basis, that you are an optometrist with an office and the community is important. It’s something that we realized this year that we hadn’t done such a great job of. Our daughter’s on the dance team at her high school and the dance team was looking for T-shirt sponsors. So we paid a little bit to get our name on a sponsored t-shirt, which generally doesn’t result in business and you kind of do it to be a good guy and to be part of the community. But this was to sponsor the t-shirt for their nationals competition. And if you sponsored it, then you didn’t have to pay that amount for national so we’re paying the money anyway, we just did it through the practice. And so now we’ve got our logo on these dance T-shirts that we and all the other dance parents are wearing throughout the season to the competitions. And it was bad. Funny. I don’t know it was a little bit surprising to us. But what we realized and wearing these with our logo on the back of the t-shirt is that many of the parents that we’ve interacted with all last year, all last season. You see these parents all the time, really had no idea that we were eye doctors, and when they found out said things like “Oh, I just took her somewhere else to get contact lenses. I totally would have come to you”. So it’s one of those that if you have merch, you have t-shirts with your office name and your office logo. You wear them when you go out to dance or hockey or out in the community. It feels funny sometimes because when I’m out at the grocery store and my sweatpants and a ponytail, I don’t necessarily want to be Dr. Fishbein from Somerset Eye Care. But being that, especially with people who have come to know me and trust me and like me, or tolerate me at the competitions anyway. Them knowing that that’s who I am professionally means that when they are looking for someone in that profession, they are more likely to come in.
So bunch of stuff that you can do. The most important thing is to do something I hope something in this was useful for you. And I hope that within the next couple of months, things pick up the offices are packed again. And you can go back to not worrying about this for now. Thank you so much for listening and more information. You can find us on powerpractice.com. If you’re sitting around wondering how do I improve my business, having a great consulting team in your corner can absolutely help, and we would love to talk to you.
Read the Transcription
Bethany Fishbein: The worst thing is sitting in your practice feeling helpless like this is happening to me. Why is my schedule so slow? The bones seem to not be ringing and there’s nothing I can do about it. And there’s a lot of power in doing something about it.
I am Bethany Fishbein, Welcome back to the Power Hour Optometry Podcast. I am the CEO of the Power Practice and Host of the Power Hour Podcast. And no guest today, this is just me talking about a topic that has been on the minds of a lot of people, which is how to get more patients into your practice. It’s kind of a funny thing because what we’ve seen across the country with a lot of the clients that we work with, is that people had an amazing first quarter of the year. When we look at our client numbers. They were up an average of 18% year over year, first quarter of 23 over the first quarter of 22 and things were good and practices were busy and there wasn’t a whole lot of concern about how to get patients on the schedule. And then for a lot of practices, April hit I don’t know the exact reason yet but all of a sudden the well dried up, and practices that were booked out a couple of weeks in advance, all of a sudden aren’t booked out so far in advance anymore. And the ones that weren’t booked in advance to begin with have open spots in the schedules for summits, open schedules like they haven’t seen in quite a few years. And obviously, that’s cause for concern when things are going so well. You just want them to continue going well. And then all of a sudden when they don’t. You’ve seen success, you’ve smelled it, you tasted it, and you’re not willing to go back to an empty schedule. Not being as efficient as you could be not filling up your days and not generating the income that you now know your practice can. So we started to get a lot of questions about what can I do to fill the schedule? And for some practices, these are new questions, and for other practices, like new practices just starting out. It’s an all the time question. So my hope today is to give you a whole bunch of information, different ideas on ways you can attract patients into your business. So here we go.
Number one, I don’t know that I’m gonna number them all the way through but for an established practice and cold starts, bear with me for a couple minutes here. Everything else is gonna apply to you but for an established practice one of the easiest ways to get more patients on the schedule is to put some effort into reactivation of patients who haven’t been in in quite some time. Right now a lot of practices have automated recall systems through a patient communication platform. So they’re sending your patients a text or an email a month after they missed their appointment maybe it 18 months since their last visit two years since their last visit. And some patients will respond to those, and some patients those just kind of blend into the woodwork they hit the delete without even reading it or considering it. So a reactivation effort allows you to do something different to email or to text all of your patients with some kind of new information about the practice. It’s been a while since we’ve seen you we just got in brand new glasses line, we have a new instrument, we have a new associate, we have new staff members, whatever the new information is to engage them. This is something different. Take a look. Take a read and it’s not going to generate a zillion appointments, but it’s going to generate some and when the schedule is empty. That’s what you need to say that can be blanketed to all of your patients. For certain patients, especially those with a condition that has a higher degree of necessity for an annual eye exam. So these are your diabetics, your glaucoma patients, somebody on a medication that needs to be monitored when they’re overdue. We’re going to up the effort a little bit, and this is where a personal phone call from a staff member can make a difference. They’re calling they’re saying the doctors named, “Dr. Fishbein asked me to give you a call. He noticed it’s been two years since your last exam and we need to be seeing you every year. We’ve got an appointment open Thursday or Friday. Which of those is better for you?”. Staff members are not going to be super fans of making these phone calls. But a lot of us have young staff in the office that would do anything rather than pick up the phone especially to call somebody who didn’t call in for the appointment and might reject them, but you can make it fun you have a list. If they get a certain number they get a present you heard the episode a couple of weeks ago on mini-games, give them motivation to call we’re gonna make this many calls a day Doc sit down and call with them just to be part of it. And those in addition, we’ll get patients in reactivation.
Second thing is when your schedule is slower like that, and you have open availability. One of the things that you can do is take advantage of that and block schedule, create blocks in your schedule, where you’re not going to see patients. And you’re going to use that time for other things, maybe to do some of the activities we’re going to talk about in a couple of minutes. So if you’re usually scheduled to see 16 people for exams every day and all of a sudden you only have 10 or 11 or 12. If you do nothing to your schedule, those 10 people will take up exactly the amount of time that 16 took up a month ago. It’s just human nature. Maybe have a few minutes in between, but it’s a very rare person that can use those few minutes for something productive. So it’s better to say, “Okay, I’m looking at the schedule. I only have 10 people coming in a day. You know what, I’m going to take a half day and use that time to either work on something that needs improvement in the business or to work on efforts to generate more patience for the practice”. So take advantage of the downtime blocks of management time in your schedule, and then start to put it to good use. One of the ways that you can use that time is to work with your staff to create an in-office event and put effort into promoting it. We talked about emailing your patients for reactivation telling them about something new. So having an event in the office gives you something to talk about and gives you reason to reach out to people a couple of times. It also generates some excitement and a difference in the day-to-day routine for your staff. So this can be something like a trunk show where you have a vendor for eyeglass frames come in or a couple of vendors regular frame vendor a sunglass vendor, bring their whole line in, your staff dresses up you can have food and little snacks, and some kind of full mocktail some people do it with alcohol and invite people to come in. You’ve got your regular schedule for exams, but you’re also inviting people to come in and see the collection on that day. It should result in a good day, which if your schedule is really slow, you will welcome a good busy day. But the other thing that it does is because you have something to talk about. It’s making you post a couple of times on your Facebook, your Instagram, it’s making you send an email letting people know that you’re having this and then there’s reason to send a follow-up email a week later and don’t forget it’s today email the day of which just helps keep your practice front and center in your patients minds in that focused management time. It’s also a good opportunity when things are slow to remind the docs who refer to you of that relationship.
A lot of optometrists do have doctors in the community who refer to them. Maybe it’s a primary care doctor who is uncomfortable prescribing eyedrops with steroids or who’s referring diabetic patients for routine exams. Maybe it’s a an optometrist who does mostly primary routine care and will refer the specialty contact lens fits or low vision or myopia patients. Either way, when you remind that doctor that you exist, you are more likely to get a referral in the next couple of days or weeks than if you don’t. It’s the reason why all these reps are visiting your office. All the time because their companies know that effect. Where when you see them, and you’re reminded, especially if something that you don’t routinely do or think about all the time, it’s like Oh, yeah, and almost inevitably, you will use their product in the couple of days after the visit. That’s why they do it. And it works. So when you have that time, it’s a good opportunity to call one of the referring doctors tell them about a patient that you saw. Thank them for referring do they need anything else? Maybe you stop by their office, if it’s a great relationship, you go for coffee, maybe you have lunch, and you will see referrals start to come in, in a couple of days after that. It’s also an opportunity to develop new referral relationships with doctors who don’t necessarily refer haven’t referred yet. One of the things it’s proven to be fairly effective is to make a laminated sheet that has your practice information on it. It has the services that you provide, particularly those that are relevant to the doctor that you’re visiting. So if you’re going to a primary care doctor’s office, you’re going to have diabetic eye exams, emergency eye care, you know, regular glasses and contacts blah, blah, blah. If you’re going to a pediatric practice, you’re going to have information on myopia. If you’re going to a rheumatologist, you’re gonna have dry eye like whatever your stuff is that’s going to benefit this doctor’s office. And then you have the insurances that you take on the back because for a lot of especially primary care, urgent care referrals, they are looking in network for the patients. For specialty services, you don’t have to have that on the back. They’re referring for the service outside of the insurance plan. But you make a sheet. It’s got your info, your services, insurance, and any true unique service proposition. Why should they come see you instead of any of the other places that they could go to or refer to, for a brand new practice, it might be that you can always guarantee that you’ll have a same-day appointment, which is pretty high value for patients who need a form for the DMV, they need their eye check for their driver’s license or for a school sports physical or whatever. Is it a unique service that no one else does? And then you bring those usually with some cookies getting in the door for the staff to just introduce yourself and drop off materials, primary cares, urgent cares, minute clinics, specialists office, pediatricians, ophthalmology, school nurses, like whoever you can think of, instead of sitting around wondering why your practice isn’t as busy as you want it to be. You are out there doing something about it, generating business for the practice while you’re there, not while you’re at the offices while you’re in your office with this time to spare.
Something else that helps is to update your Google business profile. Did you ever notice that when you change your office hours, or you change something about the business which most of us don’t do too often on the Google business profile, all of a sudden it feels like people are calling or they’ll notice it, they’ll get a notification. So you can put up a blog post update photos, make sure your office hours are updated. If there’s a holiday coming up in your close for Memorial Day, update your business hours, something on your business profile. And I have marketing guests who can talk away more intelligently about this than I can but doing things like that helps Google realize that you are alive and active business, that your profile is active and you rank higher in the searches and get patients bbecause of that as a result. While you’re working on your digital online reputation and social media profiles.
Something else you can do is to participate actively participate in any of the local Facebook groups that are people in your community having conversations with each other. So almost every community has at least one probably multiple Facebook groups. And this is a place for people to post. Sometimes looking for recommendations, the most notable thing I see is when someone hears a loud bang, and they have to post about it, and then everybody else chimes in that they heard the loud bang too. But people will sometimes when they get over the shock of the loud bang ask “Do you know an eye doctor that’s good for kids?”. And if you’re there and you’ve participated on the page enough that your name is known, or even if you haven’t, you are absolutely able to and should write in “Hi I am Doctor whatever from my office. We love seeing kids I totally am happy to take care of her. Here’s the link to schedule for an appointment”.
Now we’re talking Facebook. One other thing that you can do is post something on your office page that’s likely to be actively shared by other people. So one of the most prolific Facebook posts we ever made was actually done in a moment of desperation. It was Girl Scout Cookie season, and I knew that all these cookies were out there and we had had a patient come in that for whatever reason not when he left all of us had the munchies. And we’re kind of desperate in the office for Girl Scout cookies. So I posted on Facebook, something about “Is anybody in the community selling girl scout cookies? If you can bring them here, we’ll buy a box.” And all of a sudden, that post starts getting shared. Anybody who saw it was sharing it tagging the Girl Scout parents, and people were starting to come in with cookies. So we got our cookies. And we also got our post seen by a whole lot more people than would have ordinarily seen it. And so now most years Girl Scout Cookie season when I think of it, we do a similar post with the same result. I’m not necessarily recommending it, but I do know some people who have created fake Facebook profiles to join some of these community pages, especially those that they wouldn’t necessarily be a part of. Usually, we didn’t do this but there is a group in our community called “Brown Moms of Middlesex County”, and this is a group of Indian parents South Asian and Indian parents who had formed a Facebook community, and we had no idea that this existed and learned about it because we asked a new patient how they found a practice and they said that they found us somebody had recommended us on this group. And all of a sudden within two weeks we must have seen six or seven people referred by a post in this one group. So these kinds of things can be powerful. It is much better when it is real, like real actual patients doing this. I’m not saying that you should make up various ethnic profiles to be able to participate in every possible group and promote your own practice. But it is good to be part of the conversation. Hear what people are talking about, and chime in when you can. By way of participation in the community, you can also be part of your community in person, and the more people that you go out and talk to and meet in person. The more interactions you have, the more chances you have at getting one of those people to become a patient. So if you’ve never done it, or if you have but it’s been a while. It’s a great opportunity to go out and meet your business neighbors. Any type of businesses around you. You can go visit. We did this in a new practice, and we’d got little chocolate truffles like a little box with a ribbon and a sticker with our logo, and the chocolates were from a local business. So we were supporting a local business by doing this which felt good. And we made little eyeglass keychains and a little thing for our business card. And it was just a chance to say at that time. “Hey, We’re new here. Just wanted to say hi if you’re looking for an eye doctor, we’re right across the street, right across the parking lot right down the street. We would love to take care of you come in and see us,” and you have to do a lot of it. You can’t go to one business and do this and then run back to the office. And wait and hope that individual calls.
But as you meet more people, some of them will come in. So you can go to nearby businesses. You can go to school nurses, we’ve done this for years. You make a little basket of contact lens cases and one of the little trial-sized contact lens solutions. Can we give this to the nurse’s office in case a kid has a contact lens emergency their lens comes out they didn’t bring their stuff with them. Now the school nurse has something and on the basket is your office information. So whether they’re actively referring or even if it’s just something that they themselves, see every day, you never know when that school nurse needs an eye exam. Are they going to come in with their own family? We did the same thing when we opened at hotels. If you’re in an area that has a lot of nearby hotels, you’re going out bringing the case in the solutions. Do you ever get people traveling who tell you they forgot their contact lenses? Here’s a couple of care kits this used to be easier back in the day when there was closets full of care kits. That’s not so much the case anymore. But at that time, usually it was a “Oh, great thanks!” and you never know maybe you’re gonna get an occasional traveler with a corneal ulcer or an eye emergency which is fine but more importantly, you’re starting a conversation with an employee or a manager at the hotel. And then you can ask them “Oh yeah,yeah, we’re five minutes away. Do you guys have a vision plan here? Oh, yeah. Great. We take that”. Oh, you know, whatever and it just starts a conversation you guys know from going out in the world that all around you conversations about eyes are happening everywhere. Like you can’t go out to eat without the people behind you discussing their presbyopia and somebody else talking about their macular degeneration and somebody’s wondering if laser eye surgery actually works like you hear these conversations everywhere. So when people have the opportunity to talk to someone about it, who knows something and a lot of cases they will jump at that. So school nurses, businesses, hotels, senior centers, people have done an eyeglass adjustment screw tightening kind of event at senior centers, or as you’re going around to these you can offer to speak if you enjoy or don’t hate public speaking. So you can go in person or send a letter to schools. You can send it to the school principals, telling them that you love educating people about their eyes and if they’re ever looking for a speaker for PTA for parents for an in service for the nurses and in service for the teacher to talk about vision problems related to learning, somebody to speak for a career day in the classroom, or even just to help teach a science lesson if you’ve got the room and you’re scheduled to do it. It’s an opportunity to get out there and meet people. Can you speak at senior centers to talk about understanding your eyes as you age the ins and outs of cataract surgery whatever stuff you want to talk about.
A lot of these groups are looking for speakers, will absolutely take you up on it. And it’s another chance to build a relationship that at worst. You’ve provided education and you’ve provided service to your community. And at best you’ve done that and generated some business for your practice. If you have a full schedule all day every day, this is probably not a practical use of your time to go out and spend a few hours in the morning educating at a senior center. But if you if you’re looking to build your practice and you have the time, it’s absolutely a great thing to do. If you are busy all day, you can have the opportunity to speak at a Srvice Club, Lions Club, a Rotary Club, Knights of Columbus, I don’t know all the others but there are service clubs out there that Lions, their philanthropy, their charities for visually impaired and hearing impaired people. So a lot of what they do is centered around eyes, and glasses and vision. So if you’ve done something cool, like you did a VOSH trip when you were in optometry school, you’ve done a mission trip. They would absolutely welcome you to come to their meeting. Spend 20 or 30 minutes show slides with the cool pictures of all the people lined up outside and the next day in the room with their patches until a couple of cool stories. And it’s again just a chance to meet people and I would say if you meet nice people in a service club. It’s also an opportunity to join the club. And be active not just for the reason of getting patients from it. But to be part of a group that’s giving in the community. It’s pretty cool. There are also clubs specifically for networking. These are local networking business clubs. And they get an eye doctor and accountant and whatever and they all use each other services and a lot of them meet in the mornings before regular business hours. It’s all working people and they are actively seeking members and seeking people to refer to the other side of that coin is that you then have to use their services if you want them to use your so it’s like a whole strings attached kind of group which has worked really well for some people and hasn’t worked as well for others. staying in a community, you can do a community event or participate in something as an office. Again, to just increase awareness of your office and your brand. And practices do this. They get all the staff members there is an event that somebody cares about maybe a staff member had breast cancer. So you’re going to do a breast cancer walk or pride event or a walk for domestic violence is something that somebody on your team feels passionately about. And this is volunteer stuff you’re offering the people on your team the opportunity to participate in this if they want to. And if they want to, you go out together. You’re there as a group. If the event doesn’t have its own T-shirts, you can get matching service T-shirts made up. And it just puts you out there. The worst thing is sitting in your practice feeling helpless like this is happening to me. Why is my schedule so slow? The phones seem to not be ringing and there’s nothing I can do about it. And there’s a lot of power in doing something about it. Even if it’s a slow process that’s gonna get you one or two patients at a time, especially in a new practice. Those one or two patients at a time make a difference.
You can also get involved with other local businesses who are looking to build their own customer base. I mentioned that we did those little chocolates from a local chocolate company and so when we use their chocolates, we put it on our Instagram we tagged them on our Instagram. We hoped that they would put a picture and tag us on Instagram, just to get your name out to someone else’s customer base. So there are a couple of ways to do this. One of them is you can find a local business that has a complimentary customer base for your product. So let’s say there is a golf supply store near you. Can you do something in a collaboration with them to talk about Sunwear different color glasses to use for golf? And obviously you have to know what you’re talking about and I don’t so I’ll not talk too much about golf. But if you go and speak to them and you let them know you know we’re looking to build our patient base and we’re looking for people who are really interested in golf. We’ve got these great lines of Sunwear that are specifically made for golfers. Would we be able to put a display in your store with some information or maybe a video would you be willing to post a video on your site? So we put a display in your store and then you could put a display of golf things that they sell in golf stores in our office and be able to refer people back and forth. So anything sports-specific golf, cycling because those patients see eyewear as gear for their sport or for their hobby, which has an entirely different price limit an entirely different budget, and an entirely different level of necessity in their head than just another pair of glasses.
You can also collaborate with local businesses on an event so you know this is going to come out Mother’s Day is just past but if you have a hair salon in your plaza, if you have a nail salon if you do any esthetics, treatment, and maybe there’s a flower shop and a nice little restaurant, you can work with them to put something altogether so that maybe people can enter their mom in a contest or somebody who’s been a mom to them or enjoy themselves however they want to get in. And if you’re posting this on your office, social media, tagging all the other businesses, they’re posting it on their social media, tagging all the other businesses including you and now you’re getting exposure to all of their followers. So you’re putting together a package where a mom gets a new pair of glasses, an IPL treatment, maybe haircut, nails done, and a gift certificate for lunch. And everybody’s getting different moms to enter. So you’re building the potential base of people that you can market to. As you get to know the other business owners around you, especially when there’s like a restaurant or a spa or another business that just have like a full-service model. Ideally similar vibe to your practice. You can talk to that business owner about putting their employees in your glasses. A lot of them they’re small business owners too. Maybe they don’t have a vision plan. Or maybe, you know, they don’t have any benefits for their team. They want to do something for their team. So maybe you work something out with the business owner, to have everybody in the cosmetic dentistry office, wearing eyewear from your practice because people are there who are your target patients. These are people who care about their appearance care about their health and are willing and able to spend money on that. So for a lot of our practices, that’s an ideal patient. So if you can get your stuff into their space, even if it’s just that when their patients come to the spa to check in and they’re like “Wow, those are really cool glasses. I got them at your office.” It can help drive patients to your practice and maybe you work something out and then you can get your staff the treatments or teeth whitening or whatever from them. And it lets both of you provide a benefit to your staff while using each other’s teams to market to each other’s customers.
Also, you can use your space so if you’re in a shopping plaza or a strip mall or a street anything that has like a walk-by drive-by traffic, if it’s within the rules for what you’re allowed to do from your building association or whatever, you can do something to call attention to your space. We’re talking about this a couple of weeks ago I was speaking to a client about getting new patients, and they just opened a practice a couple of months ago. And after that call, I’ve gone out to lunch with my husband, and we’re in the little shopping center. And there’s a crumble cookies in there that’s been in there for, I don’t know 6-7-8 months and we’re in the shopping center all the time. But on this day, the crumble cookies had easel and a whole like bunches of balloons out in front of their store. So as we’re driving by, my husband says “Oh is that new?” And this has been there for for long enough. It’s not new, and we’re there periodically, but because it looked different. It drew attention to its storefront instead of being something that we drove by the same way we’ve driven by it all the time. So if the rules allow, you can have a signboard put something different on it. Put balloons, streamers, maybe you’re promoting event, maybe my favorite you have one of those wavy arm car dealership thing, probably not that extreme, but I do like those, but something that calls attention to your space and just makes people realize that you’re there. And what you’re doing with all this is you’re building what I used to call the next eye doctor theory. That not everybody you run into or attract or meet is going to need an eye doctor, right that minute. They might have an eye doctor, they might have just had an eye exam, but through repetitive messaging. You’re reminding them that you exist and you are an eye doctor and you exist and you are an eye doctor, and a couple of months later, you still exist. You’re still an eye doctor, and maybe they’re still going to their doctor that they love. But when that doctor retires when they can’t get in for a convenient appointment, when their plan changes when that doctor’s office screws up and pisses them off. You want to make sure that they know you and they know you’re gonna be there next eye doctor. And so reminding the community and even reminding the people that you know and you’re interacting with on a daily basis, that you are an optometrist with an office and the community is important. It’s something that we realized this year that we hadn’t done such a great job of. Our daughter’s on the dance team at her high school and the dance team was looking for T-shirt sponsors. So we paid a little bit to get our name on a sponsored t-shirt, which generally doesn’t result in business and you kind of do it to be a good guy and to be part of the community. But this was to sponsor the t-shirt for their nationals competition. And if you sponsored it, then you didn’t have to pay that amount for national so we’re paying the money anyway, we just did it through the practice. And so now we’ve got our logo on these dance T-shirts that we and all the other dance parents are wearing throughout the season to the competitions. And it was bad. Funny. I don’t know it was a little bit surprising to us. But what we realized and wearing these with our logo on the back of the t-shirt is that many of the parents that we’ve interacted with all last year, all last season. You see these parents all the time, really had no idea that we were eye doctors, and when they found out said things like “Oh, I just took her somewhere else to get contact lenses. I totally would have come to you”. So it’s one of those that if you have merch, you have t-shirts with your office name and your office logo. You wear them when you go out to dance or hockey or out in the community. It feels funny sometimes because when I’m out at the grocery store and my sweatpants and a ponytail, I don’t necessarily want to be Dr. Fishbein from Somerset Eye Care. But being that, especially with people who have come to know me and trust me and like me, or tolerate me at the competitions anyway. Them knowing that that’s who I am professionally means that when they are looking for someone in that profession, they are more likely to come in.
So bunch of stuff that you can do. The most important thing is to do something I hope something in this was useful for you. And I hope that within the next couple of months, things pick up the offices are packed again. And you can go back to not worrying about this for now. Thank you so much for listening and more information. You can find us on powerpractice.com. If you’re sitting around wondering how do I improve my business, having a great consulting team in your corner can absolutely help, and we would love to talk to you.