I just finished a call with a client who fits a common profile I see across the business and health care industries. He has been in practice for a little over 20 years. He has made it through the ups and downs, sifted through the 2008 wave and survived. But he is still finding himself trading time for money and is starting to look over the horizon to five, 10, 15 years from now, wondering what is in store for him.
Being on the north side of 50 myself, having owned several practices, and owning a digital marketing company, I get a fair amount of calls and emails, many with this common thread. Most of them are happy doing what they are doing, but they are looking for something they can build that would complement their practice and still be enjoyable.
The other big thing is that it cannot take a lot of extra time. No more trading time for dollars; and if it could be an evergreen business that allows them to put the work in up front and then keep generating income years down the road, that would be a bonus!
"No problem," I always say. "Let me get my bag of pixie dust, hop on my unicorn, and I will ride right over and 'poof.' I will present to you a solution to fit your desires." But a funny thing happened as I was saddling up my magical unicorn. It hit me. Wait a minute. I already have that solution. Hell, I have been doing it for years myself. So, I put the unicorn back in the stable, tucked the pixie dust away until next time, and started telling my clients about the solution: an online store.
Setting Up a Store: 4 Steps
"Bob" has a general practice and was feeling the pinch of declining revenue. As a result, he implemented a weight-loss program a year ago. He came to me asking for marketing advice. So, I got on the phone with him to see what he really wanted. (Hint: it's not marketing advice.) He wanted to increase his revenue and spend less time stuck in the office. (Don't we all?) Here are the solutions I suggested:
1. We could create a funnel and drive traffic into his clinic. This would create extra revenue, but would not achieve time freedom; or
2. We could create an online store that complements his practice.
Step #1: We designed a store on Shopify that modeled after his clinic with all the same colors, logos, images, etc., in order to make the patient feel right at home. Bob put all his products on the store.
Step #2: He did a short 30-second video (a staff member filmed him on a smartphone) introducing each of the products. For example, his fish oil product had written product description and right next to it, a short video of the doctor telling the shopper what it's used for, conditions, product quality, etc., while also talking about how combining it with other products enhances the benefits (educational upselling).
Step #3: We opened an online merchant account (you can use PayPal, Stripe, etc.) and integrated it with his store for seamless checkouts.
Step #4: We integrated an app (it does have a monthly fee) called "Product Upsell" so whenever a patient selects a product, they will see a pop-up window offering another "add on "product that complements the original one. We noticed that by doing this, we passively increased sales by almost one-third (32 percent).
Expanding the Store
After only a little over six months, Bob's store has hit the "comma club" in revenue and is still growing. If the doctor desires (which I strongly advise) he could easily start selling other products and services on his store, such as online digital courses about nutrition and more, and even live Skype or Zoom packages where the doctor counsels patients across the country 1-2 times per month for a fee.
In fact, here is a little inside information: I, myself, have an online store that sells pre-recorded online continuing-education courses for massage therapists. Here is an example. I started with a subject very familiar to me: sciatica. The course was "Treating Clients With Sciatica."
I started working on a PowerPoint presentation after clinic hours. After a week, I had created around 40 educational slides. I went to Walmart and purchased a $23 microphone (I have a better one now, a Yetti) and simply read off the slides and told a few clinical stories relating to the subject. No cameras; just a voice recording with a slide presentation. It lasted, with my blabbering, approximately 70 minutes. I uploaded it to Vimeo, filed the paperwork with the appropriate boards and got it approved for 1.5 CEs.
I sent it out to a very small email list of about 200 therapists and offered it as a CE webinar for $25. The first week, I sold more than 25 of them. Now I know that's not a lot of money, but it was something I created in my head, put down on paper and offered to a targeted audience ... that's it. I made a little over $600. Man, I was onto something!
Fast forward to today, I have over 45 courses made in the same format, all put onto a store digitally, and making passive income of over $10,000 a month. Oh, and that sciatica course – guess what ... I am still selling it to this day! That's known as evergreen income. Unicorns and pixie dust be damned!
Get Paid for Fishing
I recently ran an ad on Facebook announcing the sciatica course was on sale for only $1. (Hey, I had no product cost other than advertising.) I set the budget for $40 per day in ad spend and sold over 25 a day on average. But the cool thing is, remember that little app I mentioned earlier, the "product upsell"? Well, when the person selects the $1 sciatica course, a little pop-up appears and recommends another course the person should pair the sciatica course with – and offers a sale price (but significantly more than the sciatica course).
I am getting about one-third of sciatica course purchasers to also buy the second course. In fact, I was on the lake the other day fishing and had sold more than $300 worth by noon. I got paid for fishing!
So, if you are looking over the horizon and wondering what pixie dust and unicorns have to do with practice (which is absolutely nothing, but it sounds cool), then I strongly suggest you consider building an online a store and filling it with products, courses, educational videos and whatever else you are inclined to produce and develop. It has worked well for me and many others. Now, off to the lake again to get paid for more fishing.
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