Jeff Earlywine – Speaker Notes from Podcast

Steven Schwartz (00:02.108)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Schwartz, and it’s my pleasure to have you along today. Today, my guest is Jeff Earlywine, and Jeff and I have known each other for quite a few years. His background is in growing businesses, consulting businesses, and dealing with the finances of business to help them succeed. And furthermore, his specialty is in the medical arena. So Jeff, again, we’ve known each other for a long time. Welcome to the podcast.

Jeff Earlywine (00:32.332)
Well, thank you, Steve. It’s good to be here. I look forward to sharing some things with you and your listeners, and hopefully I’ll be able to help some people.

Steven Schwartz (00:39.13)
Wonderful. I appreciate that so much. I know you’re a huge race car NASCAR fan. And what you told me before is that you’ve got five different items that we’re going to focus on today to help concierge medical practices move forward and truly succeed in the future on five different areas. Is that what you’re ready to talk about?

Jeff Earlywine (01:01.782)
I’m gonna tune for some more, wanna overload anybody, but if we get to the fifth one, we have time, great. If not, they can download the notes and be able to get a of a bonus of that fifth one.

Steven Schwartz (01:12.164)
All right, sounds good. So helping moving concierge medical practices forward into a bright and positive future for growth and success. Let’s go ahead and get started, Jeff. What do you got for us today?

Jeff Earlywine (01:24.008)
I’ve got a question first and that is, you know, to every concierge medical practice owner that’s listening here, do you really want to develop your concierge medical practice into a successful business? And the easy answer is, well, sure, absolutely. Well, you know, do you really want that? Because sometimes it takes, it takes a lot of commitment. It takes some change. It takes willingness to do all these things.

Steven Schwartz (01:37.35)
I’m sure. Of course.

Jeff Earlywine (01:52.226)
So I want to give you four or five things today, but let me just start out with saying, I stock car racing. You see behind me, I’ve got a few things on the wall there. this, past last year, in June, father’s day weekend, I went up and at the Daytona international speedway and drove bubble Wallace’s stock car on the international speedway Daytona for several laps. And I do love.

Steven Schwartz (02:15.441)
Nice.

Jeff Earlywine (02:17.87)
The idea of 40 drivers going 200 miles an hour inches apart, that’s exciting to me. And they come a long way from being a bunch of moonshiners out in the hills of North Carolina trying to get away from cops to a billion, multi -billion dollar industry and company. So what I’ve done, Steve, is I’ve looked at racing from a business point of view.

that people can take these ideas and be able to use them directly like today in their business. It’s not like it’s esoteric and they’re just write this stuff down and go, yeah, I’ll use that someday. They can take this and use it. So let me just give you a few ideas. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna share with you kind of from a race car driver’s point of view and then a business owner’s point of view. So I’ll do that on each one. So the first one is mental preparation. Now,

In a driver’s mind, the race starts long before that guy or that woman gets in the car. And the team’s got to, you know, be mentally prepared. That driver’s got to be mentally prepared to do whatever it takes to endure whatever’s going to happen during that race. Cause some of these races are four or five hours long, several laps long, several miles. They’ve got to have that mental preparation. And one thing I would say is one piece of that.

The biggest, probably biggest piece of that is you gotta win. Refusing to lose is gotta be the slogan. Losing is not an option. So in order for everybody that’s listening to me to win and overcome the challenges that they’re gonna face, they gotta be mentally prepared. So let me just talk a little bit about doing this in the business world and a concierge medical practice.

The first thing is preparing and planning the day before. Now you might think, well, that’s pretty basic. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot. Not many people do. They don’t prepare. They don’t plan the day before the week before the month before the year before they just kind of wing it. So what I would say is prepare every day to work more on your business, more on your concierge medical practice than just in it.

Jeff Earlywine (04:40.162)
Now, if you’re like a lot of the doctors I work with, you’re the doctor and you’re the guy that cleans the toilets and sleeps on the floor and does the payroll and all these things and pays the bill and you’re working in it, but you’ve got to be prepared to work on it. The next thing I would say is expect the best, but be prepared for the worst. So a race car driver, they’re going to expect a win, but they’re going to be prepared for some kind of engine failure or engine problem or whatever, or some

one of the other drivers to do something, they be prepared. So you gotta be able to set some goals. You gotta be prepared for the challenges. And the last thing I’d say about this mental preparation is think outside the box. Just because you’ve done it this way or you’ve seen it done this way or you’ve read it done this way doesn’t mean that that’s the way it ought to always be.

The world we live in, Steve, is really different than it was 10 years ago, five years ago. I mean, we had COVID hit our world. I mean, nobody had ever been do that before. We didn’t know what we were doing. We probably screwed up a whole lot of things, but we had to really think outside the box. One thing that really hasn’t gone away is what we’re doing right now. I mean, you’re in your office, I’m in my office, and we’re…

We’re doing things differently than we might have done it 10 years ago where we might’ve all met in a studio. I read, I heard this the other day that Bill Gates said this, that AI, this is Bill Gates now, AI is the greatest innovation he has seen in his lifetime. Bill Gates said that. To me that says something. That is a huge, I mean, it’s not like Jeff Earlywine saying AI is great.

Steven Schwartz (06:12.208)
Exactly.

Steven Schwartz (06:26.77)
Wow, that’s a huge comment. Sure.

Jeff Earlywine (06:35.118)
That might mean something to somebody, but Bill Gates, that’s something. So mental preparation, big, big part of it. The next thing in racing is you got to have a sound car. You got to have a good car, a sound car. Every racetrack is going to have its peculiarities. Every racetrack is different. Like the Daytona International Speedway where I drove, you can drive 150, 180, 200 miles an hour. You go to some small track and you might get

you go over 100, you’re doing good. So that’s, they’re all different. They have their peculiarities and differences. They have their challenges to overcome. And that driver and that crew, that team, is gonna be able to identify them before they get there and prepare that car to be able to handle those things. So you don’t take a car that can drive on a little short track and put it out on a big, speedway and expect it to excel, because it just won’t.

So adjusting the car to each track is a single greatest challenge, weekend and week out bar none. The driver’s gotta get input, the team’s gotta listen, the team’s gotta do it. They’ve got to get in, they’ve gotta fine tune it. There’s a lot of pieces and parts and adjustments that’s gotta be made. You know, one thing that, I don’t know if you know this, but when the cars in NASCAR, they go through a tech, what’s called a tech inspection.

Well, before they get to that, that’s NASCAR inspect and make sure they’re not trying to cheat, right? Well, the team has their own thoroughly thought out inspection that they do on every little piece of the car to make sure that it is not going to fail. Because sometimes the cheapest, the weakest link that is the cheapest link and it fails and they’re out of the race. So by the time the green flag drops on race day, everybody’s won.

The car is sound and they’re ready to go. As I said earlier, we live in a world that’s really different now. Treating patients, in perspective, it’s the same. You listen to them, analyze, subscribe, follow up. I don’t mean to minimize them, and it’s kind what a doctor does. But how you go about doing it now? How you go about growing that practice?

Jeff Earlywine (08:53.536)
That’s really different these days. The marketing part, the running of the business, the hiring of employees, the listing parts really the same, but how you might go about some of those other pieces of the puzzle, really, really different. And the business.

Steven Schwartz (09:09.446)
Well, medical technology keeps racing forward as well, not just keeping track of patient data through your EMR system, but the different tests and machines and technologies keeps racing forward. No pun intended.

Jeff Earlywine (09:27.064)
Well, that’s exactly right. And the car in this case is that concierge medical practice. Every part, every function, every employee, every experience of the patient, it’s got to be scrutinized. It’s got to be looked at. And the better that doctor or that owner sticks to those priorities and those goals, the more successful that concierge medical practice is going to be. That may all sound real simple, but I’ll tell you, you get going in your day and you go from patient to patient to patient.

and stress to stress to stress and challenge to challenge. It’s like, well, I’m to take it over and you forget those things. If priorities is what keeps us heading in the right direction, then our plans are the equipment that’s got to be in line. We have our priorities. You know what we want to do? We’ve got to plan it. And the old saying is if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. So we’ve got to some plans. We’ve got to look at every piece and part. I tell people when I’m coaching them,

We micromanage the business. And after all, Concierge Medical Practice, it’s a business. And micromanage has got this negative connotation. I don’t mean it that way. We look at every little part, from the time they pull on the parking lot, to the time that they get back in their car and leave that parking lot, or the time that they’re surfing on the internet trying to find that doctor or that Concierge Medical Practice, what’s it going to be like? And you micromanage each part of that.

So we’ve talked about two, mental preparation, sound car. Let’s talk about a couple of more at least. One is track position. Track position is the key to winning a race. You can start in the back of the field, but if you don’t finish first, you didn’t win. And the secret to establishing track position really comes down to risk. The crew is going to keep the driver posted on what the car can do, what it’s doing, maybe what the competition’s doing.

A lot of it comes down to the driver’s instinct.

Jeff Earlywine (11:32.63)
And it’s really difficult, Steve, to drive on a speedway where you’re trying to pass people. The cars are set up the same within reason. The talent of the drivers, the same. It’s tough to pass. It’s tough to win that way. So there’s a few things that need to kind of all fall in place. One is timing for the track position. You know, that

The timing of what happens around that driver, around that car, knowledge of the track, but risk. And, you know, it’s, it’s been said that it is not what you know, but it’s who you know, the council. That may be true in, in all facets of any business. I’m conscious of medical practice or whatever, but if you’re not at the right place and the right time, doesn’t matter. So the question is, how can you be in the right place to capitalize?

on the opportunity. Well, you’ve got to take some risks.

Steven Schwartz (12:30.834)
What type of risks do you feel that concierge medical practice physicians and owner operators take on or need to consider on a regular basis?

Jeff Earlywine (12:44.13)
Well, that’s a great question. What I’ve done is when I’m just kind of a organizational process kind of guy and I’ve alliterated this. So risk R -I -S -K. So first one is research and calculate all actions and then act. Take action. So you’re researching, you’re not just going, well, somebody said on advertising on Facebook or

I advertise on the phone book or at the local restaurant or maybe I had to hire these kinds of employees. We’ll research it, calculate it, then don’t sit on your hands, act. Don’t have that analysis paralysis kind of thing. So that’s our research.

Steven Schwartz (13:30.972)
Right, nothing’s going to happen unless you take the action with and on the calculated risk items.

Jeff Earlywine (13:39.384)
That’s exactly right. So you’ve got to act and that’s important. The eye is involved your team as much as possible. Now, many times what I have found you, you get these very intelligent people that go into business for themselves. They’re called doctors and they started concierge medical practice or any kind of medical practice, but they’re, really smart and they’ve got

people around them that maybe they don’t have the degrees and the education. But those people, maybe they’ve got life experience, maybe they know the community or the customer base, involve the team as much as possible in decisions, ideas, strategies, goals, dreams, plans, involve the team. So letter S, R -I -S -K, the letter S.

Strength comes from experience and experience comes from mistakes.

Listen, I have a PhD. It’s in the school of hard knocks. I’ve made so many mistakes. Wish I could have learned from them all, I guess. But I’ve learned from a lot of them. And that’s where education comes. That’s where experience comes from, is making those mistakes, learn from them, and move on from them. So you…

You wanted to do an initiative, you tried it, it didn’t work, maybe it bombed. I’ve had that happen. But you just say, you know what? Okay, it didn’t work. It’s an experience. We’re going to move on. It’s like Thomas Edison in the light bulb. I think he tried a thousand things and people are like, well, you failed a thousand times. no, I didn’t fail a thousand times. I just got closer to the success.

Steven Schwartz (15:32.422)
Right. What was the old phrase, experience is when you do it yourself and maybe mess up, and wisdom is when you learn from other people’s experiences.

Jeff Earlywine (15:42.7)
Well, yes, yeah, absolutely. And I’d like to think that’s kind of my mantra. I read a lot. I try to learn from other business people to do things a different way and not let them make the mistakes. And then I can learn from that, that I’ve made my share of my own as well. So R -A -S -K, so the K is keep your goals in clear view. Now I’ve got a

process I’ve all people through on how to do this. know, business owners come to me all the time. They want to engage the staff. They want to accomplish new things. They want to increase their bottom line. All those things. Well, if you keep your goals in clear view, you’ll more than likely going to hit them, especially if those goals are not just in clear view, but they’re being updated on a regular basis to see how close you’re getting.

And that’s really, really important. So that’s the track position piece and it takes risks. So let’s talk about one more at least and see how we’re doing on time here with your group. The last one, the next to the last one, what I’ll talk about is a pit stop.

Now pit stops back in the day, back, you know, 30 years ago, a pit stop was probably 20 to 30 seconds. That was a good, you come in, you pull the car in on pit road. You know, you, they, they take off four wheels, they put four new ones on, they clean the windshield and they put 20 gallons of gas in it. And they do all that in say 30 seconds back, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

And that was really good. Now, if you do it, if you take more than 15 seconds, you’re toast. Most of them take 10, between 10 and 15 to do all of that. It’s poetry in motion. I love to watch it. I know a little weird, but that’s pretty amazing. But if you think about it, you know, might hit a pistol out of four or five of them in a race.

Steven Schwartz (17:44.626)
Amazing.

Jeff Earlywine (17:58.126)
And that thing had four of them and involved 15 seconds. That’s a minute. But that’s one of the most important things of the race. Because if you, if you mess up, let’s put it this way. It’s a lot easier to make time up and pass people on the, on the track, but it’s really easy to pass them on pit road because they’re stopped.

So if they’re taking 20 seconds to do a pit stop and you’re taking 15, you just increase your lead by five seconds over them. So a pit stop in a concierge medical practice, really it’s retooling and making sure what you offer is exactly what your target and market, those patients and what they need, what they’re wanting. So you really got to retool it and you got to take a pit stop to…

The pull back and look at it. So another is to have an extremely successful, you’re to see here as medical practice, a business, your pit stops, got to be intentional, planned out and effective. So when a car comes down pit road, they know, okay, we’re going to put four tires on, we’re going to put 20 gallons of gas in, we’re going to clean the windshield, we’re going to make an adjustment. Or maybe just two or three of those things. But they have, it’s intentional, it’s planned out.

and it’s extremely.

Steven Schwartz (19:26.758)
And how does that work for a concierge medical physician? What does a pit stop look like?

Jeff Earlywine (19:32.558)
Well, there could be a lot of pieces to it, but I’ll give you two. One is a weekly staff meeting. You pull the staff in, you have a meeting. What I do when I coach people is usually I say, have a 12 minute stand up staff meeting. It’s 12 minutes. are there, they dial in, come in, whatever. They stand up. They don’t sit down and get all comfortable.

And it’s really a meeting. you don’t go, hey, nobody is here. Come here, guys. Let’s talk. Nope. It’s a real, old meeting. The next thing I would say is, that concierge medical practice owner, take time to get away. Look at the numbers. Look at the goals and the progress being made. Take time to dream and know if

You’re going the right direction, the direction that you ultimately want to go. I’ve worked with medical people. I’ve worked with 150, probably, people that have owned some type of medical practice. And almost every one of them that I’ve met, I can’t think of one right now, not one, that really got out of school and said, I just want to make a million bucks and go off to a deserted island somewhere and live.

Their goals and dreams was to be able to help people. They knew they’ve got to have some mechanism to do that. And concierge medical practice is a great way. So as that owner, that practice owner pulls back and gets away, whether it’s a weekend or a whole week with the family or whatever it is, but they get away the dream. find that extremely powerful, extremely powerful.

Steven Schwartz (21:22.044)
So in other words, either with the leadership of the company or the spouse, the spouse and kids, you get away for a hotel for a weekend or a week, somewhere away that you can literally just focus on thinking about and planning about the business and the goals and which direction and way you want to go with this thing outside of the office. Clear your head.

Jeff Earlywine (21:45.25)
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tell you one of the best ones I’ve ever done. I had a, it was a pharmacy owner and he pulled one of his key pharmacists in and me and the three of us, I think we went away for just a long weekend and we did nothing but that. We charted out where the goals were, how to accomplish them. What’s the dream, how does the money look, how do the numbers look?

not just dollars, but number of patients, you all those things. We looked at all of that and what did we want next year to look like? And it was extremely, we went to a kind of a timeshare kind of thing, I think it was, or hotel, whatever. It was on the, it was a beautiful setting over on the ocean and we did that and we went out to eat and all we did was just talk about it. We kind of kept going over it. And you know, that,

that Pitch Stop was amazing. And it probably that pharmacy has now sold and it probably sold a lot more and made it more valuable because we did that Pitch Stop and that was years

Steven Schwartz (22:56.528)
Love it. Well, yeah, it’s nice.

Jeff Earlywine (22:57.112)
So those are four ways that a concierge medical practice owner can really develop that medical practice into a successful business. Now, of course, there’s more pieces to the puzzle. There’s more things to do. But if they take those four and really just focus on them, the car, the pit stop, and going back to them in notes here,

the mental preparation, they do all those things. They’re going to have a medical practice, a connoisseur’s medical practice, which is, you know, it’s coming on now because people are finding the need for it and the benefits from it. But they’re going to be able to excel past their competition. They’re going to be able to excel past their goals and dreams very easily because they took the time to really look at this from kind of a racing point of view.

Steven Schwartz (23:57.54)
Excellent. This has been so interesting and so much fun. I’ve just as we’ve been talking, I’ve been seeing in my mind’s eye the cars racing around the track and stopping for pit stops and changing tires and all that speed and adrenaline really helped me pull these the vision together for our concierge medical physicians and their businesses to help them succeed. We literally have like a minute or two left, Jeff. Is there any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Jeff Earlywine (24:29.03)
go back to this. I said it early on and the question is do you really want a successful concierge medical practice? And if you do, one of the things I went over was it was track position.

Steven Schwartz (24:38.609)
Right?

Jeff Earlywine (24:47.298)
You’ve got to end the race in first place. You’ve got to outdo your competition. You’ve got to be willing to take the risk. And if you do and you’re in first place, it doesn’t mean that everybody, well, maybe some people want to pat on the back. But really the way I would look at it is that medical practice is going to hit the goals and dreams of that owner. It’s going to help a lot of patients where they might never be helped and make a difference in the community.

Steven Schwartz (25:16.122)
Love it. Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to share these thoughts with our listeners. It’s really been a lot of fun. If someone listening to this podcast would like to speak with you personally, perhaps consider engaging you to help them with their business finances, goals, planning, whatnot, are you available for that type of phone call?

Jeff Earlywine (25:41.582)
Absolutely. So what I would say there is my phone number directly at my office is 772 -226 -0723. If you didn’t write that down, I’ll give it to you again. You can grab a pen. 772 -226 -0723 or go to purposeplanprofit .com. Purposeplanprofit .com.

There’s a lot of free materials there that’ll help their business, but they can sign up for a free strategy session, no strings attached, or jump on a Zoom or a phone call and talk over that practice and see what I can do to help.

Steven Schwartz (26:23.058)
Wonderful. Thank you so much for being willing to share your time and your expertise with the folks who are listening to this podcast. One final thought is that I believe you had emailed me your speaker’s notes for this discussion. What I’m going to do is take those notes and save them on our web page at conciergemd .marketing so that anyone who’s listening to this who may want these speaker notes can come to the website.

come to this podcast, click the button and download your speaker notes so they can keep a copy of it and use that within their practice to help them grow and succeed.

Jeff Earlywine (27:01.976)
Well, and there’s one more that I didn’t get to in our podcast today that’s in the notes. So there’s a little bonus there.

Steven Schwartz (27:08.9)
A bonus. OK, so whatever that bonus is, people have to go download the notes to to take a look at what that is. Speaking of business marketing to help a concierge medical practice grow and thrive, that’s what concierge medical marketing is all about. That’s my company. And we are offering a free book called The Definitive Guide to Winning with Digital Marketing for Concierge Medical Practices. The book is absolutely free and available for instant download through our website, ConciergeMD

And of course, anyone listening to this podcast is welcome to call me if they’d ever like to have a discussion to talk about their digital marketing to help them grow their concierge medical practice to a million dollars or to achieve their next million dollars in gross revenue. My phone number is 772 -304 -2420. 772 -304 -2420. Jeff Earlywine, thank you so much for taking the time to be on our podcast today.

been great knowing you all these years and I’m just grateful for you and sharing your expertise with our listeners today.

Jeff Earlywine (28:15.416)
Steve, thanks for having me.

Steven Schwartz (28:16.838)
My pleasure. Have a great day.

Jeff Earlywine (28:18.936)
Thanks, bye.