In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steve Schwartz interviews Helen Tackitt, a family nurse practitioner and owner of Direct Primary Care Mebane. Helen shares her journey into medicine, the transition to a direct primary care model, and the marketing strategies that have helped her practice grow. She discusses the importance of patient connection, the challenges of setting boundaries, and the success stories of her patients, particularly in functional medicine. The conversation also touches on the future of direct primary care and the potential for government support in this innovative healthcare model.

 

Chapters

 

00:00 Introduction to Direct Primary Care
04:09 Helen Tackitt’s Journey into Medicine
09:29 Advice for New Practitioners
11:26 Marketing Strategies for DPC Practices
24:43 Success Stories in Functional Medicine
28:20 The Future of Direct Primary Care

 

Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Schwartz. Today, it is my pleasure to introduce Helen Tackitt from Direct Primary Care Mebane. Welcome.

Helen Tackitt (00:37)
Thank you.

Steven Schwartz (00:38)
So glad that you took the time to join me on the podcast today. What I’d like to do on our recording today is to give our listeners a chance to learn more about you, your background, why and how you created your business, what challenges you experienced to build it, what worked, what didn’t work, maybe even some marketing, what kind of marketing worked and didn’t work, things like that. So that folks who are listening to this

who are considering starting their own DPC practice or concierge medicine practice can get value from what you share to help them grow their companies. That sound like a good plan? All right, Helen, take it away. Tell us a little bit about your background and what got you into medicine originally.

Helen Tackitt (01:14)
Sounds great.

Yeah, so I am a family nurse practitioner and I have been for almost 19 years prior to that registered nurse. I’ve been in the healthcare fields for about 25 years. So my family is full of people who are in the medical field, nurses, practitioners. And so actually it was

my dad pretty much said, you know, this is a great thing for you to do. Go be a nurse and you always have a job. So didn’t really give a whole lot of thought to what I was gonna do, just kind of knew I was gonna be a nurse. And then like I said, transition there to nurse practitioner and then got my doctorates. Wow, I guess it’s been almost 10 years ago now. And worked in a combination of urology, oncology and primary care.

And then COVID came. And so at that point, I was working in oncology and it was more administrative position in oncology. And I said, you know, I don’t feel like I’m making a difference in people’s lives on this administrative side. I was really working more with the affiliates of Duke and

doing education for the nurses and making sure they were compliant with all the guidelines and safety stuff. But I wanted to actually be back in patient care where I felt like I was making a difference in people’s lives. And I said what I was doing then wasn’t filling my cup. That’s how I put it. So at that point, I just came home one day and I told my husband that I was going to my own practice. And he said, well, wait a minute, what are we doing?

Then he got on board with me and here we are in this world of direct primary care, which was a much easier transition because I didn’t have to deal with insurance companies and credentialing with insurance companies. It’s lower overhead. So it’s easier to make that transition into owning your own practice when you’re on this side of things in direct primary care. He was smart enough to

actually write down everything that we were doing in the whole journey. And we do have a book that’s published and it’s available on Amazon, which is how to open your own direct primary care practice so that that is available to other providers who are saying, well, I want to do this, but I don’t know how and where to get started. So we do have that out there. And so I just love it because it gives me the time to really connect with people

the patients really almost become like family. It’s a whole different environment when they walk in the door here and they’re not sitting in a waiting room full of people, we take them back to the room right away. And we have that time to spend together. It’s not these 15 minute rushed appointments. So we’re spending a good 30 minutes to an hour together. And some of that’s not spent actually talking about their medical problems, but their kids and green kids or whatever because

Like I said, we have that time and it is a family environment where we’re really connecting with these patients. So that really, then I felt like my cup was being filled.

Steven Schwartz (04:30)
I love it. So many good nuggets that you’ve just shared. When somebody is considering starting as a new doctor or NP or PA coming out of their med school residency and whatnot, what advice would you give them to encourage them to look at DPC instead of a traditional insurance based model?

Helen Tackitt (04:49)
Yeah, so I think stepping right out of school and opening a indirect care practice or any practice can be a little stressful. So for me, I had opened a practice before, so I had been in charge of opening Duke’s Urology practice that’s in Raleigh from nothing. I mean, I was given a space and here you go. So I had to figure out everything, staffing and budgets and supplies and everything. So I already had that experience.

And I think that was very helpful. Plus being in that other environment where you’re having to move fast pace really helps when you’re trying to open a direct care practice. So I wouldn’t encourage anybody to come right out of school and try to open a practice like this. I think it’s really good for them to learn how traditional practices work.

plus to learn the insurance side because you don’t get away from it. You still have to do prior authorizations for imaging. You still deal with some of that with medications. You need to know how the big systems work so that you can have an easier time connecting with them, referring patients to the specialists and stuff. I do encourage people to…

as difficult as it is to enter that world, at least for a little bit, a couple of years.

Steven Schwartz (06:14)
Right. So getting your feet wet, as they say, to see how the insurance-based practices work. Obviously, a few years out of school, they get a chance to earn some money to help pay down any loans that they may have incurred and to really just see how it works so that in the back of their mind, if they do want to start a DPC on their own later, they’re better equipped to be able to do so. I love it.

Helen Tackitt (06:17)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Exactly.

Steven Schwartz (06:42)
And the fact that you wrote a book helping teach people how to do this is marvelous. What’s your book called?

Helen Tackitt (06:47)
how to open your own direct primary care practice. We can’t be simple.

Steven Schwartz (06:50)
Love it. Right? Straight to

the point. I love it. Why don’t you share your website address? Or you know, is it on Amazon? Where can people get your book?

Helen Tackitt (06:59)
So the book is on Amazon, so if you just search the title, it is on there. The website for the practice is the name of the practice, so it’s just DirectPrimaryCareMebane.com, but like I said, the book is on Amazon.

Steven Schwartz (07:14)
Awesome yeah that’s great there’s nothing quite like having your book on amazon to show that you’re an expert in the field that you know the subject beyond just writing the book do you offer coaching or consultative approach to people if they need help walking them through this.

Helen Tackitt (07:32)
Not at this time because I’m the sole provider in this office, but it is something that my husband and I have talked about because he’s got a business degree. So he did the marketing plan for this very in-depth process. Thank God I had him because I wouldn’t have been able to put together that whole business plan like he did. So we have talked about him.

being available to help other APPs or physicians write business marketing plans so that they can get loans and stuff. And me doing some coaching through that, but we’re just not at a place for that yet. I have a nurse practitioner or a nurse practitioner student, my nurse is in school to be a nurse practitioner and she’s gonna graduate at the end of this year and then I’m gonna bring her on.

And so that’s gonna free me up a little bit, but I also do functional medicine and I’m very busy and those patients need a lot of my time. So she’s gonna pretty much help with the primary care side to free me up more for the functional side. And we are expanding that piece of the practice. So we’ll have three locations. So I don’t have that time to give at this point.

Steven Schwartz (08:50)
Right. So maybe at some point in the future, as you continue to grow and scale, you’ll be able to also have some time for coaching other folks. But as of right now, buy the book, read the book and, you know, wish you well. Yeah, it’s hard when, you get into a DPC practice because you want to have more time with your patients and not end up filling up that extra time.

Helen Tackitt (09:03)
Yes.

Hahaha

You

Steven Schwartz (09:19)
that you may have with doing other stuff that makes you busy and stressed out again.

Helen Tackitt (09:23)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I’m good with boundaries. I learned that when I was in the world of administrative stuff, because even at that point, you’re still seeing patients, and I was managing everything and all that, so I always had somebody in my ear. So I’m very good at setting boundaries. And that, you said struggles. So that is one of the things that I see people when they’re opening their practices struggle with, is that they’re not good at setting boundaries.

Steven Schwartz (09:39)
wonderful. Go ahead.

Helen Tackitt (09:50)
So they have basically just gone from a insurance-based practice where they’re seeing a patient every 15 minutes into a direct care practice because they want to be able to spend more time with their patients, but they also want a better work-life balance. But they don’t set their boundaries. And so then they have patients messaging them at all hours of the day and night, and that’s really not feasible if you want to have a good work-life balance.

Steven Schwartz (10:20)
I completely agree. One of the physicians I interviewed for the podcast a few weeks ago had some beautiful advice and he basically said when he’s working with onboarding a patient and sometimes needing to remind them throughout the course of their relationship that if it can wait until the morning, please let it wait until the morning because don’t you want me to get a good night’s sleep so that I can be as fresh and mentally focused for you?

Helen Tackitt (10:43)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schwartz (10:48)
and our other patients when I come to work at eight or nine in the morning. And while that may not always work, at least you’re sort of gently nudging and training your patients to respect those boundaries as we’re all humans here and humans need sleep. And if you’re getting five text messages every night between 11 and 6 a.m., you’re not gonna be on your best for the next day’s work.

Helen Tackitt (11:13)
Right, it’s true. That’s why you don’t want to be the first surgery case in the morning, because that surgeon probably hasn’t slept good.

Steven Schwartz (11:15)
exactly.

I take my hat off to the folks who do that and hearing the stories of 36 hours on and then 24 hours off or whatever it might be. It’s like, can’t even imagine just literally staying awake for 36 hours, much less being productive. mean, when it gets to like 20 hours awake, I’m like, I’m done. I got nothing else to give to anybody here. I want to go to bed. So God bless the physicians and NPs who do that and do it regularly in their, especially in their training and residency and whatnot.

You mentioned a little bit earlier that you were growing, quote, that area of your practice. Was that the functional medicine area? Okay. So with that, is your DPC side full or are you still growing there too?

Helen Tackitt (11:56)
Thank you.

So the entire practice is, because I’m the only one, so they’re all under me. So my entire practice is somewhere around 450 patients right now. so, whereas traditional DPC, they like to cap their patients at around 500. What I see with, when you’re doing functional medicine is,

because the patients are so much more complex and complicated and take so much more of your time, it’s unreasonable to have a 500 cap in the world that I’m in right now. So where I truly feel comfortable is probably around 350. I’m pushing over that though because as I’m helping people and they’re feeling better,

in the functional world, I will send them, I graduate them. So I’m like, you don’t need me anymore. You know where to find me if you do need me. So I don’t use wait lists like some practices do because there’s always people coming and going. It will be helpful to me to get my other nurse practitioner up and running. And no, she won’t be near CAP. So on the primary care side, I think there’s,

just over 200 patients on that side.

Steven Schwartz (13:28)
Excellent. And you mentioned that your husband helped with your marketing as a business guy. What marketing techniques did he implement when you guys got started to help you get your first 10, 20, 30, 50 patients? What’s best?

Helen Tackitt (13:45)
Yeah, so we tried a little bit of everything because of course you don’t know at that point what’s gonna be best and all areas are different. we didn’t do, we did one Google ad but in Mevin we don’t need to worry about SEO because if you search primary care, I’m the second place that comes up. Duke will come up first because they put a ton of money into it and stuff and then I come up right after them.

There was no reason for me to sink money into SEO. We did BNI groups. You can meet with the BNI groups, I think it’s like three or four times a year without going. So I went to a few, I got a few patients that were members of the BNI, but I don’t remember getting necessary referrals from the BNI group, but I decided that that’s…

probably wasn’t going to be where I would get the majority of my patients. So I never, and it’s expensive to join. So I didn’t join a BNI group. I did join our local Med and Business Association, but also did not feel like that was the best use of my time. You have to go to regular meetings and I didn’t feel like I was really getting the patients from that. So where we ended up,

landing and we also did radio ads with our local country station here. But once again, I didn’t find that to be a good return on investment. And Facebook. So Facebook has been the best for us. And now that we’re entering our fourth year, it’s a lot of word of mouth. So what I do is I have every patient do a meet and greet with me prior to joining the practice.

I want to make sure they understand the model. I want to make sure it’s a good fit for them and a good fit for us. Initially, that was set up for them to just call and request a meet and greet. But what I realized was we were playing phone tag, and sometimes I would never connect with those patients. So now patients can self-schedule meet and greets through my website.

I typically just from word of mouth have about 10 or 11 meet and greets a week and that’s with no advertising. If I do a Facebook ad that will usually increase significantly, sometimes double the amount of meet and greets that I end up doing per week. And oftentimes I’m enrolling about 30 new patients a month.

Steven Schwartz (16:17)
Fantastic growth. That’s awesome. To clarify, you mentioned Facebook helped or Facebook was your best method, and then you mentioned later Facebook ads. Do you also just do basic posts as well on your basic business page? Or when you say, did Facebook, that was always related to paid ads on Facebook?

Helen Tackitt (16:25)
Yeah.

So I do post on my Facebook page and then I joined the local, like there’s three different Mebane community of Mebane pages. There’s a Burlington page. So I would share posts to those sites and I do think I got some business that way. What I find is a lot of Facebook sites don’t want businesses promoting themselves on it. It’s more for community stuff. They don’t want businesses on there.

but the ones that would allow it, did in the beginning, but really Facebook ads were where I think I got the most return on investment.

Steven Schwartz (17:16)
And if people don’t understand when you do a Facebook ad, you have the ability to target the audience of the people who actually see those ads. And could you talk a little bit about what your targeting was age, male, female location, things like that.

Helen Tackitt (17:24)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so honestly, I just did 18 and up. And then I just did usually within a 30 mile radius of the practice. And you don’t know what’s gonna stick. So what I would do is you set the amount of money that you wanna put per day and how long you wanna run the ad. So what I would typically do is just run the ad for 10 days. maybe…

$5 a day into that ad and then watch and see how well it went. If it looks like it was getting, and you wanna put some kind of link on there because you wanna see how many link clicks, they’ll just tell you how many people they got it in front of and that doesn’t count to me because that doesn’t mean they actually saw or read my ad, it just means you stuck it up there. So if you’re the link, yes, yeah.

Steven Schwartz (18:24)
Now, we call that exposures, right?

Helen Tackitt (18:28)
So if there’s a link on there that they can click on, then you know that that person actually read your ad. They took the time to click to that link, which usually I’ll link it to my web page.

Steven Schwartz (18:39)
Do you ever offer

any incentives as part of your ad? Nice.

Helen Tackitt (18:43)
I haven’t had to. I haven’t had to.

So, so then if I watch to see how many people actually clicked on it and if it looks like it was a successful ad, then I rerun that one. If not, then I scrap that one and I just make something else.

Steven Schwartz (18:58)
And by rerunning it, you rerun it sometime later. You let there be a break, you know, a couple of weeks, couple of months or what.

Helen Tackitt (19:06)
Usually, it’s after every break. I’ll just immediately go ahead and just rerun that ad.

Steven Schwartz (19:11)
OK, great. So basically, $10, $5 per day is a total $50 investment with a link that sends people to your website. Obviously, if they click it, do you do any with the cookie or pixel retargeting ads once they’ve come to your website to show them ads that I call reminder marketing ads? No? Are you familiar with that technology? Yeah, so just quickly.

Helen Tackitt (19:31)
No, haven’t done any of that. I am not.

Steven Schwartz (19:37)
I call it reminder marketing because it’s less annoying sounding, some people call it retargeting. Others call it re marketing. The idea is that if somebody from somewhere comes to your website, they’re coming for some reason. They have some level of interest, right? Even if it’s miniscule, when they come to your page, your web designer can put a cookie or a pixel on your website.

so that when that person looks around, even if it’s just for a moment or two, and leaves, they go elsewhere. They go to CNN or Fox News or the Weather Channel or History Channel or ESPN, one of these other websites that participates in a bigger ad network. Those ad network websites basically have boxes on them that ads need to be placed into. And when that provider sees that

Helen Tackitt (20:28)
Mm-hmm.

Steven Schwartz (20:31)
this person visited your practice website and they’re in your area. Essentially, they’ll push that ad promoting your business into that space on ESPN.com or on the history channel or weather channel. One of these, you know, these big websites. Again, I call it reminder marketing. The idea that you’re reminding the people who came to your website that they had some level of interest and those ads can simply remind them of your name, your logo.

Helen Tackitt (20:41)
Mm.

Okay.

Steven Schwartz (21:00)
your offer, right? This is what we offer here. It could have pictures of five-star reviews, nice things people have said about you. For practices that desperately need more patients that are not getting the kind of numbers you’re getting, there maybe would say like, know, fill out, you know, contact us and use the code ABC and to get, you know, half off your first month, whatever, some promotion. But just the idea is that you’re, many times people don’t

purchase or sign up with the practice on their first visit to that website. And so these reminder marketing ads give a way of helping those people see your name over and over and over again so that they’re encouraged to come back and hopefully do business with you. That makes sense.

Helen Tackitt (21:41)
Right.

Yeah,

it does. And it’s the same thing when we did the radio ads. And so that was how they sold us on the radio ads. you know, people have to hear it several times before they’ll be interested.

Steven Schwartz (22:00)
Exactly. And the numbers in marketing have changed over the years. It used to be, you have to hear a name or see an ad three to five times. I read an article recently that said somewhere between eight and 15 times and all these different touch points. This is also why marketing automation software has become so popular. The HubSpots and Go High Level and programs like that, do you use any marketing automation software at all?

Helen Tackitt (22:14)
Yeah.

I don’t. So what I’ve realized is you have to, when you run an ad, whatever it is, you need to really do something that’s gonna grab their attention. So when I’m trying to run something I wanna talk about, so let’s just face it, our conventional medicine system is a mess. People aren’t happy, they’re not listened to, they’re not taken seriously, hardly anybody does any form of blood work labs.

Steven Schwartz (22:25)
Okay.

Helen Tackitt (22:52)
Any kind of weird things that they can’t figure out, they’re like, here’s a referral to psychiatry, which is very insulting to patients. And I can understand that. So when I’m running an ad, I’m running to capture that frustration. So it’s, know, are you not feeling listened to? Are you not getting, you know, the tests that you want?

for the functional stuff, a lot of people have brain fog fatigue. Do you have brain fog or fatigue? And no one’s helping you. So it’s really trying to figure out what people are frustrated with, and then you’re running an ad around that. And that’s what I, when I say that an ad that got better attention, those are the ones that I see where people are interested in clicking on the website.

It’s unfortunate when I try to run an ad just kind of in general about direct primary care of, you know, longer appointment times or, you know, save money on if you have a high deductible plan and stuff. Those don’t seem to get the attention that if you really get into the frustration points that people have, those do so much better.

Steven Schwartz (24:05)
Right. What you’re putting your finger on beautifully here is that in marketing, it’s so helpful to put the problem front and center in front of your prospect. Do you struggle with brain fog? Do you feel like you’re not being listened to? X, Y, Z, whatever the situation might be. And then you provide the solution. We listen. We care to learn more, you know, or, you know,

Helen Tackitt (24:29)
Okay.

Steven Schwartz (24:33)
revolutionize your, your, your primary care experience in a whole new and dramatically better way. You know, phrases that like that grab people’s emotions. When they see something like, yes, I feel like this person is talking directly to me because I don’t feel heard. I do have brain fog. I don’t like waiting for the doctor. know they only spent five minutes with me and then they take off. I want a better arrangement and it’s enough to get them to click on that ad.

Helen Tackitt (24:43)
He he.

Steven Schwartz (25:01)
So you’re doing the right thing. I love it.

Helen Tackitt (25:04)
Yeah, thanks.

Steven Schwartz (25:05)
Wonderful. So in your last four years of running your DPC practice, do you have maybe one story of an amazing situation or outcome that you could share with our listeners?

Helen Tackitt (25:18)
Hmm, so I can

tell you it’s probably gonna be the story that really I had done some functional I had been involved in functional medicine prior to opening my practice but not to the level that I am now so I deal with a lot of chronic illness patients

Steven Schwartz (25:36)
fibro and related.

Helen Tackitt (25:38)
Yeah, so everything. So it’s a lot of thyroid issues, mold toxicity. You so many patients with mold toxicity. Long COVID. It’s pretty much the patients who are just, I can’t function. I have to go on disability. I cannot even pull myself up out of bed to go to work, which the mainstream system just fails those patients.

And then I do do some work with cancer patients as well from an alternative treatment approach, working in transition with their oncologists or with their oncologists. the there was a patient who came to me very early on. So I opened in January and I think her first appointment was in April.

And she was referral, her sister had become a patient of mine. And so her sister had referred her to me and she was, she couldn’t, she would drive down the road and she would just forget where she was going. She had severe fatigue. She had, you know, stopped working. She wasn’t on disability at that point, but still couldn’t work. it come to find out, so she was a long COVID patient. She had been given remdesivir.

And so what I find is the patients who have received remdesivir have a lot of brain fog issues and they’re the ones that will tell me that they forget where they’re driving and stuff. Almost like an early onset dementia Alzheimer’s. And at that point, so that was 2022, so it would have been April 2022 and we didn’t know a whole lot about long COVID. And so I was determined I was gonna help her and did, I mean,

When I tell you I hours of research for this patient, I did hours of research for this patient. And so I would say, well, let’s try this. Let’s do this. You know, just looking at what COVID does to the body as far as how it affects the thyroid and the nutrient deficiencies and the mitochondria and stuff. And so it took probably a good year, year and a half of different treatment options, different things that we did.

but she has, she’s no longer here, she doesn’t need me, she’s graduated. She’s doing amazing. She now, they own their own business, her and her husband, and so, you know, she’s able to be there six days a week and stuff, and so she told me, she said, I thank God first and you second for saving my life.

Steven Schwartz (28:08)
What a wonderful story. I’ve heard so many cases of people struggling with long COVID thinking that, you know, they’re losing their, they’re losing their mind is what they say. But, you know, you’re dealing with onset of Alzheimer’s dementia or something, which is of course terrifying for a person to, to feel that way. So as we wrap up our interview today, and I’ve really enjoyed this, where do you see this entire cash pay medical

Helen Tackitt (28:18)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Steven Schwartz (28:35)
industry going from DPC, concierge, executive medicine. Where do see this going?

Helen Tackitt (28:42)
Well, I think there’s just, I mean, there’s always people who are coming out interested in this from a provider standpoint because there’s a lot of burnout and they know this isn’t really what they want to do. But really what I want, and there’s a little bit of it with Medicare, Medicaid have noticed DPC and I think there was a trial with Medicare and DPC and I think there’s one that was coming up with Medicaid and DPC.

But I really want the government to look at this DPC model because patients will get so much better care if they embrace this. I had reached out to our treasurer here of North Carolina, but I think you just ignored me. But we have a real big problem with our state employee health plan.

and there’s not enough money. And so they changed over from Blue Cross Blue Shield to Aetna and Aetna is not as good of a plan and people don’t take as much Aetna as they did Blue Cross Blue Shield. And so now they’re still talking about how they’re going to have to raise premiums on the state employee health insurance people and they’re not going to be able to offer as much services. And I wish they would just listen that

if they would just pay for them to go or have some kind of incentive plan along with that for them to go to a direct care practice, they could save money instead of taking away benefits from this group of people. And I think that would go across any sort of insurance plan. So I hope that the people in the government

will see that this kind of healthcare is better in the way it should be going because what we have now, I feel like, is a socialized medicine without the benefit of socialized medicine. People are still paying these high premiums, but they’re getting the care that they would get in socialized medicine, waiting months and months and months to be seen and being thrown aside.

Steven Schwartz (30:43)
Yeah, so many great nuggets of what you’re sharing here. Employer groups are becoming more and more interested in the DPC model and saving companies huge amounts of money. And if it can work for a family, if it can work for a small business, if it can work for a large business, why can’t it work for the state of North Carolina or the York federal government?

There’s a lot of interesting things going on. keep hearing rumblings about discussions in Washington, DC, obviously. There’s been a big change up there recently this year. You may have heard about that. So, you know, it remains to be seen what’s going to happen. But I agree with you is that the DPC model certainly makes a whole lot more sense over what we’ve been dealing with that doesn’t work nearly as well.

Helen Tackitt (31:27)
Yeah, only time will tell.

Steven Schwartz (31:28)
So only time will tell.

I really enjoyed our discussion today. And for folks listening to this podcast, I just want to offer you some free information. My company has a book that I’ve written called How to Win with Digital Marketing for Concierge Medical Practices. In fact, it’s the definitive guide. And that book is available from our website. Simply go to

conciergemd.marketing. Scroll down the page where there’s a picture of the book. Put in your email address and click the go button. The system will send you a link where you can download that book totally for free. No strings attached. Please read it with my compliments. Obviously, if you have any questions struggling with anything with your digital marketing for your practice, please reach out to me. It’ll be my pleasure to chat with you and see if I can help get answers to you so you can be as successful with your business marketing as possible.

My link to schedule a time with me, cmmkg.com forward slash schedule. Here at Concierge Medical Marketing, we offer three programs that are available to our clients. The first we call transition, and that’s for practices that have maybe three or 4,000 patients and they want to transfer transition to a DPC or concierge model. We can help with that. The second is called growth. And that’s some of the things we talked about today, Helen.

with how do you do digital marketing, whether it be SEO or paid ads on Google or Facebook ads or the reminder marketing that we talked about. How do we use these tools that are available to grow the practice, the exposure and more meet and greet appointments? And the third and final, we call nurture. And the idea there is when you have a full practice and maybe even a wait list, you want to still nurture your patients, nurture your wait list to keep your practice in their minds.

so that they still feel very good about the relationship, they feel good about the investment. And basically, like I said, keeps your practice in their minds so that when it’s time to renew, they write the check and they renew. So that’s all available through Concierge Medical Marketing. Helen, I’ve really enjoyed our discussion today. Do you have any final comments or things that you would like to share before we call it a day here?

Helen Tackitt (33:38)
Nothing that I can think of right now.

Steven Schwartz (33:40)
All right. Well, this has been my pleasure getting to know you better and you seem to be really knocking it out of the park with your growing practice in North Carolina. And I wish you all the very, very best folks. Please reach out to to her, especially on Amazon, to buy her book if you want to have your own DPC practice and give us the name of your book one more time, please.

Helen Tackitt (34:01)
how to open your own direct primary care practice.

Steven Schwartz (34:04)
Love it. Straight to the point. Love it. This has been Steve Schwartz with the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. My guest, Helen Tackitt. Have a great day. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please like, subscribe, follow, share all that good stuff so we can get the word out. Have a great day, everybody. Take care.

Helen Tackitt (34:21)
See you.