Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steven Schwartz. It’s my pleasure to have you along on our discussion today. So thrilled to introduce to you Amanda Price. Amanda, welcome to the podcast.

Amanda Price (00:38)
Thank you so much, Steven. I’m happy to be here.

Steven Schwartz (00:40)
Yes, absolutely. I appreciate it. So You’re from Arlington, Tennessee outside of Memphis?

Amanda Price (00:47)
Yes, I have lived in the Memphis area since I was six years old and my parents raised me here and then they moved off to Florida and Alabama and left me here. So I just decided to raise my family right here in Memphis as well.

Steven Schwartz (01:00)
Nice and I’m located in Vero Beach Florida so you got to come visit us out here and see your family out here and enjoy the the ocean a little bit okay?

Amanda Price (01:08)
I’d love to do that, trust me.

Steven Schwartz (01:10)
Awesome. Yeah.

Book it. Book it, Danno. So you’re an MSN and an FNP and you are the owner of Faith Family Medical. Why don’t you give us some background on what got you as a child or as a young adult interested in medicine and caring for people to become a nurse practitioner and having your own business.

Amanda Price (01:29)
Sure, it’s kind of a funny story because when I graduated high school, I got a full ride volleyball scholarship to the university that I chose and I wanted to be a physical therapist. But after my freshman year, I became married and became a mother. So that changed the trajectory of what I thought my four years of college were going to look like. And I decided that I didn’t want to go to school.

the length of time that it would take to become a physical therapist. So I kept taking health classes and the friends that I had made were going into nursing school. So they were like, hey, come to the nursing program with me. So I just kind of jumped on the bandwagon and decided that I would sign up for nursing school. And

I was on a waiting list because I signed up so late, but finally in the middle of the summer before my junior year, I got into the nursing program. So I became a nurse and then I worked a few years in oncology when I had befriended this nurse that was a rounding nurse for one of the oncologists that came up to the floor where I worked. And she’s like, Hey, I want to go back to nurse practitioner school, but I don’t want to do it by myself. Will you come with me? And I was like, sure.

I’d be happy to be What is that? Yeah. Yeah. I was like, what is that even? And she’s like, dude, we and she talks. She’s so funny. She’s from New York. So she has this great Northern accent and you just can’t turn it down no matter what she says. But she’s like, we get to write prescriptions and we get to tell nurses what to do. And I said, that sounds exactly like what I want to do. So she found this program at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. It was, it was a an inaugural.

Steven Schwartz (02:46)
not?

Amanda Price (03:12)
nurse practitioner program that they were doing. And it was a satellite program. So we didn’t actually have to go to St. Louis except one time for a clinical rotation. And that was just one visit. But otherwise, we drove about three hours into the boot heel of Missouri. And it was just one day a week, but we had to do it for three years. So we would just take turns driving to Missouri. We’d ride together.

So I got my nurse practitioner license in 2003 and at that time there was no doctorate of nurse practitioner so the highest degree you could get in a nursing field was masters unless you were getting a PhD. So we got our nurse practitioner degree and both of us started working together for the same doctor

a couple of years later, I decided I would open up my own practice. And so in 2007, I had met my husband. So he was just my boyfriend at the time. And I was looking for a place where I wanted to open up my own clinic. And at that time, it was just going to be, you know, your typical insurance based family practice. Right. So we looked all over.

the Memphis area. didn’t want to be in the city limits of Memphis. I definitely wanted to stay in the suburbs. And so we found this place in Arlington and I didn’t have any money, but I didn’t have any credit cards either. So we took out a credit card and he emptied out his savings account to help me open up this business. And so now here I am 2025 doing DPC with that same clinic that I opened in 2007.

Steven Schwartz (04:55)
So awesome. What a great story. You started off going to be a PT, then I’m to be a nurse, then a nurse practitioner work and then say, you know, I’m going to start my own business. Hubby empties the bank account to invest in the company. And now you’ve got a rip, roar and jam in amazing business. So so proud of you. That’s so exciting.

Amanda Price (04:57)
Thank you.

You

Well, it wasn’t always that way. I ran the insurance-based practice for 16 years and it was a sinking ship. I was losing money and I don’t know if you want to go into more details about that or if you just want me to tell the story, but yeah, was a difficult, it has been a difficult 16 years, but the last two years of DPC has been sunshine and rainbows.

Steven Schwartz (05:42)
Nice. Well, that’s the most important part. mean, we could certainly get into all the reasons why the traditional insurance based model of a practice didn’t work for you. You were struggling, financial paperwork, extra staff hassles. I’m sure there was lots of things along those lines. We hear those stories over and over again. But in the last two years, you’ve been working through the DPC model, no insurance at all. Correct. And love and life. Right.

Amanda Price (06:11)
Yes.

Steven Schwartz (06:12)
So when you were in the previous insurance-based model and then somehow, some way you heard about DPC, how did that happen? Where did you hear about it?

Amanda Price (06:24)
Well, I have to go back to the desperate time that brought me to DPC. I’ll just kind of make it real broad. We were at a point where we were trying to decide if I was going to file bankruptcy because we had no money in the bank. Now, what I will tell you is I had an employee that made some bad financial

decisions that benefited her and not me. If you catch my drift, I can’t really say anything else about that. that was my, that was mostly my sinking ship right there. But so we were at this point where there was no money in the bank. I had all of these vendors that hadn’t been paid in six months or more. I had 13 employees at my clinic that

Steven Schwartz (06:56)
Yep. That’s fine. Loud and clear.

Amanda Price (07:17)
I didn’t even have enough money in the bank to meet payroll the following week. And I wasn’t paying myself more than an annual salary of 50,000, which I had made more than that as an RN back in, you know, the early 2000s. So I decided, and honestly, my faith comes into this big time. But a friend of mine had handed me this book on fasting.

And I had never really taken fasting seriously. My husband does it a lot. And I just jump on his bandwagon when he’s like, I’m going to fast because I’m praying about this. I’m just like, OK, I will not eat with you. But it really didn’t resonate with me, the spiritual level. But she gave me this book. I read it. And I was like, you know what? I think I’m going to actually fast for this situation. Because the easy thing in my mind was to just, you know,

chalk it up to a bad loss and go work for somebody else, open up another business, you know, do whatever and not try to stick it, stick with the clinic presently and then make it work. But my husband did not want me to file bankruptcy because then that kind of ruins your reputation with all the vendors and stuff. So I read the fasting book. I decided I was going to fast. So for three days I didn’t eat.

I did a lot of praying, I drank water, and I was sitting there in my bed on the third day of my fast, and I’m just going through Facebook. And I don’t normally post a lot of things, so I’m just scrolling and looking at what other people are posting. And there’s this ad that pops up for direct primary care. Well, I didn’t know what that was, so I just scrolled past it, but I remember seeing it, but I didn’t…

looked too far into it so I scrolled and I’m just looking and looking and then there’s another DPC ad and I’m like that’s strange I’ve never even heard of this but it didn’t make it wasn’t good enough clickbait so I kept scrolling right so a third direct primary care ad pops up this one for whatever reason worked so I clicked on it I read the whole thing

I could not get out of my bed fast enough to run to my husband and say, I think God just told me what to do with this clinic. So I made him, yeah, I mean, I couldn’t even believe it. Everything that I needed to hear about how to save my clinic was literally in this ad post for direct primary care. And so I showed my husband Mark and he read through it and he said, I can’t believe that this is actually a thing.

Steven Schwartz (09:35)
Bye.

Amanda Price (09:55)
Well, we started Googling DPC clinics in the Memphis area where there weren’t any, but there were some in Nashville and there’s a lot more in Knoxville area. So we stalked their websites to see, you know, what are patients paying? And that’s how I found other Facebook pages about DPC. So that opened up my eyes to what DPC was. so this was like in

January, sometime in January, that I saw this DPC ad on Facebook. And then by the middle of February, we were sending letters to all my patients saying, this is what we’re switching to. I had a friend that designed my whole website for me so that it would be user friendly so that patients could go and sign up for DPC. And we had a transition moment for from the middle of February until April 1st.

It was 2023 that I did this. And they would have time, if they weren’t going to join the DPC practice, they would have time to find another provider, but enough time to get their refills before they had to find someone else. Or if they joined the DPC program, then I immediately started treating them as DPC patients. So they started getting priority. So it…

It transitioned smoothly well. The financial means started coming in. I was able to pay off within a couple of months every single vendor that I had owed money to. It’s just been an amazing situation for me.

Steven Schwartz (11:28)
What an amazing story. love it. And in my men’s Bible study at church, we recently, like a week ago, two weeks ago, talking about fasting and some of the exciting things that come out when you do fast. And I encourage people who are listening to this who think, these people are nuts or crazy, but you know, there’s there’s truth to it. Look into it. If you’re struggling with something. What was the name of the book on fasting, by the way, that made such an inference to you? Do you recall?

Amanda Price (11:50)
Well and ⁓ you know

let me see if I can look it up

here it is. The Miracle Results of Fasting by Dave Williams. It’s like an 80 page book. It’s a quick read. I mean, the book is like this big. It’s like notebook size. And I bought

Steven Schwartz (12:02)
There we go. Great.

Amanda Price (12:11)
about 20 or 30 copies of this book just to like hand it out to the people because I couldn’t believe it and and one thing that I want to tell you is after I saw that third DPC ad two years ago now I have not seen one single DPC ad on Facebook since those ads right?

Steven Schwartz (12:29)
How funny. ⁓ Love it.

Love people sharing their story of their faith in action and seeing God move in a very positive and powerful way. Miracles still do happen. So thank you for sharing that really.

Amanda Price (12:42)
Yes, happy to because that is my story. That is exactly how I got here. So I truly believe that God put those advertisements in my face. I truly believe that He made the plan so easy to execute for me and that my husband was available, you know, because he runs a summer camp for kids.

and adults with special needs and disabilities. And when we get into about March or April, he is so busy planning for summer camp, he has no time. So even the timing of which I needed him to be fully focused on helping me with my clinic in January and February and March, there couldn’t have been a better time for him to be able to put his job aside for a moment and help me get this going. So just everything

I could not have done that by myself without the Lord and His guidance.

Steven Schwartz (13:36)
I love it. Thank you for sharing your faith and for our listeners. I think this means a lot to them as well. So thanks for sharing that. Why don’t we talk a little bit more about as you got started as a DPC, you need more patients, you need to grow to fill your panel. What marketing or methods did you do that worked for you and maybe what did you try that didn’t work so well?

Amanda Price (13:58)
Well, my clinic already had 5,000 patients that were a part of Faith Family Medical. So for me specifically, it was pretty easy to get the 500 patients that I needed. So most of them were already established patients and so they just moved over to DPC. But because there is no DPC clinic in the Memphis area, there are a couple now.

But when I opened up my clinic, there was only one down in Mississippi and there weren’t any in the Memphis area. So people needed to know, what is this that I’m about to pay money to you for when I have insurance? Why would I buy into you even though I don’t want to leave you? So what worked really well for me is I held three live meetings in my waiting room.

where patients could come and it was kind of just like a drop in, it was a Q &A session. So I advertised on Facebook, because that’s the only social media that I really use. So I advertised on the Arlington, Tennessee Facebook page and my private Facebook page that I was going to have basically a town hall meeting in my waiting room at such and such time and it would be from like 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

and you could come in, ask questions if you’re interested in joining the practice. So every single patient that came to the Q &A sessions ended up signing up for the DPC. So it worked out really well. The one thing I wish I had done was the third meeting I decided to do a Facebook Live.

And that was the least amount of patients that actually came for the Q &A. The best one that I had was the very first one. And I wish I had done a Facebook live, but I didn’t know how it was going to go. And I was nervous. I was afraid they would ask questions that I couldn’t answer. But actually, they’re very easy questions because it’s common sense medicine. So you just answer transparently and with your common sense and it will sell the product itself because

You know, you can take all the time you need with all your patients and that’s really what they’re looking for is someone that actually cares and can get to the root cause of their problems. ⁓

Steven Schwartz (16:20)
And also to

have that access to be able to contact you with a text message or a phone call. And you say, yeah, come on in or come in tomorrow at whatever time, as opposed to the traditional insurance method of, we’re too busy. Go to urgent care or see you in a couple of weeks. It’s just such a better model. One of the services that we offer through Concierge Medical Marketing, we call Transition.

Amanda Price (16:28)
Yeah, for sure.

Steven Schwartz (16:46)
And that’s specifically the situation you’re in. may have several thousand patients in a traditional insurance based practice and you want to switch over to a concierge or DPC membership arrangement. How do you market to those people? How do you email them and text and ads? And like you said, your town halls in person, all of these things are great things that can and should be done to help educate these people to understand what a membership relationship with your doctor or your nurse practitioner directly.

looks like, how that feels and why it’s so much better. As you said, everybody who came signed up, right? So people just need to be educated and informed on how this works. And then they’re much, much more willing and able to sign up because they’ll see the value. I assume you have a very good retention as well. Most people that sign up stay with you year after year, correct?

Amanda Price (17:37)
Yes, absolutely. Now I do have patients that have to cancel their membership because they’re moving or their financial dynamics have changed or whatnot, but it is probably, well, DPC has been going on for two years now and I would say overall I’ve probably lost maybe 10 % of the original people that signed up.

Now I am trying to grow a certain niche of patients now, so I’m not trying to grow family practice for myself. So as patients drop off, I’m specifically not replacing them, but I did hire another nurse practitioner who is taking on all the new patients. So that has been a help so that I could focus on things that I am more passionate about.

Steven Schwartz (18:28)
I assume you’re talking about the chronic lime.

Amanda Price (18:30)
Yes, yes. And honestly, I don’t know why I am so obsessed with taking care of chronic Lyme. Well, let me say that again. I didn’t know at first why I was so obsessed with wanting to take care of people with chronic Lyme. And then I did a test on myself just to see what the process was going to be like when I tested patients for chronic Lyme. And it turns out that I have it.

And I didn’t know and and I have Epstein Barr. I didn’t know I had mono. I called my dad. I was like when did I have mono and he’s like you never had mono and I said well yes I did. I’ve Epstein Barr. Now we know why I’m so tired all the time.

Steven Schwartz (19:13)
Wow.

And so this is the kind of discussion where DPC and concierge practices take the time to really dig into their patient situation, really get to know them and test for a whole slate of things to really get a great baseline. Right. And like you said, I didn’t know I had this. I didn’t know I had that. And now you do. And you can change your life or your medication or whatever appropriately, because now you know you can better care for it.

Amanda Price (19:29)
Yes.

Well, the one thing that I will say, when I was taking insurance,

I only saw about 20 patients a day, which there’s some family practice nurse practitioners that are seeing 30 and 40 patients. I don’t know how they’re doing that because when I was seeing 20 patients a day, that gave me about 10 minutes to actually talk to the patient. That’s not even enough to even get started with all of the things that you need to ask them to get to the reason of what is the problem.

So one thing that I truly have loved about switching to DPC is that I can make my appointments an hour long. I can make them two hours long. I can talk to a patient for an hour and then be like, hey, I got to go see this patient right quick that’s coming in for a sinus infection, but I’ll call you back. And then I can talk to them for another hour after I’m done seeing a patient before and after them or after and before them. So that is super cool. And because

Not everybody has to come in to be seen in the DPC model. A lot of it is handled through telemedicine or just text messaging. That has freed up an opportunity for me to learn how to treat patients in root cause medicine. So I’m integrative now. I got a functional medicine certificate and now I can educate myself on the things that I’m interested in like chronic Lyme.

and I went and learned how to give Botox injections. And I kind of like that. I don’t love that, but I do it. But it was something at the time when I wanted to learn, I never had time to learn. And now I have all this time that I’m constantly now growing in my wisdom and my knowledge and all these different areas. I’m learning about herbs and how helpful they are to patients. So.

It’s not only benefited my patient’s life, but it has benefited my life. I have quality family time, but now I’m able to take the time to learn new things to be even a better provider for the patients that are with me.

Steven Schwartz (21:43)
I love it. What a great story. And based on the structure, there’s you, there’s another nurse practitioner. Did you say you had a third or just the two of you as the primary practitioners?

Amanda Price (21:54)
It’s just the two of us. Brenda is my other nurse practitioner and she has about 100 patients. So we’re looking to grow her panel to about 500 or 600 patients, whatever she feels like she can handle. And then I have a part-time office manager who is my best friend. And then I have a nurse that works the same schedule as me, which is Monday through Thursday in the office.

Steven Schwartz (22:19)
Nice, so tight ship, but ability to grow. We talked before we started recording, we talked a little bit about employer groups and bringing on dozens or maybe even hundreds of patients all at once. For practitioners who are considering opening a DPC and they’re concerned, like, where am I going to get these patients from?

Can you share a little bit of wisdom of your experience on how you are navigating the process of finding employer groups that may want to sign up with your practice and bring 100 or more patients at one time?

Amanda Price (22:58)
So we decided to change our EMR when we switched to a DPC that would be more friendly towards DPC practices. So we switched our electronic medical record system to Atlas MD. And within Atlas MD, they have all these resources and marketing templates, if you will, for if you want to go market to corporations and small businesses.

and all those kinds of things. So we utilized their template for small business marketing and we recreated it so that it reflected Faith Family Medical and all of you know our color scheme and what our website.

was talking about as far as everything that we offer and we created our own brochure, a digital copy as well as we had printed out and we just went around to all the different local businesses. I joined a B&I group so that I could network better with other business owners in my community so that they would sign up their employees and they are being offered discounts.

And what we were talking about before we started the podcast was this organization that represents bigger companies that I would have never even considered going to these larger companies. I mean, we’re talking FedEx, we’re talking about AutoZone, these, you know, fortune trillion dollar companies, you know, and we’re talking about these people and

Steven Schwartz (24:33)
Sure.

Amanda Price (24:34)
So this company reached out to me because they’re already working with DPC clinics around the United States, so they’re a national business. And so evidently there are some larger companies in the Memphis area that are looking to collaborate with a DPC clinic for their employees to be able to have.

better access to primary care. So I’m excited about the potential to maybe be considered that primary care practice for those organizations. But I don’t know how we got on the list other than maybe they just saw me on DPC Frontier. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the DPC Mapper website.

So maybe that’s how they found me. I’m thankful that they did because this does sound like it could be an incredible opportunity for some very fast growth. Although I have some questions about longevity and things like that, but just things to work through.

Steven Schwartz (25:37)
Sure. And that’s a wonderful opportunity. And I look forward to hearing more from you in the coming weeks to hear how this shakes out. I know that if you had 500 more patients all at once dropped on your business, that would probably be pretty challenging to onboard all of them in a reasonable and successful manner, but stagger them out a little bit over time or perhaps hiring some additional help.

But one of the things we talked about before going on our recording here, one of my dear friends is a physician assistant and she works at an airplane manufacturer on site at their location. And she has her own little office there, her own little one room medical clinic. And as the employees of that airplane manufacturer need healthcare, they literally make an appointment or go knock on her door and being on site at so much value.

to these businesses so that their staff can be more healthy, have healthcare available to them where they work. They don’t have to take time off and go across town. They literally walk down the hallway, go to the building over there. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity that we’re going to see in the next couple of years as DPC and Concierge arrangements truly keep exploding in growth. We’re going to see more and more of that. Do you agree?

Amanda Price (27:02)
absolutely. And just we were also talking about how you brought up the idea of bringing in my services into an assisted living facility where there are retired people that maybe it’s hard to get out of their retirement community and go to their primary care and how convenient it would be for them to be able to just go down the hallway because their provider is just in a little office space.

within their own facility. So the potential is amazing. We don’t even know what the future is gonna look like for DPC. But I truly believe that I think eventually there’s going to be this flip that goes on where more people are going to be with a DPC provider than they will be with an insurance-based provider. I just see that, yeah.

Steven Schwartz (27:51)
no doubt.

No doubt. think, you know, we’re in an interesting time in this life cycle, right? Originally there was no insurance and then there was insurance, but it was only for the the executives. And then let’s cover the people, but maybe at a lesser level. And then it’s like, I’m only willing to go to a doctor if they take my insurance. Right. And then.

realize that some cases the care is simply not as good. The time spent with each patient has to be lower based on math, right? And you get to a point where it’s like, look, I want to be able to visit with five patients today, maybe just four, based on what you have in your schedule. And you can truly take the time to dig into situations. And the patients appreciate that because you truly figure out what’s going on in their lives and have the ability to focus on it and get it.

resolve to the best of your ability with medicine. So I think it’s exciting to see what’s going to happen in this industry. curious, let’s pick a year that more people will be in a membership medicine arrangement than insurance base for their primary care. Five years, 10 years, what’s it going to be? I don’t know. ⁓

Amanda Price (29:01)
Well,

maybe more like 20. There’s a lot of people that have to be convinced.

But in 20 years, I’m hoping that maybe I’ll be retired. I don’t know.

Steven Schwartz (29:09)
one of the topics that we were going to cover in a different podcast is, with a, an expert on how to build your practice in such a way that you can have a five to $10 million exit when you want to retire. So I think there’s a, several people have mentioned that would be kind of a nice topic for us to cover in my podcast. So we’ll get to that.

Amanda Price (29:30)
Yes, I would

like to know how I can exit with five to ten million.

Steven Schwartz (29:34)
Yes.

You get to a point like, you know what? I spent 30 years of my business. I’ve helped lots and lots of people. I’m done. I want to just travel. I want to retire. I want to not worry about this stuff and discover America or discover the planet. Whatever. And want to do it. Not ever have to worry about money again. I’ll reach out to that person and see if we can get that podcast recording scheduled. So great. As we wrap up here, if somebody is considering opening a DPC practice,

What three to five bullet points would you encourage them either to do or to visit or to learn about? What are just the top couple of things that come to mind immediately?

Amanda Price (30:14)
Well, the first thing that comes to mind for me is make sure you know why you’re doing it. Like, what is your why? If you don’t know why you’re doing it, then you’ll fail because you will take your mind off of what is your focus and what your goals are. Some people’s why is because they want better work-life balance. That was my why. I’m not too…

wrapped up in wanting to make all this money as much as I want my quality time with my family and my friends. That is what is most important to me. But some people’s why may be money and you need to learn how learn that that is what your why is so that you’ll execute a plan so that you’ll make all the money that you’re trying to make. That’s thing number one that came to mind. Thing number two is

You have to wrap yourself around other people that are doing the same thing. Be willing to learn, be willing to ask questions. Find that group of other nurse practitioners or people that are in your specific medical.

education level that are doing what you want to do and learn from these people. Find the Facebook pages because you don’t have to pay huge consulting fees to get a business professional to… Can I pause for a second? There is this…

Steven Schwartz (31:51)
Sure, of course.

And what about number three?

Amanda Price (31:55)
And number three is find a good EMR, find good staff. If you’re going to run a micro clinic, you could probably do it by yourself. But if you plan on having more than I’d say 300 patients, you’re going to need an office manager, find someone that you trust, and they can work part time. Find a nurse that can help you do the things that…

create busy work for you. You You went to school a long time. You don’t need to be checking the vital signs every time. You don’t need to be doing the PAs. You don’t need to be doing the lab draws when you can hire someone that can do that for you so that you can focus on what you have learned how to do, and that is being a clinician.

Steven Schwartz (32:39)
Love it. Also, even for a micro clinic, it’s important to have somebody else available because you may need to take a few days off if you ever get sick or if you want to, God forbid, go on a vacation or go to a medical conference, someone needs to be available to your patients. And so it’s a good idea to have somebody who can help somehow in partnership. Keep an eye on your folks in case of emergency.

Amanda Price (33:03)
Yes, I completely agree with that. have interviewed other providers on my own podcast that are a one-man show and they don’t get any breaks. They do everything and they just take their patients on vacation with them.

Steven Schwartz (33:18)
Yeah, part of being a DPC or concierge doc is that you want to take the time to have enough time with people and have better quality of life, less stress, less burnout. And I just I worry about the the single providers not getting that piece where they get to have time off themselves. You know, how productive can you be during your nine to five

day at a time at your clinic. If you’ve you get woken up in the middle of the night, two or three times a night to deal with stuff, you know, ⁓

Amanda Price (33:49)
Yes, you’d have to really establish

some good boundaries with your patients. And I can’t imagine that you can run the show by yourself with more than 200 patients. I think less than 200, it is doable and you don’t get a break, but they also, they’re not all reaching out to you constantly all the time. So it’s not overbearing, but you do need to establish boundaries where you have this space.

where I’m not gonna be available during this week, but you need to have somebody that is available for you. So as soon as you can, and maybe even collaborate with another DPC provider that’s in the area, because when everybody is only taking a few hundred patients, there’s plenty of people to go around. And I have found that the DPC community seems very willing to help and share.

Steven Schwartz (34:22)
Yes.

Amanda Price (34:42)
I haven’t found it to be a selfish community by any means.

Steven Schwartz (34:47)
Exactly. One of the things that really impressed me so much about this, this industry of DPC is that the people who get involved are doing it not to make a huge doctor salary. They’re doing it because they want better quality care for the patients and they want better, happier, more fulfilled, more peaceful lives themselves without the burnout.

That’s what I’ve seen over and over. also, hardly ever does anybody mention another provider as competition. I don’t hear that. I mean, granted, in some areas, I guess, you could be in big cities and there’s many practices in the nearby area where it does start to feel like competition, but I don’t hear that that much. Right.

People are colleagues, they want to help each other, they want to support each other, and I think it’s a beautiful thing.

Amanda Price (35:35)
Me neither.

I do too. I have been happy to give my advice and encouragement and the knowledge that I’ve gained as a DPC provider to other nurse practitioners that are just starting out in the journey. It’s part of why I started my own podcast to interview other DPC nurse practitioners and physician assistants so that those that are behind us can learn from us. We all have different ways that we got started. have different

Steven Schwartz (36:04)
Yes.

Amanda Price (36:08)
medical record systems that we’re using in different ways that we are communicating with our patients. And I feel like if I can put it out there to help, you know, whoever get this going, then I feel like that I’ve done something for my own professional community. I love that.

Steven Schwartz (36:25)
And I assume people are welcome to give you a call or get on your calendar for a 10 or 15 minute phone call if they’re considering DPC and just want to speak to you personally for a few minutes.

Amanda Price (36:35)
Absolutely,

but I’m a talker so it’ll always go over the 15 minutes.

Steven Schwartz (36:40)
Fair enough. Let’s talk just a little bit more about community before we wrap up our interview. I’ve really enjoyed this. You are part of a vibrant and growing Facebook community of NPs and PAs in direct primary care. Can you give us just quick background on the group and tell us about Penny and your team and what that group is for and how it brings value?

Amanda Price (37:06)
Well, I just joined that Facebook page a couple of years ago. So I don’t know the back history of the Facebook page, but there was a lady that started it. And Penny was very active in the, Penny Vachon is who we’re talking about, was very active on the Facebook page. And then when the lady that originated the Facebook page had to step down, she asked Penny to take it over. And Penny has taken it evidently.

from what I’ve heard has taken it to a whole other level. And it is an amazing place, a safe place. Nobody is hateful or ugly, but you can go there, ask whatever question you have. Some people will ask medical questions and be like, hey, what would you do about this rash? Or what would you do if you had a patient with these labs? But for the most part, people are asking questions about what made you decide to

go this route with this, why did you choose this EMR? Why did you choose this malpractice insurance company? How many patients did you decide on? Where did you get your pricing structure? All those questions and more. And so it has become this community where now I recognize names and I know people. And especially since from that Facebook page, we have

started DPC Launchpad, which is a conference. And now I get to see some of these people in person that I’m like, they were just my social media friends. And now there’s a face with the name and now they’re true friends for life. So it’s just, it’s been an amazing opportunity to just make new friends within my field.

Steven Schwartz (38:39)
Yes.

Yeah, I love it. know Penny has offered to share some information about concierge medical marketing and our podcast in that group. So that if there’s anybody in there that needs our help with their digital marketing or their outreach or their marketing automation or whatever it might be, it’s like, Hey, here’s a resource. These guys can help you. One of the things that we talked about recently is that we’ve created a brand new

digital marketing assistant, which is an AI called Maddy, M-A-D-D-Y, Maddy the marketing assistant. That’s where she got her name. And Amanda, you and I demoed Maddy the other day. Could you just share briefly your thoughts on how you saw Maddy work and the value that you think Maddy could bring to new or existing DPC practices?

Amanda Price (39:39)
Absolutely. was now it was quite impressive because you took the time to walk through Maddy with my business. And what I loved was the questions were very simple. You know, a lot of us as medical providers are not savvy in AI or savvy in computer skills whatsoever. So the simpler the better and

The questions were super simple. It just asked, you know, about, you know, my practice. How many patients do I have? How many employees do I have? What are their names? What is my color scheme? What is my website? What is my Facebook page? What’s my Instagram page? All the all the things. And then you started typing in, you know, create a, you know, square. I think you said a square.

Steven Schwartz (40:31)
the social

media ad graphic. Yeah. that was the one that was to promote your practice offering the services of helping patients with chronic Lyme. Right. OK. Yes.

Amanda Price (40:33)
Yeah, like a social media post, you know, that was a good example.

Yeah, that was the example that we chose ⁓ is

let’s see what it looks like for Maddy to create an advertisement to put on social media. But.

It’s not just about that. I recognize that it’s a whole tool for marketing in general if you’re trying to build, you know, your patient base and whatever avenue that you’re trying to market, whether it’s in the community, whether it’s on social media, whether it’s, you know, through other advertisements, it will create the document for you. But I loved how it literally took you less than…

I guess about 10 minutes to create this amazing ad that then you were so willing to email it to me and just I can copy and paste it. And so just having it that easy that someone can take Matty and market their whole business instead of sitting there at the computer trying to figure out how to operate Canva. mean, Canva tries to make it easy, but it’s not that easy if you don’t know what you’re doing, you know.

Steven Schwartz (41:41)
Agreed.

Yeah. So with Maddy, you know, the idea what you’re talking about these questions, this is what we call onboarding. It’s training Maddy on you, your practice, your brand, your voice, meaning the tone of the writing that you do for your practice. Are we strict and clinical? Are we kind of hang loose? Are we Southern and sweet charm, which is what you absolutely are. And so

The concept here is that you train Maddy, the AI marketing assistant, on who you are and your practice. And then it walks you through step by step the different types of digital marketing strategies and methods that should be done in the right order to help you achieve your goals, whatever you’ve told Maddy that your goals are. So it’s a really cool thing.

Literally what we were on there for about a half an hour, I think we took about 10 minutes to onboard. And then we made the social media posts for Lyme. We did a five email drip sequence for people who were interested in learning more about your treatment for chronic Lyme. And it was, think one other thing that we did. And literally in a half an hour, we did thousands of dollars worth of marketing agency work. Right. And of course I gave it you, please use it with my compliments. My hope is that

As people want to grow, they want to join the Maddy community. This is a private Facebook group that I created. It’s

CMMKG.com/JustAskMaddy.

And you go there.

Fill out the form, click the button, join the community, and then you get access to Maddy, the custom GPT, the marketing assistant to help you with this. And then from there, use it as much as you want. But I do want people to participate in the community itself. Why? Because I want you to be able to share with each other.

to say, tried this and it worked great. I tried this and it didn’t work. I tried this and I used this post and we ended up getting 10 new patients because of it, whatever. I’d love for people in our industry to try this out and utilize it to be successful. And I’m a realist. I understand that there’s people who want to use these fancy high-tech tools and computers and systems and AI to do it themselves. Totally great. And here it is for you on a silver platter. Please use it.

But other people might try that and say, you know what? I just really just want to see patients, you know, I want to help them. I don’t really want to do this stuff. And so for those who want some help implementing the techniques that Maddy offers to help get more patients into their, their panel, into their practice, that’s what my company does. We’re concierge medical marketing and we help concierge and DPC practices with their digital marketing.

to help them grow their panels to achieve their goals. So as we were talking about before, we offer transition, right? Like you needed help with getting people to transition from your existing practice to the new one. Great. We have the second is growth. I’m at 10 patients, 20 patients, 100, and I want to get to 300, 500, whatever. And the third we call nurture. And nurture is so important and ignored by so many people that

You have a practice, you have a full panel, you may even have a wait list, but you need to nurture those people. You need to continually email them, text them, show ads to them, have, you know, quarterly get together parties, wine and cheese, and ask the provider questions. You want these people to know that they’re loved and they’re appreciated on top of the medical relationship so that every year they feel so good about it, they continue to renew.

So those are the three programs that we offer through Concierge Medical Marketing. And I wrote a book called The Definitive Guide to Winning with Digital Marketing. And that book’s available for free. Please just go to our website at conciergemd.marketing and scroll down the page. There’s a picture of the book. You can literally put your email in, click the button and the system will email you the link where you can download the book. Please take it, use it with my compliments. And of course, if you have any questions, please reach out to me.

a good way to find a time on my calendar is through the link, cmmkg.com/ schedule and put a time on my calendar and let’s talk. Amanda, this has been such a pleasure getting to know you better and allowing you to share your story from, you know, where you got started in medicine and nursing and,

your story about fasting and God literally putting an ad in front of you that completely spoke to you. And now,

a growing practice with so many opportunities. Any final words that you’d like to share to our listeners before we close this up here today?

Amanda Price (46:21)
would just like to just tell everybody that’s listening, know, be passionate about whatever it is you choose to do. If you do decide that you want to open a DPC clinic or you already have a DPC clinic, be passionate about it. Love your patients. Love your life because that will reflect in the kind of care that you give your patients. And honestly, that is what will bring joy. Money doesn’t always bring joy to people.

but having a good balance of your life and not raising your cortisol levels from all the stress. If you can avoid all that, then you’re living right, you’re doing right.

Steven Schwartz (47:02)
Wonderful. Thank

you for sharing and people can find you obviously at faithfamilymedical.com to reach out to you there. People can request to join NPs and PAs in direct primary care, your Facebook group. And obviously people can reach out to me if anybody has any questions for me with regards to growing your practice, transitioning or nurturing. And with that, I think we’ll call it a wrap here. This has been great, Amanda. So nice to meet you.

and keep up the great work. Thank you for being available to people to help them in their journey in DPC. This is Steve Schwartz with the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, and I wish you all an awesome day. God bless. We’ll see you next time.

Amanda Price (47:43)
Bye bye. Thank you.