How to Kiss Your Pimp [Insurance] Good-bye. Part 1 for Health Care Providers

Transcript

Charles Runels: Like a lot of physicians, I had a pretty dramatic event. Some might call it trauma, but I call it awakening to what was real, around the year 2000. I managed to kick Blue Cross Blue Shield to the curb in 2003. By 2006, I was seeing patients because I wanted to, not because I had to, so I would like to tell you how that process happened. As an internist in Alabama with three red lights, it took three years to have my income not only back to where it was but back to such that medicine could be a hobby.

You know, when I was a resident, I had a really wise gynecologist tell me. I'm 58, so this was back in the '80s. He said, "Charles, if you watch what's happening, medicine is going back to the way it was of Charles Dickens' day." If you think in the 19th Century, medicine was not something you did for money. You either did it because you were so wealthy you could do it as a hobby, or you pretty much took a vow of poverty. If you read the Charles Dickens' novels, the physicians are pretty much portrayed as almost like missionaries. I don't know that that's such a bad thing.

Another thing that was told to me by my dad as a child was that people will always want their lawyer to be rich, and they will want their physician to be poor. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. You will often hear and see patients typing in blogs, we're taking advantage of sick people. In some ways, I can see how it happens. We make our profit, we make our money by healing pain. If there were no pain, no need for us. Now in the ideal situation, all pain is gone, and we're in some superior race where physicians are not healing disease anymore. We're just making people from normal to supernormal maybe, like on the island where Wonder Woman came from, but in the real world, we take care of the sick. When we remove pain, the psychology of it is that people resent us profiting from their pain.

Well, how did I deal with it, and how that lead to having a million and then more in profits and making nursing home rounds for free because I didn't need the insurance anymore? How did it happen? Around 2000, and then we'll get to the practicalities of how to do this. I want to explain to you the difference between sales and marketing and how it applies every day in your office. By keeping these ideas in mind every day in your office, you will not only be more efficient, you will take better care of your people.

In the year 2000, I quit the emergency room and opened up a private practice as an internist. I had this idea I was going to do the super best practice of the future, so I was doing clinical trials. I was actually doing a Phase IV study of Genotropin. In pharmacy, they still have that drug. It was measuring amyloid threshold and VO2 Max as a change with using growth hormone in a Phase IV study of growth hormone replacement in adults that were deficient, 18 years ago. I was trying to create this ideal thing and bill it all to insurance. Then I found out I couldn't do it.

I was doing testosterone pellets 18 years ago, before Suzanne Somers wrote those first books to explain to people what I was doing. I would spend an hour with a patient, and then Blue Cross would send me 80 bucks because to them that was doing a hormonal consult with a woman. It was basically writing a prescription for Premarin. It wasn't an hour and a half, two hours of analyzing all organ systems because there might be something metabolic that gives you a clue about how you need to change things. Obviously, working with metabolism involves every organ system, so I was going broke as far as the clinical practice went, and I was supporting the practice with the research. Research was basically financing my desire to take care of sick people.

Now here's another thing to, I think, just reality. I'm going to try to speak the truth to you. You may leave. People may get mad. We've got a lot of people on this call, two people who already dropped off because I probably offended them. I'll probably offend more people before I'm done, and that's good because it means we don't match. We can figure it out. You can just do something else today, but I will tell you something else that's true, and some may find it offensive. As healthcare providers, we don't just want to get people well. We want to do miracles. We want to be superheroes. If you read Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, he actually says, "I want to do miracles." It's okay to admit that.

If we just wanted to make money, we would have done something else, and for half the effort, we would have made at least twice the money, had we put those efforts obviously into real estate or some other moneymaking endeavor, stock broker. We don't get a really high return on investment as far as money goes. We want to be superheroes. We want to make people well. It bothered me that in my efforts to make people well, I wasn't being compensated in proportion to what I could make in a clinical trial where I was functioning as a cog in the wheel and just reading stuff. As part of a research process, the profits were much higher. I was bothered by that, so basically I had to support my bad habit, monetarily a bad habit, of wanting to be a superhero by doing something else.

Then at that time, as an internist, I thought if you're an internist, you should be taking care of really sick people. I had years in the ER. In my ER days and my training, I had a strong interest in pulmonary medicine, so I felt like I was a really good intensivist and kept a lot of sick people in the hospital. Then here was the perfect storm, and this is what led to the marketing piece that I want to teach you and perfect in that it led to something better.

All at the same time, Blue Cross Blue Shield audited me, and the judge awarded my children in my house six nights a week as a single father, so now I have simultaneously 20 people in the hospital, several in intensive care, a full schedule at the office, and three sons to come to, ages four, six, and eight, every night. I had to make a decision. If I'm supporting this habit of taking care of sick people with research or cash practices and yet at that time, research showed that the primary care physician broke even after patient 21, so at 15 minutes apiece, I broke even at 3:00 in the afternoon, right when the children got out of school. I had to figure out a way to make this work and not be gone or else basically just have someone else bring up my children six days a week. Many of you might have been in or be in a similar situation.

The first thing I did was give up the hospital privileges, which was a very, very difficult thing because as some of you may know, when you do that, give up a piece of your practice, it's like taking a piece of your brain that you've worked on intensively and put it aside, which in some ways is like mourning a limb or something. It's like losing an arm and mourning the loss of it, in some ways more so. Before I did that, I tried just taking my three sons. I stuck them in the doctor's lounge, and I would make rounds and they would do their homework, but after a week realizing the doctor's lounge at the hospital and the cafeteria is not really a good daycare center. It didn't really matter if they were there. I still wasn't being a father to them. I gave up the hospital.

Then after the Blue Cross Blue Shield audit and them fining me money for people whom I had spent a lot of time with and really difficult people who had been to tertiary care centers and their problem hadn't been solved. They fined me money because I had in their mind over-billed and this blasé boring stuff because it happens to so many of us. What really got me was because of my growth hormone research, they changed their policy. In September 2003 was when they audited me.

In October of 2003, they changed the policy, and the policy changed such that it took all the people whom I had done formal stem testing on and diagnosed adult growth hormone deficiency in the most formal of ways. They cut them off, and they changed the policy where you had to have two pituitary hormone abnormalities, and now these people who I had put back together, some of them had lost 100 pounds. One of them had six surgeries on her humerus, and she wasn't healing because her osteoblasts were asleep because she was without growth hormone. Another who was a Vietnam War vet, and no one had diagnosed that his head trauma had caused pituitary stalk. He dated his diabetes, his weight gain to head trauma in Vietnam, and he had growth hormone deficiency, other pituitary abnormalities.

In other words, they took all these difficult patients whom I had put together and cut them off from their medicine, so then I was faced with this dilemma of basically that I couldn't really do the medicine I wanted to do, and the people whom I had put together, I couldn't buy all their medicine for them, so I was just disheartened and wrote my letter to Blue Cross Blue Shield and gave up my PMD status so that I could be a father intending to support my family doing clinical trials full-time, which was really huge because now I'm taking 3,000-plus patients and saying, "I'm not going to do this anymore," which was difficult because that was like 3,000 girlfriends basically because most of them were menopausal, post-menopausal women whom I had put back together, some of them diabetic.

There was no way to do it and pay the bills and do it the way I wanted to, and now even one of my tools had been taken away from me. About that time also, growth hormone became a prison sentence, if you write an off-label prescription for it, and no one can really agree what on-label is, so now I'm looking at going broke and even going to jail by doing the medicine that I know how to do. I quit, and I did clinical trials, and I started doing what I suggest you do now, which my attendees of my workshops do. I started having a rule that from then on, if I went to a course, I had to make the money back from that course within 30 days, whether it was a medical course or a marketing course. I started going to marketing classes with the intention of attracting people to my office who could afford to pay me cash.

As an internist, my rule was that I may not make you well, but I will diagnose you and make you better. I don't care where you've been if you will pay me cash, which of course I didn't have to be smarter. I had the luxury of having all the time I needed to sit there and read their charts, no matter if they were three stacks that were a foot high, like some of your difficult patients with hospital charts. I could ask as many questions that I want, call all the other physicians who had taken care of people, so I found when I went to all cash like that, I actually took better care of people.

If I wanted to take care of someone for free, I could actually do it completely for free because I wasn't obligated to even have to charge the co-pay. I found that I didn't need as many staff because now that I'm charging cash, I don't need to have a staff of people to figure out the paperwork on how to get paid three months from now half of what I billed. I could just have someone pay me. Now if you think about 2003, that was about the time that Walmart was in its heyday. Sam Walton was driving around in a pickup truck and known as the richest man in America and was offering money back guarantee on everything anytime. I thought, "You know, if I'm going to charge cash to people, do I really want to be less reliable than a $20 watch from Walmart?" By the way, I like $20 watches from Walmart, but if had a $20 watch from Walmart that I bought and next week if it broke, and Walmart did not replace that watch, I would be angry.

I decided that anytime anyone paid me cash, I would be willing to give them back all the money they paid me anytime they asked for it. Even my weight loss patients, they had a year. Anytime during that year, they could ask for any penny they ever paid me as a physician fee, and I would give it all back to them. I can honestly say, as far as I know, since 2003 when I went to all cash, after that audit, every person I ever cared for and paid me cash, they were either happy with what I did or I no longer have their money. Even in the kind people who will say, "You know, it's not your fault I didn't get well. You did your best. We tried the therapy. It didn't work. You don't have to give me my money back." I always do. I insist, and I put it back on their credit card or write them a check because I want to be that reliable.

Now here's an interesting idea. By charging more, you can actually be more ethical because unlike insurance where you have a limit to what you can charge, and then of course if they don't get well, nobody gets any money back. Your pimp keeps that money and pays you maybe half of what you billed, but if you are charging cash, you can do what you want to, and you can give all the money back if you want.

PART 1 OF 3 ENDS [00:17:04]

Charles Runels: What you want to and you can give all the money back if you want. And you should, and I do. So that's how I was doing my practice. And ... but the cause of living in a small town where the total population of our county, including the beach, we have a resort area, is only 250,000 people which is about four square blocks in New York City, I needed to attract people to my town who didn't live here. And I needed to do it in an economical way because in the beginning I was starting over. So I started studying marketing. Now up until that point I had been doing my own website, just because I thought, even as an ER guy, which I did for 12 years, I thought that should be something that would be just an electronic way to be a more effective teacher trying to get people [inaudible 00:18:01] I had a website. My first website which is my last name.com. Runels.com and I just put things on it that I thought would make people better. But I wasn't really trying to make it into a marketing piece to bring people to me, obviously it's in New York [inaudible 00:18:18] and even as an insurance based, interns.

But once I went all cash, there weren't enough people in my area to support me so then I started going to marketing classes. Along with my continuing medical education. When I say marketing classes, I mean for example, one class costs $30,000. One fella I ... I mean the class I'm in now costs $33,000. One guy back then, I paid $1,200 a month for three years, so I had that up. So 1,200 a month for three years and I spent one hour a month with him but he makes over 10 million a year writing emails. And I would write an email, I'd look at it, and say do this, and this and this, I would change it, I would send it out and I would get $5,000 worth of patients to come see me. And so it was worth it. And others. I paid $5,000 for a half a day on how to do a video.

So when you add it all up, my routine budget for software is around $100,000 a year, I would buy software just to see how it works, how it can function in a positions office. So that idea of doing the class and then paying for it within a month was necessary, because I was starting over. When I gave up the insurance, that was a big thing. I also gave a house that was almost paid for back to the bank and I rented a little house across the street from the school so the kids could walk to school and walk themselves home and I sat down at a desktop that was a slow dial up back in the days so it'd go ... and you can hear it connecting. YouTube, I can't remember if it was there, it was just starting and mostly something kids played with and ... there were no podcasts, there were no iPhones, there was no Facebook, and I decided to get people to teach people how to find me, in an ethical way. In a way that would enhance my reputation, and at the same time, teach and inspire people who may never see me with what I was teaching them online and make it in such a way that those who ant to find me can and will. That was my intention.

So that's what I want to teach you, that's where it came from. 2003 to 2006 it went from that to starting completely over, to replacing my income and to then not needing to see patients. Which is freeing, obviously I want to keep seeing patients but bringing back to how we started, I would like to see patients the way they did in Dickens' day not because I took a vow of poverty, but because ... I don't need the money. Now because I know what it's like to lie away at night with three young children, three sons, ages four, six and eight in the bedroom next to me in a tiny house worrying if I will be able to buy groceries with what I'm going to make, I'm very passionate about what I'm teaching you. It's empowering not only to physicians, it will change your life, it would change your family and it will make you a better physician when you practice the marketing techniques I teach you because they involve learning and educating people how to do well and in that learning and education, you will have new ideas and think of new things that will make you a better physician, and that's exactly where the Vampire Facelift, the Oshot which we just published a study this year in the Journal of American Academy of dermatology about how our procedure helps [inaudible 00:22:37] up until this time all we had was [inaudible 00:22:40].

Our double blind placebo study of that should be done by the end of this month. We have another double blind placebo going. All in all, we've published so much work and these ideas came out of the way I think about marketing and they were financed with the money that we had been able to generate with marketing. I'll digress one other time about my background. I lived for a year as a student out of my car because I wanted to experience owning nothing. I was brought up as a Christian, I also studied meditation with the only presently living disciple up here, Monzio Gananda, so I've read the Buddhist teachings, I'm not sure what you would call my flavor of faith but having read extensively in the area of Hinduism and the roots od Christianity before they were polluted by men's dogma and Walden and Emerson, I wanted to experience owning nothing.

So I spent a year owning nothing. And I actually got to where I didn't want anything. I put my books in a storage room, I had a beat up car that I lived out of and it was pure piece. I always [inaudible 00:24:03] had a library card and a YMCA card, I could be perfectly happy. So when I teach you these prophet models and when I teach you ... before I ever teach you, before I ever teach the first thing about marketing sales, which is the biggest principle I want you to get today, that one principle alone will change your practice I want you to understand that it's done from the idea, or should be done from the idea of things flowing through you. Money was went to flow representing energy, not something you collect. It flows through you, you drink from the faucet as it's flowing through but if you try to pour it all into your pool and hoard it, it dries up, the pipe clogs. Emerson said he wanted to be a perfectly clean pipe and I think that's a good idea.

You have a pipe that's connected to your muse or your God or your inspiration, whatever you call it, the other end of the pipe is connected to the people whom you want to help you become the pipe. As that information and skillset flow through you, you drink from it, and that's how you support your family but you don't ... you don't pay too much attention to the pipe itself, which is you. Or it's also the things that may come from you, so we'll get to that. But first, let's talk about getting to the actual difference between sales and marketing and how the effects your practice. That's enough background. Let's talk about what makes a relationship, and then I'll be able to explain to you the difference between sales and marketing.

So if you've read the book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Steven Covey and if you haven't I think you would benefit from it. It's thought to be one of the top 10 most influential business books in the past couple of decades, and in that book, he defines what makes a relationship. So a relationship, according to Covey has two things, making a promise and keeping it and if you think about that, promise has ... it's really implied in every ethical relationship. So for example if you buy ... ethical business transaction. So if you buy a cup of coffee, there is a certain promise implied, it's gonna taste the way you expected, it should be hot and on and on. And for that promise, you give a certain amount of your income. I give you five bucks, you give me a coffee with some foam on top.

So a bigger promise brings a deeper relationship. If we can just agree on that much. So obviously marriage is a much deeper promise than a friendship, every relationship has implied promise, father-son, aunt-niece and so that makes a relationship. If there is no promise then we're acquaintances. We will develop a relationship if I give you what I promise on this, which is that if you will give up your time, which is very valuable so you're not giving me money, you're giving me your extremely valuable time, you give me your extremely valuable time and I will give you concepts that will make you cash while simultaneously allowing you to take better care of your patients, that's my promise to you, okay?

So that's what make a relationship. Now if you believe then I'm gonna put something else on the screen. If you believe a relationship is one making a promise, and two keeping a promise then you can make a couple other assumptions out of that, first of all, if you keep a promise, the relationship gets deeper. Keep it, relationship, deepens. Okay? If you break it, relationship is gone. Okay? Which is why even if you bought a $20 watch from Walmart, if it didn't work, you're going to be upset. The good thing is that most people are honest. If they weren't, Walmart would be out of business in a week. Most of us have a conscience, not everybody does. I have met people who don't and they're out there, it's hard for most people to conceive but there are those who have no conscience and they're called ... not all criminals have no conscience, many of them have a great conscience and I've been to prison, most people forget that part of the doctrine of most religions and we visit those in the hospital but don't visit those in prison, I have. Not that, that makes me wonderful but I'm just telling you that because I want you to know I've been to prison and most criminals do have a conscience.

Most of them were in the rage of passion, or they were drunk or on drugs and had deep regrets for what they did, but some criminals do not. There are criminals who will slice your throat and go have a cheese sandwich and not think twice about it and we know that pathology exists and that is a place for the criminally insane, that's why we have places to lock people up. But most people do have a conscience, and so that's why offering money back will not make you broke and we have to do it because if you break your promise and don't ... then you lose the relationship. Here is the caveat of that, we all break promises, so how does this work out?

Well, let's say that I promise you to ... let's keep it simple, you give me five bucks for a cup of coffee, and you hand it to me, and it's cold. You basically broke the promise. If you come to me and tell me that and I'm the barbista or whatever they call them, I'm the coffee beast, and you tell me that, and then I make you another cup of coffee, and I give you a free Danish to go with it, then the relationship can actually deepen, because I was certain about somehow giving you whatever it took to make the promise good. So we can elaborate more about that later but if you believe this then there becomes only three ways to make more money, you can make a bigger promise or you can make more promises by promising more people or you can more promises or promising same people more often. And there is really not a fourth ethical way to make more money.

When I say make it, I mean make it and keep it. There is not an ethical way to make more money. Now we'll get to how you can leverage it and actually do those things without spending more time and more resources, that's where profit happens, but we'll come back to that, I want to cover now sales and marketing and I think because this is the key nugget for today and then next time we'll go over more about this and money back and emails and all the other things that people expect me to say when we're talking about marketing but the problem with emails and websites and podcasts and all that stuff. Social media and face booking and Tweeting. To me Tweeting is like Tourette syndrome or something. What can you do in so many words? A little bit but not that much and so ... but all of that will actually hurt your reputation, I promise, it will hurt your reputation if the message behind it is wrong.

For example if you're doing emails that are saying 20% off because it's Valentine's day, you're killing your reputation. Think about it, if you're trying to be a superhero, when's the last time you heard Superman say, "20% off if you let me save you today." Superman doesn't beg people to let him save people, he's there and if you have faith or confidence that he can help you then he will but he doesn't beg you to let that happen but he is out there flying around in pantyhose and a big cape and dressed in Red, white and blue or whatever it is, red and blue, red, yellow and blue because ... so you have to know he's there, it's not your job to discover there is a Superman he shoots around in the skies so you know there is such a thing but he doesn't beg you to let him take care of you. In the same way if you're begging people on your internet and your emails and whatever to let you make them well, I don't know what you're being but it's-

PART 2 OF 3 ENDS [00:34:04]

Charles Runels: ... make them well. I don't know what you're being, but it's not what you want to be, I don't think. So, what do you do? Let's talk about sales versus marketing, and I think we'll call it a day.

If you buy what I just told you, that every relationship has a promise, and that there are only three ways to make more money, then sales would be this. Let's imagine that you're in your office, and someone says, "Tell me about this machine," or, "Tell me about this procedure."

The instant you open your mouth and start explaining it, that is sales. You may call it education, you may call it answering questions, you can call it what you want to, but you're selling.

The reason we don't like it is that people tease us. Let me just explain what I mean by teasing. If you are a woman or a man, I promise you, at some point in your life ... most of us are one of those two things or some combination of the two. We've had this feeling that we want to interact with someone sexually.

And so, watch this scenario. Woman is sitting there, talking to a man, or two potential lovers are talking to each other. Two women or two men, whatever it is. One is trying to seduce the other. But we'll man-woman for now. Man is trying to seduce a woman. A woman is sitting smiling, letting him buy drinks, entertaining the conversation to, somewhat, to some degree.

He has this illusion that she is going to go to bed with him. But in her brain, she has no intention, ever in her life, ever setting foot in this man's car, much less in his bedroom. And after he's bought her a few drinks, she smiles and goes him, and leaves him there, feeling stupid.

We've all seen or experienced that scenario. But the same thing happens in your office every day. Someone says, "What's this machine here?" "Oh, that's a ..." We'll use a; I don't know, let's use cool sculpting: "That's my cool sculpting machine." And you start to explain it.

Then, after explaining it, they ask you six more questions, and then, you see them almost smile, in delight, and they say, "No. I don't think so. Not today." And you realize, they never really intended to do that thing.

They were just enjoying the conversation, and sometimes, I think, even maliciously, or mischievously. However you want to look at it, want to see how far you'll go before you give up talking to them, and how much they can exhaust you. That is very, very common. I don't do it. I just don't do it.

But, I don't know, ethically speaking, what sales is..., is making a promise ... a promise, with your time involved. In other words, you are opening and closing your mouth.

By the way, if you don't make a promise, you're not going to make the sale: "If you use this Emsella machine, it's going to make your pelvic muscles contract, and release. It's going to strengthen your pelvis. It's going to help your incontinence. That's a promise, and if you believe that promise, you're going to give me some money, I'm going to put you on the machine, and you're going to get better, most of the time."

If you believe that promise, you give me the money. If you don't, then you don't, but if I had to sit there and tell you that, on the phone or in person, I am selling.

Marketing, this is the key, I want you to realize. Marketing makes the promise, with none of my time involved. Now, you could say, "Well, some marketing just makes name-brand awareness, like a Coca-Cola sign on a T-shirt." That's not really making a promise, and you could offer to do it, if you're the Coca-Cola company, or you're Baer, or whatever.

But if you're a physician, where your idea is to promise people something, in return for that promise, they trust you, and give you money, then you now keep the promise for them, which is what you really want to be about, which is part of the reason I went through that long story at the beginning.

If you didn't really do want to do that thing, and make people well, if the money was the main thing, you wouldn't even be on this call. The thing is, you want to be making people well, but you don't want to be sitting there, metaphorically speaking, on the bar stool, trying to talk the woman into going to bed with you. What you want to be is having sex with the woman.

In this case, what you want to be doing is healing people, and in some ways, they're similar in that, we want, as healers, to see people who have pleasure in healing, and inspiration, and a better life, because of what we know how to do. So, that's what sales is, making that promise, but we'd rather be keeping the promise. We'd rather do that side of it.

Marketing, the best marketing, finds the person that you can actually keep the promise to. Let's use the Emsella thing again. Emsella's great for strengthening the pelvic floor. But I'm not going to use it on someone who has, say, cervical cancer. With cervical cancer, they need a [inaudible 00:40:05], they need a hysterectomy, they need something done, a procedure done, that's not Emsella.

If someone tried to say, "Oh, this electric, magnetic thing that strengthens your pelvic fold is also going to do something in your cervical cancer," well, they should probably lose their license, because that's a bogus promise not supported by research and science.

So, back to your marketing. If you just had, "Emsella makes your pelvis well," not a good marketing message, because it will attract to you that you cannot make better with your Emsella. Or let's take our O-shot as an example, or orgasm shot: "We have amazing results with incontinence in those who have pelvic floor integrity. Their bladder's not falling out into the room. Amazing results."

But I would never use it, say, for dyspareunia, because someone has a uterine fibroid. They need to have surgery. Or something other than an O-shot. So the marketing message should, first of all, without your time involved, identify and let the person self-identify: "Okay, this is something that could help me," or, "This is something that will not help me, so I should look elsewhere." And they should make that decision before they ever take up any of your time or your staff's time.

Seconds, they should know if they can afford it. For example, I don't put the main price for the O-shot on our O-shot page, or the priapus shot, on our priapus shot page, because if you live in Chicago, it costs more to turn the lights on. You need to charge more than you do, if you live in Alabama.

So I don't put the price on the main page, but I'm reckoning that our providers do the price on their page, so that people can decide if they can afford it or not. It's a price, basically, like a new set of tires. Some of those people can come up with that money. If they're calling in, they just really can't. I'll treat people for free, if they're just broke, as much as I can. And so do most of our providers.

All that's determined, though. Okay, so, will it help me, or not? Can I afford it, or not? They're making these decisions before they ever call you. What's the science of it, or if I'm more attracted to celebrities, say it's a cosmetic thing, and I just want to see, has a celebrity done that?

With our Vampire facelift, we have Kim Kardashian, and the top paid model on the planet has had a Vampire facial, and many celebrities. So if a person wants confirmation, which is why we have celebrities, it's just, they have great power. If we don't want to figure out something for ourself, because there are 20 tubes of toothpaste at Wal-Mart, we know what the celebrity used. We let that make our decision for us, so we don't have to be making so many decisions.

So, if that's the mindset of someone, who's trying to decide about a procedure, they'll look at that. If they need to receive their research, because they're more science-minded, they look at that. If they're going to read testimonies, they look at that. But they do all of those things before they call me.

The other thing they might do is they might just look at people, look at locations. One person may like me, because I'm blue-eyed, Caucasian. Another person may avoid me, because I'm a blue-eyed Caucasian. And the same with every race, color, and geographical location.

We all have those who are attracted to us. We have many who are repelled by us. So, letting people make those decisions before they ever get to your office makes your life much more wonderful. Think about what happens. You actually get to surround yourself in this bubble of love, because those who decide they're not attracted to you don't show up. They have a chance to make that decision. Saves them time. It's courteous to them, to figure that out before they get there.

So, good marketing lets them decide about your person, your location, your price, your expertise, the research, the celebrity factor, the review factor. They're figuring all that out. You know what you're doing? You're busy, either with your family, at your dinner table. You may be sleeping in your bed, with your husband or your wife. Or you may be keeping the promise, which is using your highest skill set as a healer, to make people well.

I abhor selling. It's kind of ironic, I suppose, for someone who has ... Again, I'm just a pipe. I'm probably a pretty clogged-up pipe, sometimes connected to the wrong thing, but I seem to have been connected to the right thing a few times, and for that, I'm eternally grateful and take no credit for it, myself.

But I want people to ... Even though I've had some success with marketing, what I wanted to be in the first grade was a healer, not a salesperson, or a marketer. I did this out of necessity, which is why in the beginning, I said, "Things that happen that weren't so beautiful, at the time, turned to be some of the most beautiful things that could have happened to me, because it freed me up to use myself as a healer at my highest purpose, I think, which is having time to heal people." That's what we want to do.

So, back, sales versus marketing. If you're doing sales, here you are as a person with this high skill set, either technically or knowledge-based, to do procedures or do diagnoses, and treatment plans, and instead, you're talking to someone who metaphorically is the ... That is just teasing you, and not interested in your healing at all. He may not even like you, because they showed up, not knowing who you are as a person, or anything really specific about what it is you're trying to describe to them.

Versus this: the reverse is one, is that out of all those people who've looked at your marketing, those ones who have self-selected, and showed up in your office, they know you. Often times, they've fallen in love with you, because you've already given them inspiration, instruction, and a big, giant word, my favorite four-letter word, perhaps, in the dictionary: hope.

Because you've taught them about their disease, and how you might offer them hope. You've reassured them, you're not going to keep their money if you don't get them well. So there's no, assuming your procedure is reasonably safe, there's not a big downside to them coming to you. They've looked at your person. They've looked at a picture of your clinic. They've preferably heard you speak. Some may be repelled by my Southern accent. Some may love it. Some may be repelled by your Ukrainian or Russian accent. Some may love it.

So, they've figured all that out, and whether they can afford it before they get to your office. I think that's where I stop in that, with this assignment, before the next time that we meet. Catch yourself, between now and when we talk again, and just, every time you catch yourself opening your mouth, or your staff opening their mouth.

So you're explaining something about a post-op procedure, or you're explaining a process that you want, that you think may help a person, just make a note of the topic, because we're going to talk more about what to now do with those topics, and turn them into marketing pieces, that extremely leverage your time. Just on one of my channels, in an average day, I will talk the equivalent of three days' worth of talking. Think about that.

In one 24-hour period, I will talk 24 times three hours, before supper time, okay? In other words, between the time I work with this morning, and by the time I have supper tonight, I will have talked the equivalent of talking around the clock for three days, at just one of my video channels.

That doesn't happen overnight, but it doesn't have to be expensive, or difficult to create, for example, that sort of educational, hopefully inspiring to some people, materials that then attract those people to you, for whom you can make a promise, and establish a relationship, and kick your pimp to the curb, and take better care of patients.

So, next time we meet, that's where we'll start, and I just wanted to tell you that I'm, again, I'm grateful. I know what it's like to feel like you have a skill set that's extremely valuable, and yet, you feel like you have to go out there, and somehow talk people into doing things, and to get them to do something.

I'm not going to ask you to try to get anybody to do anything. I'm going to ask you to quit hiding, and put yourself out there in a respectful way, as superheroes do, and offer to help people, and then wait for them to walk through your door.

Hope that's helpful, make that list, and I'll see you guys the next time we do this free webinar.

Next hands-on workshop for procedures with live models with Dr. Runels also teaching marketing<--