Join host Bob Miglani in a captivating conversation with Dr. Brianna Rhue on the Marketing for Doctors podcast. Dr. Rhue, an optometrist turned tech entrepreneur, shares her journey from practicing medicine to owning and marketing her own business, Dr. Contact Lens.
In this episode, Dr. Rhue delves into the importance of understanding the business side of healthcare and the value of measuring and improving marketing strategies for doctors. She emphasizes the need for doctors to shift from being operators to owners in order to achieve success and growth in their practices.
To learn more about Dr. Brianna Rhue and her work, visit her website at drcontactlens.com. Don't miss out on valuable insights and tips for marketing in the medical field by connecting with Dr. Rhue on LinkedIn.
Tune in to this episode for expert advice on marketing for doctors and discover how to enhance your practice's success in the ever-evolving healthcare industry.
Join host Bob Miglani in a captivating conversation with Dr. Brianna Rhue on the Marketing for Doctors podcast. Dr. Rhue, an optometrist turned tech entrepreneur, shares her journey from practicing medicine to owning and marketing her own business, Dr. Contact Lens.
In this episode, Dr. Rhue delves into the importance of understanding the business side of healthcare and the value of measuring and improving marketing strategies for doctors. She emphasizes the need for doctors to shift from being operators to owners in order to achieve success and growth in their practices.
To learn more about Dr. Brianna Rhue and her work, visit her website at drcontactlens.com. Don't miss out on valuable insights and tips for marketing in the medical field by connecting with Dr. Rhue on LinkedIn.
Tune in to this episode for expert advice on marketing for doctors and discover how to enhance your practice's success in the ever-evolving healthcare industry.
Bob Miglani:
Hello, hello, hello, everyone. Welcome to the Marketing for Doctors podcast. I'm your host, Bob Miglani. Today, I'm with Dr. Brianna Rhue. Hi, Brianna, how are you?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Hi, Bob. Excited to have the conversation today.
Bob Miglani: Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you for joining us. We're going to learn a little bit about you, Dr. Rhue and Brianna. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us how you got here and what you do.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, my story is, um, I'll sum it up here, but I like to say that I've been an eye doctor since I received my first pair of contacts from my eye doctor in third grade and kind of worked my way up from front desk to technician, to school, to, um, associate doctor, to now owner, to now tech entrepreneur living on the other side of the table. in selling to optometrists. So we'll, we'll get into all of that.
Bob Miglani: So you're an optometrist selling to other optometrists. Okay. Okay. And she says that with a smile.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, that's loaded. All you can do is laugh, right? If I don't laugh, I'll cry.
Bob Miglani: Right, right, right. So tell us about your days of being a doctor and then let's get into your days of being an entrepreneur, how you got to that space.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, I knew what optometry was when I first went into it. Again, growing up in a private practice, worked for a private practice that had three doctors in it, they had six lanes, I scribed for one of them who would see 55 patients in a day. So understood scribes, understood what we did, the vision that we provided, not only for the patients, but also for us to live wonderful lives in helping so many patients. So when I walked into the clinic that I now own, and it's second generation of servicing this wonderful community, that's what was there. And so it, we needed to go from paper records to, you know, EMR and some systematic approaches, but that's what I joined.
Bob Miglani: Wow. Wonderful. What did you love about being a doctor or still love about being a doctor? And what did you despise? Like, what do you hate about being a doctor? Tell me.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Okay. So what I love about being a doctor is obviously I'm really heavy into the myopia space and just providing that kind of care that I received. And the faces that light up when you give them a contact lens for the first time or glasses for the first time, you know, I had one kid three weeks ago, I put contacts on him. He was like a minus four. He's like, Oh my God, these have changed my life. Like in just two minutes of putting them on, you get these, these results and then people coming in just. Last week, I diagnosed a girl that had been to four other doctors, pretty basic diagnosis of whooshing her ears, headaches, and sure enough, she has pseudotumor cerebrae. So just that constant helping, which is why we go to it. What I despise most about being a doctor is us not understanding our value, us not taking care of ourselves as physicians. us not keeping ourselves in the conversations to move the profession forward. So really having that, there's the book, The Infinite Game, which I'm sure you've read by Simon Sinek. It's just that infinite thinking, like we kind of get in our dark rooms and we kind of like to stay there because it's easy. But I love really kind of pushing ourselves to get out of that.
Bob Miglani: Yeah, I think often, you know, I've seen and exactly is that, you know, doctors love the patient care and they always go back to it. But the paperwork always is like annoying, you know, administration. And then the lower reimbursement is why I hear a lot of doctors like yourself pivot into specialty care. Do you think that's like a big, important thing to do for doctors is to pivot and change in this marketplace?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: 100% I mean, if you're not evolving, I use the word instead of change. Now, I say the word evolve, because you and I are not going to be the same in 20 minutes than we were when we started this call. Because we're going to be there to reflect and grow and evolve in an ever changing world. Right. So what I started to get away from, though, is really calling it specialization. These are things that you need to do to provide to your community, whether, and it's all of it, myopia, dry eye, your contact lens patient, selling glasses. It's this full comprehensive patient in your practice from six months old to, we have 103 year old patient in our practice. So understanding you're servicing a community and in that community, you have all these things.
Bob Miglani: Right, right. Sort of changing and adapting to the times. And you can call it whatever you want, but you're not going to be the same for sure. For sure. Absolutely. And so now tell me about your journey as an entrepreneur. How did you get into this business or how did you get into this business? What did you do? Give us the moment you said, oh, I'm going to do this thing, this entrepreneurial, heavy startup technology company.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Well, first off, I think being naive is half of it, had I known how hard this was going to be, I, there's no way I ever would have started and probably the same for yourself. So in 2015, Jen and I, we were both really kind of. So who's Jen? Talk to us.
Bob Miglani: Who's Jen? Who are you talking about?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah. So Jen Tviza, Dr. Tviza, she's out in LA. So she's my co-founder of Dr. Contact Lens. We both brought practices closing within about a week of each other. And had that constant conversation of, you know, here we are going from paper to EMR. Now that we did all that for three years, what's next? So really having that vision of getting healthcare to the patients in a better manner. So one thing that came up time and time again was contact lens sales. we see the patients just to see them walk out of the door. And that's not fun for anybody. It's not fun for me as the doctor, it's not fun for the staff and it's not fun for the patient because now their care hasn't really ended. Now they have homework essentially when they leave. So we wanted a whole scenario to bring all that back together. That's how Dr. Contact Lens was born on feeling that burnout. And I hate the word burnout. It was not feeling valued. So how could we put ourselves back in that conversation to show the patient? We actually are less expensive. We are more convenient. But when you go and you talk about this a lot on the marketing side, when we go into sales mode, the patients feel that we feel it, they feel it. And so it's really providing solutions over selling. And that's, I think where we need help.
Bob Miglani: All right, so let's just step back for a second. For those, for our listeners who don't know about optometry or contact lenses, explain just briefly the problem statement that your business solves.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, the problem statement. Patient comes in, says, you know, Dr. Roo, best eye exam I've ever had. I want to go up the street to the big box store or to an online retailer to order my contacts. Got it. Well, that's not fun.
Bob Miglani: So what we do is we- You basically losing that potential. Lose the sale. Right.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, we lose the sale and we lose the patient and then the patient doesn't know that, that they're putting their eye health at risk by doing that.
Bob Miglani: Why is that? Why is their eye health at risk? They're just fulfilling a prescription, right?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, contacts at the end of the day are a medical device. and should be treated as such, but we've commoditized it so far down by looking at just the box price that we're taking out of the equation, the eye health. So that's front of the eye, middle of the eye, back of the eye, connected to the brain, just looking at this full ocular system for what it is. The contact lens is the icing on the cake. If everything else behind it is healthy, great. But by people coming back in to renew their prescription, were able to diagnose diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer's, dry eye, myopia, man, you know, little things like that. For this girl that I saw two weeks ago, right?
Bob Miglani: Yeah, that makes sense. So so so the patient in the problem statement is it sounds to me like a patient walks out, takes your prescription goes to a you know, another place online or whatever, orders your contact lenses, they get it. And then they use it however they're going to use it. And they're kind of lost. I mean, yes, you've lost that revenue, right? The doctor's office lost that revenue. And you're saying to me is that connection between losing that patient is if you maintain that, if you preserve that revenue, they would see you more often. And therefore, you would be able to find, identify problems, get to the root of the problems and then solve potential problems before they took place. So you would have better patient outcomes as a result of keeping, if you will, closer contact with that doctor, that practice.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Exactly.
Bob Miglani: Yeah, yeah. So that makes sense to me. Okay, that's good. So now you started this business. And so what does Dr. Contact Lens do for that doctor's practice?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, so what we do, we're talking here on marketing for doctors for this podcast, right? Is really it's creating a customer relationship management platform for all your contact lens patients. So what that means is a CRM. So just like all our reps come in and talk to us, right? And they're on this cadence and you see them every month or depending on your account every two weeks, depending what you're, what you are to them. you're in a CRM as a doctor. Now we're putting that patient in a CRM, so you know who never ordered from you, who's due to reorder from you, and who's due to come back and see you. So by that, you're sending them text messages and emails where they can either make an appointment to see you, or they can order their contact lenses, or the patients that walked, right? You're giving them, again, yourself that second chance To show them I am less expensive because of your rebate and your vision plan and all these things that we discussed to you. Maybe I was running 20 minutes behind and you got to go pick up your kid. And that's why you wanted a copy of your prescription, but it's a digitizing everything or
Bob Miglani: Got it. So the patient in this case would, as a doctor, I would say to the patient, Mr. Jones, we can get that, or the staff would say it, right? Would the doctor do it or the staff do it?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: It depends where that patient is. I've said it, right? And it puts me on offense. The staff has said it. So it's just, it depends on how… Yeah. I guess, confident that patient is in the chair.
Bob Miglani: Right, right, right. So it's really about so there's a transition language, which is, look, here's a prescription for your contact lens. There's a bridge language, I suppose, like, okay, there's a prescription. Now to fill it, you're probably thinking, I'm going to go online to do it or whatever. But we can take care of that for you. We have a digital system. And it's all going to be delivered automatically, you won't have to kind of keep a track on all this stuff. We maintain all that you know, your records here. So we'll take care of that for you. And it's actually a little bit cheaper. It's about the same as you would get online. You just get better service. You know, that's kind of it. And then we would manage all of that for you, Mr. Jones. So, you know, Jenny at the front desk or Tom at the front desk and take care of it for you and go and do that. Is that kind of the spiel? Okay. And then so how's, so what has been, so you launched this company, you launched this business and what happened?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah. Like we built this company because people, our colleagues were saying, I want a system that does X, Y, Z. And like, we really built it kind of looking at what everybody was talking about and also what we wanted in a system. So when we launched, it was like, and then we started charging people for it. And they're like, no, I just fish. Why isn't this free? And you're like, Oh my. Yeah, like do you give eye exams for free? Like, I don't understand.
Bob Miglani: Wait, your customers wanted your software for free. Let me understand that. So is it EHR free? Is there, you know, yeah.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: I don't know. I mean, they all think that they're, a lot of us think that there's no money in contact lenses. The way that we're doing it, Bob, there is no money in contact because you're letting literally 50% of your pie go away that you've never even been able to see. So I'd love to break that down, but yeah, so then it was, you know, we had to find our first couple of people to come on that were believers and then it started to trickle down, right? And then we've gotten some fast followers, which is great. It's showing that this is no longer a want for your practice to be in 2024, but an actual need. And that's actually been fun for us because it's showing validation in the market for what we've built. So now we're kind of gotten to this pick me phase, which we're up against free products. We're up against people getting better rebates on their contacts. And I want people to understand, don't have this vision for two months or a quarter from now. Have this vision for your practice for 10, 15, 20, 25 years, whatever your retirement date is.
Bob Miglani: Yeah.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Think longevity.
Bob Miglani: Right, right. So you're, so you're marketing to doctors. So how do you market to doctors? So tell us about that. Tell us a little bit about that. Like how does Dr. Contact Lens market to customer prospects? What do you do today? Like email, social?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: What's our customer acquisition cost here?
Bob Miglani: Well, I mean, this is where we're listening. Our listeners are doctors and they want to learn about marketing. And this could be plastic surgeons, could be dermatologists, could be ophthalmologists, could be optometrists. So they need to understand how do you, as a doctor, put on the marketing hat and market to other doctors? What do you do?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, we've done all of it. We've done like the LinkedIn stuff, Facebook, Instagram. We go to as many shows as we can afford. Like these shows are expensive, as you know. We need doctors to lean in, whether you're in plastics or you're in med spa or dentistry, whatever you're in. Lean into your vendors at these shows. I don't have a hundred reps that are going out and I don't have a budget to take you out to lunch because then you're wanting a software for free. So all of that investment, it's that feedback loop or that kind of ecosystem loop that I don't think we talk enough about. on how are you going to learn about new technology? It's not these big boys out there that can wine and dine you with the big booths at these expos that you should go into. It's the ones on the outskirts that you need to pay attention to. And if you don't, that's what's cannibalizing your profession.
Bob Miglani: So you do social media marketing, you do shows. Do you do email marketing as well?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: We do email marketing, we do cold calling. Like if you do not understand one thing here in cold calling, yes, I know that I'm a doctor, but in that moment that I'm calling your practice, I'm Brianna, right? I never use that doctor language.
Bob Miglani: So do you actually as a CEO, as a CEO of this company, as a co-founder of this company, do you cold call to practice?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yes, I do. I do. And what I want to hit on there is your team I empower my staff at West Broward to take these calls because that's what's going to advance us. That's what's going to keep us at the forefront of our profession, practicing to the highest standards is you taking these calls and taking the demos and then bringing to me what you found and us deciding together if we're going to invest in it. I use the word invest because a lot of us lead with cost. Right. These are investments for you to connect to your patients. So your team, a lot of our teams are rude, rude on the phone. And I can tell right there what kind of practice you are. And sometimes they don't even know that I am a salesperson at that moment. Maybe I was a patient. If you don't take anything away from this, empower your team.
Bob Miglani: Empower them to make decisions or take calls or to
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Empower them to take calls, to take demos, to understand. Again, in companies like ours, I don't have the capacity to buy you lunch, to get an ear for you. And when you are at lunch doing a demo, you're not fully present. That does nothing for my company or for you.
Bob Miglani: Yeah, for sure, for sure. So you cold call, you do all these strategies. What have you found works well and what's a complete waste of money? from a marketing perspective.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Oh my God. What works well is obviously other doctors validation. And everybody at this point in their life wants to be a KOL. I use that term lightly. That one gives me a little bit of headache. So if you want to be a KOL, understand that that comes at a huge expense for the company and they're putting a lot in you to make introductions. and warm introductions.
Bob Miglani: So you're saying KOL strategies work? Is that what we're saying? It depends. It depends on the KOL. What has been the most successful strategy for Dr. Contact Lens for your business? Is it email marketing? Is it social? Is it trade shows? What is the one or two things that's worked pretty well?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: It's getting the social validation. So whether that's through people on the platform, testimonials, and introductions from doctors that are happy with the service. And some Facebook groups have been really good for us. And I'm really kind of building that brand.
Bob Miglani: Where are you getting most of your customers? Is it through referrals or word of mouth or is it like marketing campaigns or sales?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, it's just kind of what we're doing, whether the build the brand that we're building on LinkedIn with the following there. And then again, just showing the doctor's value that you're part of this membership, you're part of this community, that we're not just giving you a doctor contact lens, but you have two private practice owners that are living it every single day with you.
Bob Miglani: Right, right. Yeah. One of the things that worked for us has been, I mean, email marketing has been excellent for us. Email marketing, we do a cadence of four messages to a lead. We do kind of two different campaigns. We do a sales campaign and a marketing campaign. Marketing campaigns are, hey, you know, this is kind of be aware of, you know, kind of hey, we're having this webinar coming up, check out this video, check out this podcast, sort of like content marketing. And then we have a sales campaign. And the series of sales campaigns have four cadence. One is introductory message. Second is a follow up. Third is like a specific thing that they might be struggling with. And the last one is, as you know, the breakup message, which is the last message I'm going to send you. And so that cadence has worked fairly well with us. All of our messages have a video embedded inside, whether it's a testimonial, whether it's me or my sales colleague here. So it's really specific. It's targeted. We sequence, I probably, I mean, we have a list of 27,000 or so doctors in the US, and we've been cultivating that list and getting, you know, adding to the list and, you know, throwing some, you know, names out and so on, you know. dead names. But the email marketing campaigns have worked very well for us. The trouble is, increasingly though, I think has been email marketing wise, you've got a lot of different policies. And with DMARC, something new, which is these associations like Outlook and Gmail, they have new policies of how you can send out emails on mass to these email addresses. And so you've got to be sure to monitor wherever you're sending them, whether you're using HubSpot or Zoho or Salesforce or whatever, to make sure these policy areas are aligned. So for us, it's been email marketing is number one. The second big thing for us has been very, very good is events. And so whether we're at a sponsoring an event online and you're spending like a few thousand dollars to get on for five minutes, I hate those things, man. I don't know what you found, but I kind of feel used a little bit when I do these sponsorships, you know, hey, come in, Bob, you know, it's, you know, spend $5,000. Here's five minutes in front of 5,000 people. Okay. And that's like, oh, like, It's like five minutes, and it's a CME-sponsored course, so you're given five minutes, and then you're like, oh my God, is my five minutes up? And you're like rushing through it, and it's just challenging, and I feel kind of used at the end. I'm like, you just took my five grand, and I don't know what I'm really getting. But we've had an uptick when that happens of demos booked. You know, and then the third that's been really powerful. So the emails and all that. And then the third is social. We did a lot more social media. And, you know, I think for doctors, LinkedIn, I don't know. I don't know what you think, Brianna, but my sense is that more doctors are on Facebook than on LinkedIn. The ones on LinkedIn, are trying to promote their speaking services or be a KOL, be seen as a KOL or their own thing to other doctors versus receiving content. Whereas on Facebook, they're more really aligned to, hey, I'm a doc, I wanna learn as a doctor. So those are some of the things we found in our experience in terms of marketing-wise. What do you think? Anything specific that sticks out to you?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, I think that you're hitting the nail on the head there. We're looking for that mindset person, right? It's really kind of what kind of doctor are you? And I'll go into this for a second. I'm going to ruin like all salespeople's lives for a second is when you go into a doctor, there's typically four types of doctors. You have a business, business doctor, they own multiple clinics. Talk to me about business, all the care is about the business. Maybe I'm seeing patients like two days a month, whatever it is, right? Then you have business science, that's where I would put myself. I love the business side of healthcare. I wish that more of us understood that the business of science or the science of business, we're really good and we need a lot of validation when it comes because yes, we're treating a patient, but business moves way faster than getting all that validation that you need for a business. So talk to me a little about business, validate me with a little bit of science. Then you have the science business doctor the majority, kind of minor majority live. I want validation with science. And then you can validate me with business. And then we have the science science doctors who maybe I run a clinic, I have more on my bank account than I did last month. That's great. And then you have this little piece left over for you, which is your profit that you got to pay taxes on. So we want us to move kind of into those other boxes. That's my purpose now in building this company is showing doctors how much value you bring, but you've got to understand the game. You have to invest not only in your education, that's the easy part. Like I can talk dry eye, glaucoma, myopia, all that stuff forever. But understanding what ROI is, return on investment, understanding what investment makes, understanding what a CAC, customer acquisition cost is, where are your new patients coming from, understanding the marketing, Yeah, you don't have to do all that. But you need to empower a team member that this is important to you. And then you can cycle that through. So understanding that there's a science of business. And if you don't figure it out, what's left for you? Absolutely nothing.
Bob Miglani: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you've said it really, really very important point, which is that, you know, that doctors need to become better business people in order to be good doctors. Yeah. And I think a part of that is this notion of operator versus owner. You know, we are, you know, doctors go in and a really good, you know, operators, they see patients all day long, hamster wheel, next exam, next exam, next exam, next exam. And the end of the month or they're in the end of the quarter at the end of the year, they meet with their accountant. Not even at the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, they're like, hey, how did I do? They're like, oh, you made all this money. You made a million dollars in revenue, right? Or five million in revenue. And they're like, OK, so what did I get at the end of it? Well, you got 80 grand left. What? What happened? Well, your expenses, this, blah, blah, blah, blah. what, oh my God, 80,000, like I can't retire on this. So I think the challenge becomes is this operator hat, it just continues to be on and really have to do is to be successful now, I think you've got to put on the owner hat. And the owner hat means is understanding the words that you stated just before, which were customer acquisition cost. Where are my margins? Where are the new customers? Where am I specializing? Where am I pivoting into? Where am I spending on marketing? Why am I spending on website development? When I shouldn't be spending on websites, I should be spending on technologies such as, you know, Dr. Contact Lens or Hoot or others, whatever, whatever they might be. But that is the owner hat. that allows you to live a life of freedom, inspiration, and success. That's what it's supposed to be about. But going on vacations, Brianna, doctors I talk to, they're just so burned out. Their heads are down. And then they're like, oh, I'm just dragging through the day, seeing my next $40 exam, and then the next one, and the next one. And I feel like I had a good day because I saw 25 patients. But I made like $1,000. versus I saw three, I made $10,000, right? And I have an automated system that's like capturing all this lost revenue that I could have gotten. So that's an owner hat versus an operator hat. And I find that in order to move forward and really grow, we've got to put on that owner hat. That's really important.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: And you have to give yourself the time to put on the owner hat. It's not in between patients. It's not at a lunch. it's literally cramming all those patients that you saw, whether it's on a Monday or a Friday, I wouldn't do Friday, a Wednesday into other days, right? Where you are fresh, you're gonna go there, you're gonna work on your business instead of in your business. And that owner hat is your empowerment. So replacing that, putting owner on, and that's the empowerment hat, that's where this gets fun. Because now your patients schedule you. right? You don't schedule your patient. If you see 20, like you're scheduled from the first patient that you see to the last patient that you see, you are not the boss. And we think that we are. So again, when we're having this conversation and this difficult conversation, I read a book that really, really changed my life. I've put it on some other podcasts, but buy back your time. I love it. Oh my God. Yeah. Who's that by?
Bob Miglani: Who's it by? Who's that? Who what's it about?
Dr. Brianna Rhue: By Dan Martell. Okay. Um, it talks to you. He's really good at like high performers and that's what we all are. Cause we went to school all these years. We're high performers, but we're not physically, mentally, um, functionally taking care of ourselves in order to take care of the patients. And he really gets you out of your own way on breaking down the value of your time. and how you're buying back your time by not doing these little things, but how you get that team around you. And that's what people ask me constantly. They're like, how do you do all this? You're a wife, a mother of two, you have this business, your practice, you, all these things. I do that by having an incredible team, not delegating, but empowering around me.
Bob Miglani: Yeah, no, I love it. All right. So let's kind of wrap up. We're talking to Dr. Brianna Roux, doctor and entrepreneur, CEO of Dr. Contact Lens. So tell us one tip for marketing for doctors. What do you suggest that doctors do today? OK, maybe two tips, OK, of what they do today in order to improve their marketing, to grow their business.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: understanding at the end of every encounter, what you're getting or leaving on the table. What I mean by that is like investing in who, investing in Dr. Contech lens, where you're doing all these eye exams, but yet your team is afraid to tell you how that exam ended. Do an audit of your last 20 patients of what you saw and how that encounter ended. So for like eye care or dentistry or med spa, whatever it is, You saw all these patients and I'll take it from the contact lens side. You saw 20 contact lens patients that week. Tell me how the encounter ended.
Bob Miglani: Right.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Did they buy, did they buy a whole supply, a partial supply or did they walk? Are they in trials?
Bob Miglani: Yeah.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: And right there is going to give you your tip and your tool to grow right there because you've, you've, um, yeah. you know how the encounter ended.
Bob Miglani: Yeah, I mean, I say to people, you can't grow without measuring. And you've got to measure, you got to do the math. There's a math to growth. And if you're trying to lose weight, okay, get fit, right? If you don't have a scale, how do you know how you're doing? How do you know? You can't just put on those jeans and be like, oh, I feel great. And the buttons are popping out. You know what I mean? You can't lie to yourself, right? And I think often you're lying to ourselves and we're avoiding the hard thing. And so to me, to your point, it's like you really have to measure what you're doing. So how many patients you saw this month, What were the value and return on investment for each single patient? What did they give you? Obviously, you have to give great care. That's clinical. That's just standard of care. You just got to give great care, but measuring and then saying, well, maybe this is not the insurance plan I want to be on. Maybe my prices are too low. Maybe they're too high. What did we do right? What didn't we do right? Did these patients come back? So you got to measure it. When we do demos, first question we ask is, show us four numbers. you know, how many patients you're doing every single month, okay? How many are dry eye suspects, right? And number three is how many showed back up for a follow-up or some ocular surface values and how many signed up. Those are four numbers. And so that, from the chair to conversion, we wanna know how many you've been converting today. And I will tell you, 95% of them don't know these numbers. 99% don't know these numbers. And if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. You cannot improve it. If you don't know where you are, you can't improve it. And we've seen practices that we think outside are super, super successful in their marketing, their business. They do hundreds of YouTube videos. I've got a great presence on social and amazing, amazing docs. But I kid you not, the conversion rate is 0.05 percent. And I'm like, what is going on? Right. So you're losing all that revenue. So if you don't measure, you cannot grow. So that's kind of my take. But I agree with you. You really have to understand the math and that big.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: And I'll end to Bob where if selling to you is a bad word and that's okay. If it is provide solutions for patients. So if you just need to turn terminology in your head, it's all again, how you're talking to yourself. Like with my seven year old in the morning, I don't say we have to go to school. We get to go to school. Right. And now, because I've been saying that to him for seven years, Hey mommy, do I get to go to school today? Like how much better is that? You get to take care of patients, you get to provide them solutions and they are looking to you for that expertise. How many times do you go to a doctor's visit wanting your problem solved and they were too scared to sell you, air quotes there, without providing you a solution? That doesn't feel good for anybody because now they got to find somebody else that's willing to sell them or provide them a solution. So that would be my second.
Bob Miglani: Yeah, I think it's a really important point. I would love to have you back on the podcast here, Dr. Rue. Brianna, thank you so much. As we wrap up here, it's been excellent talking to you. Where can people learn more about you and the work you do? Tell us.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Yeah, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. That's really my jam over there. And then you can find out more about Dr. Contact Lens at drcontactlens.com. That's drcontactlens.com spelled out.
Bob Miglani: Wonderful. Brianna, pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you for being a guest on our show and we look forward to seeing you soon. We're going to put everything in the show notes so people can check out Dr. Aru's website and all the great learnings and follow her on LinkedIn. I follow her and I learn something every single time. So thank you very much. Thank you. Have a great day.
Dr. Brianna Rhue: Thank you, Bob.