with Stewart Gandolf, CEO Healthcare Success
Stewart Gandolf built a hugely successful digital marketing agency for healthcare companies using SEO and PPC ads. His company is currently planning for a pivot, so Stewart takes some time to reflect with Susan on how he would build a digital marketing agency today now that he’s reached the buyout stage.
Notes from the Show
Healthcare Success CEO Stewart Gandolf has been in business for 15 years as a medical advertising and digital marketing agency. In the beginning, Stewart focused on being a partner with his clients so that their partnership would be a win-win for both of them. For many of his clients, Stewart’s company has functioned as an outsourced marketing company.
Today, Healthcare Success is getting approached for a buyout, and Stewart shares with Susan the three reasons his company is attractive to outside buyers:
Having a digital focus
Focusing on a specific industry
Recurring revenue
If he were to start from scratch today, one of Stewart’s biggest lessons from the last 15 years is that he would be more judicious with his hiring. If you’re at the start of building your agency, Stewart’s advice will be timely to help you cut through the noise about hiring a team. Connect with Stewart at stewart@healthcaresuccess.com
What’s Inside:
In the process of growing an agency, Stewart realized that partnering with a company that’s too small would only cause a headache because they couldn’t afford his marketing services.
Blogs, podcasts, and webinars are great, but podcasts and webinars help the audience feel like they really know you.
Stewart credits a large part of his success to the constant adaptation of his business model reacting to outside market forces.
Because most clients hired them for results, Stewart relied on digital marketing because it was the fastest and easiest way to get there.
Transcribed by AI Susan Tatum 0:03 Hey everybody, and welcome to stop the noise. This is where we get to hear from some of the most interesting and experienced minds offering us advice and some great ideas about why and how to stop wasting money looking and sounding like everybody else. You know in business, being the same won’t keep you safe. It will make you easy to replace, and even easier to ignore. I’m your host, Susan Tatum. Let’s get started. Hello, and welcome back to stop the noise. I’m Susan Tatum. And today I’m talking with Stewart Gandolf, who is the CEO at healthcare success, which is a medical advertising and digital marketing agency. Welcome, Stuart.
Stewart Gandolf 0:53 Hi, Susan. pleased to be here.
Susan Tatum 0:54 So you’ve been in business with healthcare success for about 15 years. It looks like you’ve grown this massively successful agency you’ve got you’re being approached now by people that want to buy you. So tell us how you did that you built the agency from scratch?
Stewart Gandolf 1:12 Yes, it’s actually a I’ll try to give you the quick story, as it has been 15 years. But yeah, I felt it’s funny. I stumbled into the world of healthcare marketing. By accident, I was doing something completely different. I started my career in advertising and worked my way to agencies like J. Walter Thompson, left the business for a while. And then at some point, I was recruited into this agency that worked with a lot of doctors. And I thought, first of all, I’m not showing you advertising anymore. You know how you guys make any money with this. But the funny thing, Susan is that it turned out that there’s a natural affinity I didn’t know in myself. And so the model of that company was a little different than ours. But there’s some similarities where I was a speaker and I was flying around the country. And by the way, I had never spoken publicly before in my life. And I had five weeks to prepare for my first meeting with very little health. And I had to go in and work with a six practices, I think it was 12 15 people. Remember, I’d never spoken publicly ever before, really. And I had to keep them entertained and leave the group like that for three days. And on the way up to the meeting, my I got stuck in the elevator and somehow made it through anyway, and actually had a really good weekend. And I did a lot of stuff. And it went really, really well. So it was a good experience for me. But anyway, that was the beginning of a time where I spent with this other company flying around the country doing these seminars, leading small groups and getting lots of experience on speaking getting lots of experience in healthcare, getting lots of experience in selling, because I would get at bats every week. And I’d go and get five or six opportunities to sell something to somebody. So I didn’t realize it was an educator. So it turns out, I’m an educator, which will play into this company just a moment here. So ended up getting really good at the whole healthcare marketing world and built some skills that, you know, are irreplaceable. And like, for example, we’ll talk about sales a little bit later. But one of the things I use as a metaphor is, you know, if you’re most people are trying to sell something, don’t get many at bats all year, right, they might get three or four or five or 10 opportunities a year, I would get that I’d get more than that in a single month. So the more balls you swing out, the better you get hitted, right. So these things became relatively easy for me just because I did it a lot over and over and over again. And I stumbled into a niche that it was kind of unnatural. So jumping forward. A few years later, after I did that, and became VP of that company and moved on, I again did something else because that’s just the water loss to me, but I hated that I left all that experience laying in the field. You know, I had this experience where I understood you know, one of the jokes we talk about a lot is a little nightstand. You need to build a gastroenterology business and the neurology business(3:47), a psychiatry, a gastroenterology, I can do that. Like every single specialty in Medicine and Dentistry, physical therapy, or whatever we’ve done can talk about and so I left the business, I thought, well, that’s kind of done. And I have all this great experience. And while I’m having fun doing something else, I thought maybe we could start this business as a hobby or start a business as a hobby. So a friend of mine that I used to work with as well. And I decided to become partners. And it was honestly an experiment. And so without very little strategy. Mostly like let’s put up a website and get discovered to create an agency and but going back to what I said earlier, the educational side of me really helped make this work. So when we started the company we went sold the former clients some stuff to get some seed money, which is pretty easy because he was a good relationship and he needed stuff anyway, so we did that. And we went and got a website going but the key was we started off with the idea the objective, this is a 2006 to get SEO, Search engine optimize, and to get and to build on this knowledge base that we had. So the first thing I did was after getting the website built, we launched the blog this they were called blogs. We call it a newsletter, but it was essentially a blog. Second thing we did was I went to dental economics and offered to write an article for them. And after we sent the first article, they said, Hey, we’d like a regular column. So suddenly, now we’re writing a column for dental economics, went to medical economics. And my former partner and I did a version of our seminar on audio CDs, we did a deal with that club nomics, we did a revenue share deal with them, we sold a couple $100,000 for the CDs. So those people were paying, you know, a couple 100 bucks to get our advice. And it did exactly what we expected, you know, so we started getting people to call us. So that was really fun days. So we ended up grossing a million dollars almost in our first year. And it was just the two of us, you know, and some freelancers, and it was one of our more profitable years. So we talked about this now a lot, but we’ve been doing content marketing before and inbound marketing before those terms existed, they, those are terms of came along later. But really, that was that the idea was to get on the search engines. You know, there was a point there in the early days where we own every term we wanted number one, like health care marketing, number one worldwide, I once went to MIT and Columbia. And sure enough, holistic health care marketing, we were number one. So we still are heavily SEO, we have 1000s of pages of content. And so it’s hard to own number one in every position now because it goes up and down daily, but we still are pretty heavily SEO. And so that inbound marketing stuff really worked for us as we got started. And then eventually, I bought my partner out about, I don’t know, five years, six years into it, we’re still friends. And then, you know, since then, I’ve been running the company as the sole owner and CEO. And so yeah, that’s where we are today. It’s, I think that you asked also asked about people that are interested in buying our company, you know, I keep telling them No, because we’re not ready yet, which is, you know, the truth, but the reason why they get interested in us because of some of this stuff that we’ll talk about in more detail in probably a few minutes. But like some of the things that we do that, you know, make people attracted to us is one, you know, heavy digital focus is certainly something that most of them, you know, pe guys, investment bankers and strategics are looking for, two, is the healthcare niche focus, you know, it’s like, it’s so much easier to have a specific industry for so many reasons to, to attract business to manage business to add value to the business. And then third, we have mostly recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is a thing that that’s what they’re looking for. So yeah, that’s kind of where we are today.
Susan Tatum 7:24 So when you started the company in 2006, I think you said you were focusing on digital from the get go?
Stewart Gandolf 7:31 That’s a great question, actually, that bizarrely, in those days, we were working mostly with smaller practices, you know, one or two or three doctors, not necessarily small for single doctor practice, because they’re usually almost always had to be successful in order for us. It’s funny one, just as another side note, when we started off, I had this ambition to be able to provide, you know, full ad agency services to add a private practice budget. And it turns out, you can’t do that. So we have products for individual practices, but you can’t have a full ad agency, because always want to get paid that you’re working with, right. But we were doing a lot of, you know, branding and collateral and some external advertising and some digital, but while we’re doing it for ourselves aggressively, including paid search, and SEO, especially, most of our clients, were either ready for that, or you know, whatever. And we always talk to our clients about another thing we do to add value beyond the stuff that we sell, we help them with things they need to do. So for example, we teach them how to answer the phones or answer how they build doctor referrals, or how do they treat their patients better? Or how do they do whatever. So it was like kind of a bundle of services. And we did a lot of projects at that time. And so there was an aha, I’ve had a few aha moments. And I don’t know three years ish into it, I felt like this is a dumb model. Because the idea initially was, we’re going to set you up, you’re going to pay us X dollars, and set you up for what everything you need. And then you can do all the rest of the stuff on your own. So the presumption is that’s what the client wants, right? They want to be able to get everything they need to get started and save money in the long run by doing everything themselves. And what we found is that’s a lose lose proposition. So from our standpoint, when we did work, like that was like a shark quest keeps finding new, you know, they talk about sharks who have to keep swimming, they can’t Yeah, that’s true or not. But the metaphor is that if they stop and sleep, they die. And so they have to keep moving. So that’s what it was like, if you work on a project basis. You’re like a shark who can never sleep. You’re always looking for the next meal. And it’s a really exhausting way to live. And it’s really hard. If you think about it, it’s really hard to how do you do that? How do you continually come up with new ideas, give your best thinking to a client say goodbye. We’re gonna start all over again with somebody else. It’s like and then number two, the amazing thing we found was most clients don’t want that most clients they want to park. They don’t want to do transactional work. There are some for sure. But there’s a whole bunch that one have deeper relationships because they want to have a partner and so it’s a win win. That’s why he’s mentioned everything. revenue clients, because most of our clients have that kind of relationship where we do a ton of work at the beginning, you know, projects and whatever. But then after that we have a management agreement where we work with them or partnership agreement, where we work with them over a period of time. And we’re, you know, really essentially their outsourced marketing department in many cases, depending on the size or the ad agency in other cases. But at any rate, that’s those are important things that came along in our evolution, right, the idea of going after clients that want to be a partner and grow. So it’s evolved. And then going back to your question, the digital services, as you know, things evolved online in 2006. Certainly, Google’s obviously around back then, you know, things, there’s a lot of infrastructure in place, but the power of the internet was still most people didn’t get it, they didn’t really understand how powerful it was. And what we found with the digital stuff is that most clients want to hire us for results. So digital is the easiest way to get there. Like we can get there through TV, we can get there through newspaper, we get there through iPad, you know, theoretically knocking on door to door. But if you’re talking about something that scales quickly and delivers the highest ROI, it’s usually the digital camp. So we began that transition at the same time toward digital services. That’s our favorite level, because it’s faster, and it’s better ROI wise, that coincidentally is what people want to buy anyway. So you know, it’s we focus on that.
Susan Tatum 11:23 What I hear you saying, Stewart, though, is that you’re and I think this is important, you’ve continued to refine your definition, or your idea of what an ideal client is, is for you, as you learn more about the market and what it wants.
Stewart Gandolf 11:37 Yeah, we pride ourselves a couple of things. Actually, what’s funny, I thought we were gonna say one thing that we’ve done historically, and we have to do is reinvent ourselves, I don’t think we’d still be here, if we were committed a single model, because every time we have a model, it’s the right model for a while, and then we have to evolve away from it. Yeah, I mentioned earlier, I lead to this as well, early on, we had a bunch of marketing target clients that were smaller than the problem with that is if you go try to partner with a client who’s too small, then what happens is, it’s a lot of money to them. And so they feel financial stress, and then if it’s also not profitable for you, so that was happy, right? Are we happier, so we found was a way of productizing our products at different levels. So I am excited that we’re able to still work with the small guys, we have products that make sense for the scope make sense. And this didn’t happen at once. It was, you know, a lot of search volume there. But the we have products where somebody can pay, you know, a few 1000 a month and be a client of ours. And we it’s all about setting expectations, having the right scope, because otherwise suddenly everybody becomes a full service client. And then you have problems. You can’t you know, so you can’t brand somebody for 2000 a month Pay Per Click budget, for example.
Susan Tatum 12:50 Yeah,
Stewart Gandolf 12:51 so we have that level. And then on the larger site, we certainly became more and more enterprise driven, and have, you know, products for that. So it’s it’s really as thinking about your target audience bases you’ve built generate more clients. And you know, because the goal is obviously for everybody, you want the client to be happy, you want to be happy, it’s it needs to be a win win.
Susan Tatum 13:11 So you started the agency, you focused on content, and inbound, even though it wasn’t called that then, you’re just naturally doing it that way. And when you and I talked before, you mentioned that there was a point at which you realized that although there were plenty of leads coming in through inbound, it wasn’t by itself, giving you what you wanted in terms of the types of clients who wanted to talk to or the prospects that you wanted to talk to. So you added and outreach component. Is that correct?
Stewart Gandolf 13:41 Yeah. What happened is that, again, was an evolution. But there’s a couple things. One is, I’m big on analogies, metaphors. And so what if you forget to go through a conversation about at least one. But one of the ones I use a lot is SEO, in particular, and pay per click as well are kind of like throwing a net into the sea every day. So imagine you’re on a big boat, you’re thrown out in the sea. And you know, when you bring a relative, sometimes you get, you know, an old shoe or a stump or a shark would bite you sometimes you get you know, a lot of little tiny fish, that kind of stuff through that. Sometimes you get some say bass and rarely go whale. But the thing is, that, you know, it’s it after a while if your entire business relies on just that, as an agency, it’s a little disturbing if it’s successful, because you know, you can’t really control Plus, you know, there may be some people that are ideal for you that would just never think to search for you online. So, there may be like, 100 if you look at your top, you know, 100 prospects, you’re hoping by chance somehow, someday somewhere, maybe that the executives of that company will find you online. And that’s where I think like, you know, companies like HubSpot for a while there it was like their religion. It’s like you don’t need salespeople anymore. That’s an outdated dumb idea that you should just do that by marketing and I always thought that was naive. And today, they now have gotten more towards account based So they recognize that while inbound marketing is powerful, it’s not sufficient. And I think it’s To me, it’s always it’s, it’s became much more of an integrated strategy where we still do inbound. And we still do education, like we sell seminars. So we’re we’re doing kind of a quiz I inbound happen where we’re doing hard mailings selling a seminar, but one meeting I had in particular, that was funny, where, you know, as we’re beginning to think more about, like, well, how these ideal prospects that I really got to wait, I could take centuries before they find us and they’re dead, right? So they’re not, it’s like, it’s really, really hard to go after ideal clients to just sit around and wait for inbound, inbound should be part of the mix, but not the whole mix. So then what we did was we switched to. I had a meeting once where this lady came to us from our seminar, and you know, our seminar, we’re educating or, you know, we all do superdude, ethically, it’s not a big sales pitch, but to teach and teach and teach and teach. And so halfway through the first day, she asked me to go to lunch, and she looked at me, she goes through the seminar is amazing. Can we just cut the crap and do some business together? And I just laughed, it’s like, I get where this is going. But you don’t need to do that I need a partner, can you help me, you’re obviously you’re smart. And let’s just work together. And so I got out of the plane that day, we came. The next day, we flew in from Vegas with over two days now, not three. And I had a couple my key teammates. And I still remember that moment, we’re at Orange County, john Wayne Airport. And I told my team is like, Guys, we’re changing. We’re doing business, right flipping now. And we’re going to go after who we want. And so that’s what we did, we started creating a variety of different outreach programs, whether it’s, you know, email, or calls or mail or whatever, lots of different outreach ways. We identified target audiences where we felt like were ideal for us that we have a great story for. And so today, we have an integrated approach where we still do the inbound, and we just as I was telling her last call, we got a fantastic inquiry from our website a couple months ago, it could turn out to be a total marquee client. And we stumbled into that, but we had the right you know, the right content, the right website, presence, the right everything. So that foundation was there. But then, you know, maybe half of our clients today were reached out reaching to and so it’s a combination, it just leaves you, you know, it’s like a diversified stock portfolio, you’re not relying on any one thing. And oh, by the way, anything with SEO is is a little challenging beyond the fact you never know what you’re going to get. The other thing too is if you’re doing SEO, it’s like your businesses in the hands of Google and Google’s a fickle mistress right. So I sleep better knowing I have, you know, whole separate outbound effort going on.
Susan Tatum 17:35 What do you Stewart, what do you see? Is the difference in the sale itself? inbound versus outbound? Do you go through the same process? Or is it different?
Stewart Gandolf 17:44 No, it’s different than on the inbound, it depends on like, so inbound. Another thing I remember back in the early days, I’d go to Google and they did pivot, he came up with these theories, they were absolutely certain like. So when I went out, and the only days I’d go to Google’s headquarters, because then this party called Google dance, so now anybody who’s really, and when I say, Google dance people that have been in business a long time, Oh, you were there. It was a thing. But anyway, when I go to Google dance, the engineers would tell me, oh, it’s all you have to get it, you have to give them an E book first. Because they’re not going to be competent to call you like that’s not true, because I’d say half of our calls are right often calls. That’s true today. So about half of the people call us not the internet calls impulsar. On the side, they found that they just call us, there’s another half. So those are similar in the way you approach them in a way, although they have a need, right? So you think about those calls and calls don’t have any credibility built with us, besides, they just saw. So they’re a little harder, like on a scale, like the hardest ones, when people you’re reaching out to because you never know that could be the next year, the people that found you on impulse. And the third category are fans, people who have been following our stuff for years. And those are obviously a lot easier. So I mean, I once had somebody from Australia fly as my seminar paid to fly across the world. And my seminar happened in New York not in California, was even further away. And she sat through the whole meeting, looking at me like a rock star. And one of my favorite podcast guests was there at the meeting for his own business. That’s how you market his own business. And she’s like, Oh, my gosh, you’re Paul, you’re amazing. So the, you know, it’s like, obviously easier when you have that kind of credibility. So like, this week, for example, we’re working with a company in the radiology business where, you know, they listened to a couple of our webinars, the first thing that came back with them didn’t go anywhere internally, and now we’re back to engage for SEO. So it is certainly easier when you have that credibility.
Susan Tatum 19:38 Yeah, because they already feel like they know you and trust you and like you and all that good stuff.
Stewart Gandolf 19:43 Yeah. We’re not gonna do that today. As much. We talked about that last time where you know, if you’re talking about content, and I know you’ve talked about this topic with other people, but I think the mix of you know, blogs and podcasts and webinars is great, but I find is podcasts and blogs or I’m sorry, webinars are better. Because they those that listen, first of all committing more right than just reading a blog, and even more than reading ebook, I forgot ebooks ebooks are good too. But they feel like they know you. If you bet on a podcast interview, or you’ve interviewed, like at my interviews, when I’m doing what you do, is we do a lot of podcasts, I start my own two sets. I’m not just, I really tried to add my own spin of stuff, because it’s usually about something I’m also an expert in. And so the people feel like they know me. And yeah, hopefully, those of you that are listening to this, like know me and say, hey, let’s do some business.
Susan Tatum 20:32 Let’s give him a call. Well, so a whole bunch of other things I want to ask you about Stewart, we’re, we’re gonna run short of time here. But quickly, you mentioned earlier in this conversation that you found that you just had a natural tendency to be a salesperson. But when we talked previously, you were set, you refer to yourself as a reluctant salesperson. And
Stewart Gandolf 20:50 I apologize. Yeah, that wasn’t clear I’m a natural educator. I’m not a natural.
Susan Tatum 20:55 Okay. I mean, yeah.
Stewart Gandolf 20:58 I wasn’t clear. Apologize. So yeah, so what happened there was it’s a fun story, because you asked about when we talked before you asked about what, you know, agency owners, and leaders often struggle with, and a lot of them struggle with the sales process. And you ask them for my guides on that. And the story that we discussed that we’ll talk about now is the following. There was a point in my career where I used to work with Mr. Johnson, it was certainly a prestigious account. It wasn’t an easy or fun job. It was really, really hard. And the part about it used to drive me crazy was my print sales guy would come in, always happy, always in a really nice suit. And clearly making a lot more money than I was, you know, I was working 60 hours a week and wasn’t feeling the way he was. So I thought, Okay, well, this advertising stuff is fun, but I really want to make money right now. And this was back in one of the housing booms in LA so prices, kind of crazy. So the idea of buying my first house is impossible. So I decided to go into sales. So I got into commercial real estate, and I was doing industrial and investment properties, which is selling great big, you know, shopping centers or industrial buildings. And if when you’re selling or leasing industrial to tenants, you have to actually go cold call, like old fashioned way. leaseback that they do now. And so, you know, I remember I was standing in front of this building, I still remember the building, I probably could find it still in Rancho de mangos. And looking at this building going, I don’t really want to do this to walk in and cold call somebody, you know, I’ve got a college education and an MBA, I’m smarter than this, I don’t really want to do this. And I thought about it like, okay, so either I go back to the office and resign because I can’t do the job, or I’m going to go in there and go do this. And so I did. And so nobody died. Nobody cried, at least screamed at me. I’m like, okay, I did that. I mean, I can do it again. And so there are some key moments in owning any business where it’s like, do you want this or not? And that our joke is like, you know, if you’re all shy and embarrassed, and your singles like blow through one beat someone or not, yeah, you’re gonna have to do something different. So I think that’s important. So the sales process, the was not natural at it. And I’ve just worked that much harder a lot of times to make up for my deficiencies is by working harder than anybody else. And so during when I was in commercial real estate, I timed it with the real estate, the riots in the commercial real estate crash and perfect. I still made some money there. But it was, you know, it was up and down. But the point was that that gave me the courage and the recognition that I have to really do this. And then later on, the skills got better and better. The point I was making earlier wasn’t so much that I enjoyed sales, it just became more easy for me because I did it over and over again. But those first days, you know, again, if you’re an agency owner, some there may be moments in your life, I do want to do this your agency or not? Or do you want to get this client or not? You have to get past it because there’s no other way to do it.
Susan Tatum 23:45 Well, as you alluded to, that’s it. That’s not the only time that you have to make a decision like that when you own an agency, or any kind of firm. It’s, there’s a lot of
Stewart Gandolf 23:54 Yeah, it happens all the time. I talked to my phone partner the other day. And like Lonnie, it’s not any easier to step up. And it’s just bigger, the problems are bigger, you know, so it’s, you know, I don’t think any and she chose a creative business now. You know, if you’re the whoever’s listening, if you’re, you know, the owner, scalable, digital agency, and everything’s running smoothly. That’s one thing. But truly, if you have creative evolved by its nature, there’s going to be different challenges all the time. It’s a very human business. So the agency business is not the easiest business to get into for sure.
Susan Tatum 24:26 True, and even harder to stay into sometimes I think, yep. All right. So one last question, Stuart, and that is, what would you do differently if you were starting an agency now?
Stewart Gandolf 24:37 Yeah, that’s a great question. So I would say the two things that I think hopefully will be helpful to your listeners was, especially I think the people that are listening, then the business longer will agree. I would say number one, first of all, is Be really careful on hiring people. The you know, at the beginning, you know, people tell me they can do the job. So I believe, or I hired friends that’s brutal. Somebody I knew, like, you know, may have been, you know, really great at some other endeavor. And I brought him in thinking that they would think like I do, I feel like one of the things that I’ve done is, one is I assume everybody else thinks like me, and my personality is really strange and weird. And most people don’t think like me. So if you have no natural entrepreneur, you approach things like an entrepreneur and you expect somebody else will to but that’s not what most people are wired. So I think you know, and the problem was, when you’re small, you can get away with that, right? So you just work hard or somebody else’s deployed on our way. It’s like, okay, fine, I’ll do it. Right. That’s somebody else’s only flow, find your own way. Fine, I’ll do that. So what happens is, you end up with this bloated organization with, you know, mediocre performers. I’m not saying that everybody in my company has been mediocre. But we certainly suffered through some people that weren’t the right fit early days. And it’s a big anchor on the on the agency. So hire really carefully take it really seriously. And really, really, really seriously. And check references and and whenever you’re hiring for something you don’t know about, try to find somebody who knows that area better than you do. So like for example, if you’re, you know, you’re more of a creative agency, you want to get into website stuff more than get, you know, don’t just go hire the first website designer, you see a five developer designer, consultant or somebody to help you figure out where the talent is. Because it’s really in like SEO is another category. It’s really easy to be fooled. Oh, yeah. If you don’t know this stuff, and you’re and you haven’t done the homework, like for us, like I knew sem said it for our own company. So it was easier. But yeah, I’d say picking the right people’s number one. Number two, I would do differently. I mentioned how we did this as a hobby. I mean, I really did it without any strategy at all. We just said, let’s get started this part time. Okay, those CDs I told you about, I recorded those in a studio, I was still working for my other company. I was like meeting with attorneys doing estate tax mitigation of all things. And I’ve raised from those meetings, and go to the studio go, Okay, here’s how you get patients internal. Your record those CDs, I mean, literally, it was just like that. So there was no strategy it was because we had all this knowledge, it was easy for us to be I kinda had a sense of where I wanted to go. And it was like, we got into the tactics really quickly. Yeah, it spent a time thinking through like, what’s the business model? How’s it going, you know, how we’re gonna get to recurring revenue is just how it gets something going, which is, I forgivable when you’re an entrepreneur, when you’re entrepreneur and you’re trying something going, it really is, the most important thing is to get something going, you can’t sit around and theorize forever. But I would spend a little more time if I had to do it over again there. And I think the last thing that I would do is, again, focus on who I want as a client, like what’s the ideal prospect and then create the company for that. I mentioned one other thing, too, that’s probably relevant. I’m trying to get as much as I can, in a short amount of time, I think it’s really relevant is, as you go upstream, you know, you, I think it’s important to recognize that as you your contracts get bigger, and the demands get bigger, and the support gets bigger, you can’t service things, if you start going out to larger clients, you can’t service in the same way to smaller clients. And that seems like a no duh, we really didn’t get that for a while. So it’s a it’s an evolution, I think we’ve done a great job. Our clients are happy, and we always have, some are happier than others in general, obviously, everybody has not every doctor has that, you know, everyone has happier than other customers. But I think it’s really important to try to, you know, start from the philosophy of Win, win and come up with the right level of service and the right level of client, and make that a match and just try to find some time to do that. You know, today we were talking on an internal meeting about, you know, how we plan for our clients. And it’s just really important to get everything aligned, right and to take the time to think strategically because it’s really easy in agency business to get tactical, and you’re just doing a bunch of stuff, and then you lose the focus from, you know, what’s the big picture? What are we really trying to accomplish here, both internally and externally with the client. Things I would say are really important.
Susan Tatum 28:51 Those are excellent tips. Thank you. If the listeners that want to get to know you better know more about you get in touch with you. What’s the best way for them to do that?
Stewart Gandolf 29:00 Sure. It’s well there’s couple ways First of all, if you’re on Twitter, I’m on Twitter by the time you listen to this hopefully it will be less political based only tweet about marketing since then. This last year has been a little difficult for me. So I’m on Twitter, LinkedIn zz, it’s historic and off. And if you’re interested in contacting me, just contact me at Stewart St. St. Ew AR t at healthcare success calm and that’ll my assistant will reach out to your I’ll reach out to you and set the time to talk. All right,
Susan Tatum 29:27 sounds great. We are this is December 17 2020. So I’m wishing you a happy holidays. Yes, I can stay safe.
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