Why I Built a Better CRM (In My Free Time) - Shitel Patel, MD, Plastic Surgeon

Hello and welcome to the Patient Obsessed Podcast where we see the world through the eyes of the aesthetic patient to try and improve the patient experience. On this podcast, we explore the elements which drive conversions to help aesthetic professionals see more of the patients they want, grow their own audience and spend less on paid advertising and paid social, the hamster wheel. We want to get off that hamster wheel. My guest today is Dr. Shitel Patel. He's a plastic surgeon in Houston, and to me more interestingly, he's also the founder of Ad Vital. And on Dr. Patel's LinkedIn, he has a sentence that says he's passionate about patient care and treating them like family, and that is not something that you see on a plastic surgeon's LinkedIn profile very often. He also is, I would say, passionate about using technology in combination to provide exceptional long lasting results by solving the problems of tomorrow. Today he's a software developer and an entrepreneur, and his goal is to improve the efficiency of the practice of medicine. And I can tell you from seeing his platform now twice, that is not just something it says on his profile. I think that he is doing something really special and that's why I invited him to talk to me about this program today. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself, Dr. Patel? 

Sure. So I've always been very intrigued by medicine and technology. I have used technology in the past as more of a hobby, but I've seen kind of the bridge between the two for the company for Ad Vital and what it does to help private practices do better. 

The problem that you're solving in particular is what? Can you articulate it briefly? 

Well, so in a practice, a patient has a journey that they come across from the moment they see an advertisement or they think about doing something to the point where they actually show up to an office and actually have something done. And so what our software does is it helps follow that entire patient journey with the start from advertising all the way to the end of a procedure and then the follow up after that so that we're not missing any of the touch points required to be the best at what we're providing. 

I think a lot of people forget that the journey actually begins sometimes many years before they reach the point where they see that ad. And so I try to always remind everyone that it's a really long process, but when they're ready, they're very ready. So it may have taken them five years to get there, but when they want to move forward, then they want to go really fast and they want what they want right now. 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the whole thing, but it's also meeting the patients along their journey in terms of the messaging, the marketing that goes along with it, but then also helping them overcome their own objections of why they should do something. Because the most common thing that patients say is, I wish I would've done this 10 years ago. I wish I would've just pulled the trigger then. And so it's like for us, in terms of the marketing, it's meeting them at that messaging point so that they can do these things earlier in life and so they can live their best life earlier for longer. 

There is no question that finding that happiness sooner is something that people regret that they waited so long, and the more we can remove those barriers for people to move forward, and I think sometimes it's financial, but also this year in particular, what we've started to see is that people are very worried about safety now in a way that they were less so in the past. Identifying those things and addressing them in marketing proactively is one of the ways that we try to help them move forward faster, but also you have to be able to track what's working because, and I think back through the 20 years I've been doing this, how many tactics are on the list now that are required? You're required to have a website, you're required to do Instagram, you're required to be literally everywhere. You have to do Ad Words now you have to do paid social and everyone is trying to monetize you to the max and squeeze as much out of you as you can. And I think we've over-indexed on paid and are neglecting what the patient needs to really feel safe and feel comfortable like they know you. So that's something I care about a lot. But what we're talking about here is measuring what's working and what's not working. I think, if I'm not mistaken, one of the greatest things about that is you can actually give people permission to quit doing things that aren't working by tracking it correctly. 

Absolutely. And sometimes that's more valuable than trying to find the right thing to do is stopping the wrong things that you're doing. 

When you started using your own system, is there anything that you were able to quit doing because of the 

Oh, yeah. There's lots of things that we quit doing in terms of spending a lot of time on some of the things that we thought that meant something that really didn't. And so we were able to kind of more laser focus our marketing efforts and then also our messaging and I think being more concise and pointed to exactly what we wanted to do versus the entire breadth of what we could do. 

So in a nutshell, you're tracking the patient's behavior before and at the moment of conversion, and then you are communicating with them after the conversion in an automated way. And that saves your staff time and yourself time. It also creates a better patient experience because their needs for information are being met in real time instead of waiting for a human to catch up with them. 

So I think it all comes down to education. The more educated we are about our options, the better choices we can make. So for us, it's almost like preceding all the questions that you have. So for example, if someone's interested in a breast augmentation, there's a lot of questions along that path that come along of, Hey, am I a good candidate? What's the best option for me? Do I need a lift as well? What's my recovery? Can I breastfeed after it? Can I not? Well, all those questions we can do in terms of a very clean format of whether it's email marketing, text marketing, or videos that we're shooting and putting on YouTube and the other sources that we're already putting out there in terms of Instagram and social media, we take all that and we put it within our software and we have a way to repurpose all that content and that content then helps educate the patients before they even step into the office. So for me, I'm not actually repeating anything, I'm just customizing everything. And that is literally where I'm spending my time as a physician now and customizing that plan for that particular patient instead of all the common details that I'm putting in the messaging to get them educated for what they want to do. 

Why do you think they don't want to go Google the question? Why do you think that they would prefer to hear it from you instead of just the 7,000 pages that address that on the internet? 

Because anybody can put their opinion out there, doesn't mean that it comes from a board certified surgeon. It doesn't mean it comes from a plastic surgeon, it doesn't mean it comes from somebody that's in that field. And so there's a lot of noise out there and sometimes it's important knowing which avenue you're going to listen to, which newspaper do you read, which TV station do you look at for your news? And so all that stuff has to align with what your beliefs are as well to say, Hey, this is the right place for me or this is not the right place for me. And so I think the branded messaging and being able to customize that for each practice is also crucial because then you're attracting the right patients for your brand. 

You have the great benefit of having a branding expert in your house. 

Yes, I do. My wife is amazing. So she's taught me so much in terms of that part of the industry and why that's so important. I think marketing creates awareness, but branding creates trust and I think that's the biggest part of it is I'm going to operate on you. I need you to trust me that I'm going to do the best thing for you to achieve the results that you want to live your best and happiest life. 

Tactically speaking, what kinds of elements of your marketing do you think build trust and get people to that point where they reach out? 

I think the biggest things are videos and I think right now the videos for them to understand and know our personality because anybody can say anything once, but if you have a consistent message and you have a consistent video platform of what you're broadcasting, that's what is going to build that trust. I think that when you see a commercial, it's one thing, but now if you see a commercial and that commercial goes to an educational platform where I'm not asking anything from you. I'm literally trying to help you diagnose the problem and give you an outcome-based result of a whole plan for you along your journey to get you over whatever's bothering you. I think that's where marketing is right now in terms of video and text marketing, those are the two things that are working right now. 

I think another thing you have going for you is that your visual appearance, the stuff that we can find on the internet looks different. And having built a few hundred websites in my life for surgeons, I can tell you that they all start to look the same. And so it's human nature. We try to find shortcuts to do things faster, so we look at what the other successful person has done, but over time everyone starts to copy each other and no one's doing anything differently. And then someone will break the mold and do something innovative and then everyone will follow that. And this happens a lot, and your site looks, it has the elements the patient needs still, but it does look different and it has those branding elements that are important and that does build trust. I like to use an analogy of a mirror that if they can see themselves reflected back in your marketing, if there is something they can latch onto in what they see visually, they feel like they're in the right place and that's why video works so well. Right? 

Yeah, I agree. I think it comes down to identity comes when I'm comfortable in the identity that I'm in. It makes you comfortable in the identity to reach out to do the next things to be like, okay, well yeah, you think about sports, Kobe Bryant took a lot of input in from all the greats that were out there to become even greater at what he did, but it was the identity and the attractiveness to that identity, and that's what that attracts like. It comes down to those same kind of sayings that are out there. And that's the same thing from a practice. It's like I have to know the identity of what I enjoy doing, what type of patients I enjoy treating, and then that is going to attract them back to me. But the only way for me to get that out there is a combination of all this marketing. A lot of it now is video. And then the next piece is like you mentioned, our website. The other parts of are social media of what you choose to put out there and what you choose not to put out there as well. And then the text messaging is the other piece of it as well. 

Texting is very difficult and it's been made unintentionally difficult sort of by the tech stack that most people operate under. So what I mean by tech stack, for those who have never heard this Seattle Tech lingo before, you have the foundation of your tech stack would be your EMR, your Nextech or something similar to that. There's several others like patient now, aesthetic record, Symplast, you use Nextech, right? 

Yeah, I use Nextech, but it just depends on what you're comfortable with and what you've built out to work for you in terms of the foundation of the medical side of it.

The bottom of the stack. Then you start layering things on top of that. And the longer you've been around, probably the harder it is to change things in that stack. So you might have Constant Contact, you might have podium or Weave or have tried to solve the problem of texting, but none of these systems really talk to each other well. What thoughts do you have about the stack in general, and can you tell us what your stack is? 

Yeah, sure. So a tech stack is complicated, right? Because you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know the limitations and you don't know if it's going to talk to the other part or not, and you don't even know if it needs to, right, when you start out. I started my practice five years ago, went through a bunch of different softwares and struggled with that whole process so much so that that's what we had to create, Ad Vital as a solution for it for us. The EMR that seemed to work the best for us was Nextech, having a facility and also having plastic surgery practice. Then layering on top of it is wanting to have all the ability to do everything else, but that wasn't disjointed, that all spoke to each other. So it can work in conjunction because each one of these things independently may give you a one to 2% change, but when you put them together, it's not just adding them together. It's like exponentially increasing those conversions of what you're doing in terms of the energy you're spending to then the throughput that you're getting. So for us, all we have for our tech stack is Nextech and Ad Vital, and that's it. And then the other part that we have a marketing agency and a media buyer that does the other part that makes our website and that helps us continually change our Google ads in terms of Ad Words.

A tech stack without Ad Vital and what would that look like for someone that was using Nextech and several other things.

Yeah. So before we had to have Nextech, and then we had next patient, and then we had MailChimp, and then we had Constant Contact, and then we had Clara for the text messaging, and then we wanted to monitor leads and we had my med leads and we had this whole conglomeration, none of it talked to each other. 

None got reviews either, so how were you? 

Yeah. And then there was BirdEye as well. We also put all these stuff together of doing these things because we wanted to have all the abilities to run a private practice nowadays. And that's where there are some core principles in terms of, yeah, everyone has to have a website. That's pretty much a standard thing that everybody knows, but do some people, can you just get away with having a landing page? Well, possibly if your landing pages are done appropriately, do you really need a full out website? Some people would argue on that, right? To say, okay, well where can I find you in terms of SEO and how valuable is SEO, right? And so there's all this kind of noise out there to say, okay, well you should spend all your money in SEO, but that's going to take you five years to get there. 

Well, I don't know if your practice is going to make it through the first three years to get to the five years where the SEO actually makes a difference or not in terms of social media. Everybody knows that social media is here to stay and it continues to be one of the major feeders into the leads that come in because it's visually oriented in terms of Instagram. So Instagram versus Facebook versus TikTok. You see all these different platforms that are even Snapchat, but it's a combination of copywriting and videos and all this kind of information that goes through, and you have to learn through that process and be able to have access to post on those things. Well, our platform allows for you to post on some of those platforms. And so we tie that all in because in the communication of those things, we get leads from everywhere now from the website, from our phone lines, from social media, but it's all disjointed. 

Right? It comes in, in terms of forms of emails and they have to switch screens and things, leads get dropped and lost and all this other stuff. Those are leads that you're paying for from a practice standpoint. And you're like, well, why are my clinics not full? Well, it starts at the top of, Hey, where's the top of the funnel? Is my marketing agencies bringing in the right amount of leads for what I want? And then is it funneling through all the next steps of saying, Hey, is my staff doing the right things to get those leads to come in and become prospects and patients? And the next step of is my staff closing as well? And then after that, are we doing the right follow-ups to retain patients? Are we cross pollinating between a med spa and a plastic surgery office? Are we doing all the things to know that they don't have to go across the street to get something else done.

They can get it done right here, right now. So we wanted to combine all these different aspects of marketing, texting, video, email, marketing, voicemail drops, call tracking reviews, put it on one place so the staff can be organized. And again, when somebody's out, you can see exactly where they left off and then what the next thing you have to do is. And so I think it took all the micromanaging out of our practice and a lot of EMRs talk about being able to do that with tracking ladders and little steps that come, but it's just not as customizable as we would want it to be. 

It seems like you got a lot of the busy work to fade into the background, and I think what I'd be curious to know is how does Ad Vital tell the staff what to do every day? I know it's a podcast and if I can get a screenshot, I can put it in the video and the show notes. Can you describe that visually for us? 

In a visual nature, it literally puts everybody on a drag and drop journey. And so if you have a journey of what the patient goes through is like, Hey, they see an advertisement, they come in as a lead. Well, what does it take for them to become a booked appointment? And that's what my front desk manages is say, Hey, this is the journey for them to come in. And then the back office manages the journey of after they come in of do they book a surgery, what else do they need? And then the follow-up of all that stuff. So in terms of the micromanaging, they know exactly what stage and phase that those patients are in to do the next steps that they need to do. 

So those look like swim lanes on the screen and then each person in your office knows which lanes they're responsible for?

Well, each one has their own kind of start to finish point because if you think about the journey, the front desk, their main point is to get a lead to book an appointment. That's their goal. The back office is for a patient that gets a quote to then have a surgery, so they have delineated time points of the patient journey that they take part in, and then the communication between the front and the back is also crucial. 

So does the front make notes in the patient's record inside Ad vital that are obvious to the person who's taking the handoff? 

All the handoffs are seamless and all the messaging is there, and then all those messages also get put into the EMR as well. So it lives in two places. 

So the first time you showed this to me, you told me about one of the neatest hacks that I've ever heard to automate yourself in patient care, and I'm hoping you can tell that one again. 

So for us, we want to make sure that patients are getting the ultimate care in terms of the boutique experience. And so what we found is after surgeries, people forgot a lot of things that we said beforehand because they only probably retained about 10% of the things that we say in terms of what they need to do after surgery. So we also wanted to also check in on our patients the day after surgery and we were playing phone tag with them. We were texting or we're missing calls because we're also doing other things and they're also doing other things, or they're asleep because it's the day after surgery. So we came up with this creative automation to check on them and ask them what their pain scale is on a scale of one to five, and they're able to text back and once they text us back whether their pain's controlled and that means a three or less, then it would send an automated message and it would also drop in all the common questions that they ask us, Hey, when can I shower? 

When can I lift weights again? Can I use perfumes? Can I use ointments? How do I sleep? All these normal common questions that we're having to repeat ourselves all the time now, it was dropped into an animated format. These little cartoons that go over what they should do when they should call us, when all these little processes. And then also for the people's pain that's not controlled, we're able to drop them exactly what we want them to do also with those postoperative instructions and also notifies my staff to call these people because if there's any other questions or anything else that we need to know in terms of becoming aware of, then we're able to talk to them about it. Now the other part that was interesting is that once we started doing this pain control part is that if the pain was controlled about an hour after that they responded that the pain was controlled, we actually sent 'em a review request because we want to know what their experience was, what the hiccups were or what they're happy about. And most patients, it seems like about 90% of them write that review when their pain's controlled. 

It's 90% will write a review from that request? 

Right now. That's what it is for our practice. 

Oh, wow, that's very high. Do you think that they can tell it's automated? 

It's interesting that you say that because some of the responses that we get to it are actually asking for my staffs by name and be like, thanks for checking in on me, Michelle or Christina.

Oh they assume it's the person they know?

Yeah. They assume it's one of the staff members. And then when they get the phone call, they're like, oh, I mean if their pain's not controlled, they're like, oh, thanks so much for calling and checking up on me. Well, they feel like you've been talking to them for the last hour checking in to see how their pain's going, what's going on, all the other things, looking up to see what medications they're on and the next things to see what we can do to help. So for them, they see it and they're like, oh man, they go all out for me. I am special. 

Has the system caught anyone who was really in serious trouble and needed help? 

Yeah. In some of the postoperative stuff, it's like we have one patient's husband that just never picked up the pain medication, and so it was like, she's like, oh yeah, I'm in pain. And so we're like, well, did you get the pain medicine? And she's like, oh, and she's asking her husband and he's like, no, I only picked up the antibiotics. I was like, oh, great. So it can, and just by that small check-in and stuff like that, it versus her just sitting through pain for the next few days or whatever, I think it can catch some of those things. 

In surveying patients that the number one reason for dissatisfaction is actually that people were not prepared for recovery, and I can see how this could really set them up well to feel safe and cared for and listened to in that critical couple of days right after they go home. Before something I would think not feeling listened to would send people in a really bad mental direction. 

I think it creates a level of frustration and that level of frustration sometimes you can't recover from. They're like, well, they didn't even care about me. They just operated on me and then nobody ever called. 

Took the money and never called.

Yeah, no. So I think that for us, we're using the software to create more touch points and not less. 

So I gotta ask, what pushed you over the edge and made you say to yourself, I'm going to build my own software to solve this problem? Because I have seen a lot of people do this over the years, and it doesn't matter where I work, someone's always saying, oh, I'm going to build the thing you do and I'm going to do it better. Specifically, remember several, someone saying, I'm building a Real Self killer. Really, you're really going to build, okay, we have 200 people. We've been around for 10 years. You're going to catch up with us. So there's a lot of hubris when someone says, I'm going to build a thing and I'm going to beat you guys at your own game, even though you've been doing it with incredible resources and time for many years, and it's happened with all kinds of other stuff that I've done too. And so you can imagine my surprise when I saw Ad Vital and realized it actually was the best thing, and this doesn't come from me lightly. I am not a person who says, that's great to everything. I see you're here because I really do think you're doing something very different and doing it really well. So I'll stop with my commercial for you and let you answer the question

Appreciate it. No, it is a great question. So I think like anything, like the pain has to come, become so great that you do something about it. And for me, I just did not repeating myself, and then with all the great resignation and staff changes and all this other stuff that was going on, I could see the writing on the wall of, Hey, I need to just hire people that can think. I don't want people to just do the repetitive work, just cuz it's repetitive work. There's got to be a better way. And if you look at what Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and all, they have a commonality, even though they live at both different spectrums, they both think that anything that is repetitive will go away in terms of a job. So this is a perfect example of it in terms of, Hey, I'm repeating myself all the time on educating patients. 

I'm repeating, my staff is repeating the same things. Each one of these things that the software does is a repetition in some which way, shape or form. And then I knew in my mind that, hey, I can consolidate all that. I can shoot a video once and use it a million times. I can literally put the messaging out there of how I want to say it, how one I want to talk about it, write it down once, and it reached 10,000 people of all the future patients that may come in. So for me, I just looked at it as I'm going to spend more time getting to know my patients and less time just educating them on the basics. But it's some of those things of the frustration of having to go on repeat the frustration of wondering what part of my marketing is working, being sold a bill of goods in terms of marketing agencies and click-through rates and how many impressions I get, but it didn't add up to telling me how much revenue did this create? Am I running in the right direction? Anybody can run, but if you're running in the wrong direction, your practice will not succeed. You'll not make an impact as you wanted to when you started out having the dream to be the provider you wanted to be. 

I think that one of the other big factors here is the marketing agency is going to filter and spin what they want you to see so that you don't leave or recognize that there are things falling through the cracks all over the place. And so owning the data on your end is something that I am super passionate about, and maybe that's why I like what you're doing so much is that you're in the driver's seat with the data, and you own all of it from end to end, and you're measuring the performance of any marketing agency channel with real numbers. 

Yep. No, I think that you bring up a good point and it leads into Web3.0, right? Web3.0 is all about owning your own data because I think what everybody learned from Web 2.0 is that when somebody like Apple cuts off the data that feeds into Facebook, now all of a sudden Facebook ads are not working as they once were because it doesn't have the data because now Apple owned it. And so our platform allows you to own your own data because you are able to see what pieces are working and what marketing efforts are working to then run in the right direction. 

You just also nailed why I love podcasting so much because nobody can own it. There's no one platform that can say you have to be over here. 

And that's like it comes down to owning your data that is Web3.0, 

Which is owning your audience. That's where we're trying to go, and that's how you spend less over time. I used to do this drawing on a napkin and I can still do it. I mean, it's not easy to do on a podcast, but I feel like at the beginning of a private practice career or a business, you have to invest a little more. And what we're all working toward is a day where you have built up enough content and enough of your reputation and enough of your brand that you can spend less. And if you make it to the middle of your career and you're still spending too much because you haven't done the right things in the beginning, you actually have really damaged the trajectory of your business over that first 10 or 15 years. What were some of the challenges in the beginning when you started building the software that you did not expect? 

I think the biggest thing is that since we do so much, it was taking a step back to be like, okay, when we do this, I mean it was a lot for the staff too to be like, okay, well, we're going to take on this software or Wait, it does a hundred different things. And you're like, where do I start? And so I think part of that is I knew since I built the whole thing and I'm like, we do this, this, this, but I had to slow it down, fractionalize it, and make it digestible in terms of a process of, Hey, what pieces of the software make the most sense to start? And then once you start it and you see how it just simplifies everything and simplifies each role in your practice, then all of a sudden you see the beauty in it, right? Then the adoption phase is immensely high. And I think that's something that I didn't see. I was more so of like, Hey, well, it does all these things. Let's just do 'em all right. And I had to step back and be like, no, no, we're going to do this one piece here. Then next week we're going to do this. Next week we're going to do this. Next week we're going to do this. And then at the end of the four to six weeks now it's humming in terms of a machine. 

So you do sort of a staged onboarding. 

We do a completely staged onboarding because as it continues to free up their time, then they wonder what are they going to do with it? What's the next thing they're going to do with their time? And that's really the next week when we give 'em something else to do and then we give 'em something else to do because I'm reprioritizing their time from the repetitive tasks to the tasks that require them to think. 

I recently had the experience of listening to inbound phone calls for a practice, and what surprised me in this was there was sort of a desperation on the part of the callers almost across the board to bond with the person they were talking to on the phone. And in this case, there was kind of a disconnect between the way the caller was approaching the conversation and the way the staff was. And so what I'm hearing you saying is that you wanted to free your staff up to not follow a script to have enough intel before they get on the phone. Is that something that they have before they talk to someone? 

Oh, absolutely. And so they know exactly what their procedure of interest is, they know exactly what their, you know the questions. Sometimes it's hard to delineate some of these questions by a phone call, and that's where the texting back and forth is so crucial. And so once they'll tell you a lot of different things in the text message that then you have elaborated in the other part. I mean, I think we had one patient that texted wanted a breast augmentation, and then in the text message you're like, please don't tell my husband. But it tells you a lot of what stage and what phase they're in, and I'm like, your husband's eventually going to find out if you do do this. So it's like there's a whole mentality and mindset stuff that we're going to have to talk about beforehand, which means that's what the staff is talking to them about of like, Hey, so what's going on? Why do we not want to talk about this? Is this something only you want? Is this something he wants you to do? Because then it helps us treat the right patients. It helps us know that we're doing the right thing for the right reasons. 

How do you make sure your team has enough time to talk to people without rushing them? 

Well, that's where all the automations come in. And so in terms of the automations of it automates the response time to decrease it to less than a minute versus the two hours it takes to respond to a lead is to let them, give them information, give them some content, and it buys the staff a little bit of time to actually have those phone calls, to have the meaningful conversations. And I'll tell you where it showed up the most for us. It showed up in the reviews, and you're like, what do you mean in the reviews? Well, they started actually mentioning each one of our staff members by name in the reviews, and that's how I know that they remembered them because they knew their name, and then they took the time to actually write a review that mentioned to say, Hey, Melissa did an awesome job at this, and I was so impressed by how this person did this and they're using their names and all these reviews, and all of a sudden it went from this superficial review that they didn't write anything. It's just five stars to hey, five stars. And this half page review talking about all the different people and how that affected their entire journey. 

In the olden days, you probably don't know about this because you're five years in, I believe Mentor had a training, and in the training they would teach you that the patient has to have a girlfriend in the practice, and it was all about bonding with somebody in the practice so that they felt safe. And that's what you're describing here is that their bonding, which it starts with texting and then it moves on to other channels when they feel comfortable. It's the modern version of you got to have a practice girlfriend. 

And that's why part of our practice, mission statement and stuff is treating patients like family because you treat them like a sister or brother, you're going to have that open conversation, right? It is not going to be just superficial. You're going to ask the why's, right? Instead of like, oh, you want a breast augmentation? Yeah, these are the sizes. This is what you can do and this is what it's right. You're like, well, why do you want to have one? How long have you been thinking about it? What's this preventing you from doing? 

It's not a complicated question to say, how long have you been thinking about this? Or do you want to have this done before something that's coming up? Is there something on your timeline of your life that you want to do this for? And that opens the door to a completely different conversation that's not how much does it cost saline or silicone? 

And so it is like it keys you in on the whys and once you know the why you can help people get to where they want to be happy. Because for the longest time I thought plastic surgery, we're selling people confidence. We're selling them the confidence that they want to have. Well, it's the confidence that they want to have in the happiest version of themselves that they see. They think it is just on the spectrum of happiness, and that is the key to all the stuff that we do. McDonald's has a happy meal. Apple, when they show these products and stuff like that, they're not talking about all the technology in it. They're like, oh, look how beautiful she looks. Look how happy they are using it. They're selling you a version of happiness that you can imagine yourself in. 

It's funny because the phone, I think is the thing that makes us the most unhappy in the world right now.

Yeah. But it is all marketing in terms of all that part. But I think that with what we do as plastic surgeons, cosmetic surgeons, anything in the aesthetic field, anything in medicine now, things are changing. People are becoming more aware of, Hey, I need to go to this person for this versus a doctor used to tell you 20 years ago, well, you should go see this person because you have this. Now people are coming in being like, well, I have these five problems and I'm going to go see this person for this one and this one, this one, this one, this one. It's like a menu that they choose from. And within that menu, it's like, are you at the top of the list? Are you at the bottom of that list? 

It's been true for a long time that almost every plastic surgery practice gets 80% of its revenue from six procedures. The six vary across from practice to practice, but you're really doing six things most of the time, and then it gets filled in with other things. And I have known many surgeons recently who say, I just do these four procedures, and they're very, very happy because they're so focused. 

And I think marketing is all, it feels like everything used to be more broad marketing to get these people, but as the competition goes up, it has to be more specialized and specific. And so in terms of specific marketing, it's like people, they used to market facelifts. Now they're deep plain facelift. They're talking about a fill in facelift, right? And so they're doing fat grafting with facelifts and just the vocabulary is changing to become more specific and more specialized for even the procedures themselves. 

When did you start building Ad Vital? How many years ago was that? 

A year and a half ago. 

Okay, so you haven't slept in a year and a half? 

No, I have two little kids. I have to sleep. I got to be there, be present for all the above. That was the other why, right? If you asked me what is your ultimate why and what you're doing, my ultimate why was to be able to buy my time back for not having to do anything that was redundant. Because if I took away all the things I repeat, then I buy back at least two hours a day in those two hours a day. What kind of impact can I make with my kids, the future generations? The other stuff that I want to do with my life to create an impact is enormous. 

When I was in high school, my boyfriend's dad said to me one time, if you just slept one less hour a night in two weeks, you would have an extra day. And I was like, whoa, that's incredible. And that family in particular had such a huge impact on the way that I thought about work. And his mom was a Christmas ornament designer, and everyone I know in America has her ornaments on the tree, and she just had a completely different kind of life. The thing that she did that was so incredible was we would work at the Minnesota State Fair every summer, and we would take all the Christmas ornaments and sell them at the fair and personalize them, and she would sit in the back corner and watch people pick them up, talk about them, look at them. And that's the other thing that stuck with me was she got her customer's feedback in a way that was so natural by watching them touch it. And she couldn't have done that any other way. They just figured out how to scale that experience of observing their customer. It was almost like they just designed their own focus group. And I still think about that. In fact, this morning I asked somebody, you have this new loyalty program. Are you going to ask some patients what they think of it before you launch it? And it was like I was speaking Chinese. 

You can't just keep throwing spaghetti without checking the spaghetti first. 

You got to know whether they want it or not. And that's the other unique position that I'm in with Ad Vital is that I came from a place of pain for growing this practice from brick by brick, making the mistakes, making all the different errors and marketing companies and softwares and this and that, to pushing myself to create a solution for it. And that's I think the biggest takeaway is that product research for it. I am the product research. I am the one that I'm like, Hey, well, how can I be happier? How can I make myself the happiest plastic surgeon in terms of being able to treat patients and still be there for my family, my friends, and myself? 

I think your timing is also exceptionally good because everyone is drowning under the stack and nobody wants another tool. There's so much fatigue. 

Yeah, I agree with you. And that's where it's like sometimes the best answers are simplifying things, and so this helps a lot of different things, and it is intuitive, and that's one of the other things, right? Like, yeah, you could get something, you could probably make something that competes with this that's on a bigger platform of another CRM platform that's out there and that does these things, but it's going to cost a ton, and then it is going to cost in terms of development and all the other pieces that go along with it. So I think that the major focus of all these other software companies has been larger hospital systems, bigger businesses in that. And for me, I was just trying to survive in terms of Covid and a practice and a family and as a person in terms of doing the right thing that I thought was right, and what I'm passionate about, the things that light me up is patient care is talking to them. It's not doing the notes, not all the paperwork and all the other stuff that goes along with it, but how can I get more time doing that? Well, all the repetitive stuff has to go away. 

It's like you're rejecting the equivalent of the clipboard. Just don't look busy just for the sake of looking busy. Well, you described for me, you're a year and a half in, actually, can we talk about the accelerator? 

Oh, yeah, we can. 

Okay. You were just awarded support from this really cool ASPS startup accelerator program. And what does that look like and how are they going to help you, if you know yet? 

I don't really know, but I think the biggest thing for me is awareness, right? I think a lot of people don't know that we've created a software. So we applied for this MedTech innovator program, and from there we got selected to be and present at the National MedTech Innovator where we compete for prizes and other things and whatever. And so in the next week and a half, I'm presenting in California at the Wilson Symposi, uh, Innovator Symposium, and then also the MedTech Innovator and competing with other 60 other companies on getting funding and creating awareness. For me, it's about strategic partnerships and awareness because again, I'm handing the keys for Porsche over to each of these practices. And bad things can happen and good things can happen depending on how you use the technology and what you do with it. And so for me, it's like I want to make sure that we have a good advisory board, a good process of plans of development, what we plan on doing with all this. I think the biggest thing that's going to help with is awareness for our platform for other plastic surgeons, other cosmetic surgeons, anybody else out there in terms of the medical field. And then going from there, we'll see if we end up having a partnership with ASPS, which hopefully that is something that they find intriguing because at the end of the day, we're here to help patients and providers. 

Okay. Last two questions. At this stage, what is the right kind of practice for the platform and what does that look like? Who are they? 

Yes. So the right type of practice is probably a practice that's at least two years out that has some of the processes and the foundation of the people and the roles in place because again, I can provide you a Porsche, but if you don't know how to drive, you don't know what to do with the Porsche, and especially if you don't know how to drive stick and you only know a how to drive automatic. So there's a couple of things that go into, so it's like at least a practice that's two to three years out and then at least has five to six employees. If it's a mom and pop shop that's only two people. It's really hard to do and use the software in all the full nature that it can because there are roles and there are things for it, and then it will become too much for just one person. So if you just have a husband and wife and the wife is doing the software and the husband's operating and doing all this other stuff, there's just not enough people to provide the level of care that you want with what the software is going to do because that practice is more of a, it's like, hey, a five patients a day practice versus a 20 to 60 to a hundred patients a day practice. 

And then on that other end of the spectrum, can it handle a really, really large practice with multiple locations? 

And so we have a few providers right now with multi-locations, multiple providers, and it's works awesome for that because it organizes the entire from start to finish, right from front office to back office, and then it lets management do all the rest of the things it's supposed to do. And it gives them all the critical key performance indicators and all the other things that they want to know whether we're performing at the right things. And then also the crosspollination. The crosspollination is priceless. 

What kinds of things have your current customers said to you about the platform? 

One of our customers is like, Hey, this just makes it so easy. Now, I was only booked out two weeks in advance. Now I'm booked out six months in advance because I have the processes in place for all these leads that I was just losing that we weren't doing the right things and I didn't know I didn't have the right person doing this. And it helps with their staff training and the HR portion and the other pieces of it. And so I think that's what a big part of just the not having lead leakage and then organization of it, because these spreadsheets and this other stuff, when somebody wrote something down on a scratch speech, maybe another piece of paper over here and another place over here, now everything's organized. You can't say, oh, I forgot. Oh, I lost that piece of paper. Oh, I forgot to call this person or whatever. It's right there for you in terms of, Hey, these are the things that you need to do what you're responsible for. There's nobody else. So the other part was the accountability. When you have so many staff members, the accountability of what you're assigned to now is like, oh, well, it is going to show all these things. Dr. Patel is going to come talk to me about this if I don't get this done. 

Performance management. 

Exactly. And I think that's the whole part of it. And then one of the practices started gamifying it and seeing who could get the most leads to convert to patients, and so they gamified it and put a bonus at the end of the month for that person. The other person's more motivated by a party, so they're like, if she wins, then she gets a party. And it just figuring out what they're motivated by. But I think it let them look at their HR and how they're motivating the staff, how they're going about knowing their staff. First part is knowing them to then be able to motivate them of what drives them, what's their love language, what's the other pieces that are crucial to making all this stuff work so that you're working as a world-class team, not world-class individuals. 

That's fantastic. So how can listeners reach you if they want to learn more about Ad Vital? 

Yeah, so we have our website of ad vital md.com. They can go there. They can also just message me on Facebook or LinkedIn, Instagram. For us, it is just about, Hey, reach out if you have any questions about it, anything that you want to know in terms of private practice from building it from the foundation level all the way up, we're happy to talk to you about it. I give free advice all the time on all these demo calls, even if they decide not to use the software. And again, I'm qualifying them as much as they're qualifying me for a product fit, and that's how I want to maintain my reputation. 

I see we can book a demo right on the website, and I'll make sure that I put that link in the show notes, if you're interested in reading more and reaching Dr. Patel there. And there's a nice video that also shows you what it looks like. It's a beautiful, beautiful piece of software, is very well designed and easy to look at and not cluttered or complicated. And I think when you have staff of varying, especially if you have staff who are a varying degree of technical skill level, that this would work across the board for everyone. It's not going to confound them like some other systems that I've seen that are very hard to look at. 

Yeah. I appreciate you, Eva, for having me on the show and excellent questions. Again, happy to chat and talk to you anytime about anything. 

Yeah, you, you're not done with me. I'm going to come back and find out how we're doing. 

Sure, absolutely. 

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