Dr. Allen Miner: Welcome everybody to the UAC Best Practices Podcast. I’m Dr. Allen Miner with Dr. Brian Capra. And our guest today is Dr. Erik Kowalke, the founder of… Well, first and foremost, one of the most impressive practices I’ve ever come across. And then I think out of that, also birthed another baby, which is SKED. And so, I’m going to kick it over to you, Dr. Brian, to lead us off.
Dr. Brian Capra: Dr. Erik, thanks for joining us today. Really excited to have you on. This is… Allen and I were just talking, we really enjoy these things, because every time we have somebody on, the information in the minds of the people like you that come on, this is just amazing. So, we’re trying to get, but we can’t do too much. Right? I know we could talk forever, and you could probably teach people a million things, but we want to just try to get a nugget, something tangible that somebody could take away and a best practice for their practice. We’ve talked a lot about automation and procedures and the practice, and you’ve had an amazing success with your practices. And what can you say, what do you know, what do you think that… A little nugget that you can think of right now that’s happening in your practices, that you can share that you think is important to this, their success.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yeah. Well thanks for having me on, our offices in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and one of the things we’ve done really well is when we learn a new… A concept or a new thing, for example, every new patient that schedules an appointment, we want to instantly send them an email with a welcome video, links to our website testimonials or Google reviews, links to paperwork, directions to our office. Something like that seems so simple, but it’s something we learned a long time ago or had the idea.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: And we implemented it, but we use technology that allows us to automate that, but it still feels like it’s coming from us personally so that we can basically just forget about it and move on to the next thing and implement something else. And I think for a while, early on in practice, we would learn something, we would implement it, but it would be very manual. So, we’d have a team member that their job was to do this one thing and then we’d get too busy, or they would have a baby and leave, or something would happen. Then all of a sudden you find yourself where you’re like, wait a minute, we’re not, we’re not doing that anymore? How long has it been since we did it?
Dr. Brian Capra: Right, yeah.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: How come we’re not doing that anymore, you know? And then you’re like, no wonder we’re not seeing the results because we should keep doing the thing, we did eight years ago. And I think what we’ve gotten really good at, and we saw almost 80,000 visits last year, is build on the next thing, build on the next thing by using all the technology that’s available. There’s so much in 2023 now. Crazy to say that people have created software and technologies and… Just allow us to automate that, those things so we don’t just start all over each time somebody quits, or we lose a team member or whatever.
Dr. Brian Capra: What would you say like…
Dr. Allen Miner: Can you give a specific… Yeah, example.
Dr. Brian Capra: Sorry. Yeah, give us an example and then I have this in my mind. I’ve done this a million… Made this same mistake a million times with Genesis, yeah, great idea, everybody is rah, rah about it. But how do you make sure when you implement something that you’re… When everybody agrees to implement something, how do you catch it if you stop doing it or are no longer doing it well.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yeah, so it depends if it’s a technology that’s doing it for you or it’s a person.
Dr. Brian Capra: Right.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: If it’s technology, you just got to pay the bill every month, and it keeps working. [laughter] Or, you know, something else doesn’t change. But there’s somebody that still holds the technology accountable because you can’t just forget it completely, as you change your office hours or something, you’ll have emails going out saying the wrong thing or sending it to a dead link. So, I think, ultimately, whether it’s a person doing something or its technology doing it for you, it just comes back to accountability. Who’s accountable for that one thing. And then that’s part of their scorecard and that…
Dr. Brian Capra: That’s the key.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: That technology becomes part of their scorecard and it’s reviewed monthly, reviewed quarterly, to make sure all of those stuff still gets done.
Dr. Brian Capra: Cool.
Dr. Allen Miner: I love it. Yeah, do you have a specific example of something that you guys’ lost sight of and then it impacted your numbers and your performance and when you put it back in and held somebody accountable, anything specific you can point to?
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Well, I think what… The difference maker and the success of our practice, I truly believe is the experience that people get when they come in. It’s like no other, I mean, they feel like we’re part of their family and they are, we treat them like family. And even though we see so many people, they don’t feel like a number. It’s the little things that make a big difference. For example, if we send out a general text reminder, it’s not the same every time. It’s not just, hey Allen, see you at three o’clock tomorrow. It’s unique and personalized by the theme in the office or whatever’s going on in our community at that time.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: And it creates an emotional response when they receive it, and they smile, or they feel connected to us in a way that’s not… That’s authentic and not inauthentic. And I think that’s one of the things that is kind of a mix because we use technology to send all of the stuff, but we have a person that’s accountable to that to make it authentic. And that’s where the magic comes in. If you can utilize technology and leverage so, then that one person that’s accountable to that can accomplish so much more because it’s not all her doing it manually. And so, I think that’s the sweet spot we found instead of where it’s either a person or its technology. When they can work together, then you really get 10 x.
Dr. Brian Capra: You know, you kind of glanced over it probably because of your experience in business and success and all this, but you mentioned the scorecard and that’s where I was kind of, the question I was asking was… I didn’t want to say that but the scorecard is the key and that’s where you’re measuring the result of implementing something like this.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yeah.
Dr. Brian Capra: So, when you implement or automate, first you have to measure is it better than what we were doing manually? Are you measuring these things? And then also making sure that the person is responsible for the result is what you’re getting at. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about the scorecard concept because maybe there’s a lot of docs that might not be doing that. And that’s the key to making sure that just because… There’s no shortage… I have… The thing I say all the time with my team. There’s no shortage of new ideas guys. We’re idea machines and we get excited about some of the ideas and then we go in blind and implement an idea and it distracts us from something else and or we forgot we even did it a year later. And it was a good idea. There’s no shortage of those things. So maybe you can talk about the scorecard and measuring and how to actually do that when you’ve implemented a new technology to automate something like that.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, honestly, we’re kind of new to scorecards, new as in maybe we’ve been doing it for two years and when I… I like to tenaciously implement things so when I first learned about it, I was like, well, let’s just do scorecards next week. We’ll just do scorecards for everybody. And then we realize, well, we don’t have any objective. We’re not tracking the information that we need to track in order to assign a number to a KPI that’s going on a scorecard. And so we’re still getting better at that. But I think number one is it doesn’t have to be perfect. Something is better than nothing. And a scorecard literally just assigns accountability.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Somebody is ultimately accountable even though everyone is responsible for whatever that main thing is. Let’s say it’s show up rate. So, the example we were using is customizing messages to go to people to create an emotional response and make them feel connected to our office. The end result in that ultimately is they show up. So, is our show up rate improving or is it staying the same or is it going down? Then how do we know that? Are we measuring it? And then that would go on a KPI for that scorecard. But I think the second one… One is you just have to start somewhere. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Start with three to five things that somebody’s accountable to.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: The second one is do it with whoever you’re holding accountable to that. It’s not authoritarian like I’m telling you that you’re accountable to these things. You can do it like that but in my experience, it works better if that team member is part of the discussion on, hey, let’s find the three things that we’re going to measure that you can be accountable to in your role. Because ultimately if they’re an A player, if they have clarity in what success looks like for them then they’re going to just go after it and they want to know measure me because I want to do better. I want to know where I can improve. And you’ll find those people quickly as you start going through these exercises, who’s like that and who shies away from it.
Dr. Brian Capra: And just that rhythm of looking at the number to make sure that things stay consistent. One of the first things you said just automate, of course, if you can but make sure it’s consistent and it stays and it doesn’t go away and it wasn’t an idea that came and went. It’s better to implement one thing that stays through the year than have 50 things that… All these amazing and people just start thinking they can implement any idea they have.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yes. [laughter]
Dr. Brian Capra: And you wind up with a mess.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yes.
Dr. Brian Capra: By the way my email campaign for our… I think it was our new lead nurture sequence. Another thing is test. My point is test the messages. Have somebody actually look at them like you’re mentioning links. I tested it one day and I was just looking at them, open the emails and I click on the video, and it goes to YouTube and, you know, that fuzzy… Like what the heck? Then I opened the next one. It was Fuzzy. I’m like who deleted all the YouTube videos? We had no more videos, and every email was wrong, I’m like, oh my god. [laughter]
Dr. Allen Miner: Hey Erik, last question real quick. Anything that works really well in text messages to use or not use like emojis, humor, not humor, just any… You talked about kind of linking it to the theme in the office or the theme in the community. Anything specific? Even let’s just take something simple like a message that goes out when somebody missed an appointment. Is there any… I don’t know. Anything come to mind that you can share with people for their text messaging to make them better?
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yeah. Do it as if you were the one messaging somebody that you know because you would do it differently. For example, our missed appointment message originally was, “Hey, Jerry. We had you scheduled at three o’clock today. We haven’t seen you. Call us to reschedule,” or something. And we switched it to, “Hey, Jerry… ” Like, what does it say now? “Hey, Jerry. Are you on your way?” And then it has our front desk team member’s name, Kalana. So, Jerry feels like Kalana is texting him seven minutes after he missed his appointment and he responds, “Oh my gosh, Kalana. Can I come in at this time?” Or “I just clicked on the appointment, move my appointment and I’m coming in at 4:00 o’clock,” or whatever. So just make it so it’s normal. What you would text somebody instead of what you feel like sounds perfect in an automated way.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: People get so much of that now that they want just normal messages to you. And emojis obviously stick out. I mean, if you look at your email inbox, just go to your email inbox and look at the subjects. The ones that draw your attention are the ones with emojis. Ironically enough you’re still only 5%, I would be willing to bet are the emails that are in your inbox have an emoji in the subject line. And those are the ones you see first. So, using emojis, they stand out whatever it is. I wouldn’t go too much because then you use so many emojis in your copy, it sounds, it feels very salesy and fake. So just be authentic in whatever your community is. If you’re in a city or you’re in rural, people communicate differently. Use that however you communicate, and people communicate within your area in your SMS.
Dr. Allen Miner: Awesome, Erik. Hey, if anybody wants to find information on your text platform SKED where do they find you guys?
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Yeah, you go to SKED, S-K-E-D.life L-I-F-E our website. Or you can shoot me an email Dr. Erik, D-R-E-R-I-K@sked.life but yeah this has been great.
Dr. Allen Miner: Awesome man. We appreciate you, Erik.
Dr. Brian Capra: Perfect. Thanks buddy.
Dr. Allen Miner: Thanks for coming on and sharing.
Dr. Erik Kowalke: Thanks guys.
