Agency Success Interview with Michael Echevarria – Home Health Success Academy

All right, well, Hello and welcome. I’m super excited. This is the part of our seven figure agency podcast or agency Success Series where we’re interviewing successful digital marketing agencies from across the country. And today, I’m super pumped to be interviewing Michael Echevarria from home health Success Academy. Did I get that right? You got that? Correct. Perfect. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the time. Thank you so much.

So just before we dive in, just tell us a little bit about your agency, kind of the the niche you serve kind of where you’re at in terms of your growth, and we can we can dive into the fun stuff.

Here, no problem at all. So what we do is we service the senior care communities, a lot of agencies that provides homecare services to patients, so whether it’s nurses to the patient’s home or therapists, but at the very same time as on the non medical portion, which is the private duty caregivers, and it’s just but you know, keeping the seniors at home where they belong, right? So we’re able to kind of at the same time, save them money, instead of them going into the more expensive assisted living facilities, they can stay at home where they prefer, and the family prefers that as well. So that’s pretty much the main area that we kind of service.

Excellent. So you work with home health organizations to help them keep their, I guess their patient flow maxed, what’s the name of your company and kind of tell us about how many clients and how much revenue is in the business at this point?

Sure. So, you know, for our, for our agency wise, you know, it’s one off Success Academy and, you know, currently right now, at this very moment, we are actually 273 clients in four and that’s for our, you know, for our consulting services, providing, you know, SEO, providing, you know, content creation, content posting, as well as, you know, some Pay Per Click clients as well. But typically, we stay in the range of the SEO, Facebook marketing, YouTube marketing type of genre. So that’s the amount of clients that we have. So You know, luckily enough, last year, we were at 7074 75 clients. This was April of last year. And this year, we just had a tremendous growth, especially, you know, around February is where we suck, we saw such a, you know, a large growth just because of the whole COVID-19 problem that’s going on.

That’s amazing. And a lot of people, when you’re shooting a lot, I thought, Oh, man, COVID-19 Let’s fold up shop, like there’s going to be no growth, where you’ve seen accelerated growth during that same window of time, just by being strategic with your marketing and kind of keeping mentally checked in.

Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing though, is, you know, I remember a quote, long time ago, I don’t know who said it, but you know, the, the best time of company growth is during a time of recession. And so looking at, you know, problems that are being faced and so, you know, we looked at, you know, so our main goal is to look at certain problems is going to happen and kind of anticipate it that’s, that’s a big thing of a lot of companies is that some, most companies are, what they call reactive. We’re in What we wanted to do is be proactive. So, you know, even during, when COVID just hit Asia, and this was around December, and I was actually in the Philippines at that time. And when I got back to the States, you know, we had a huddle. And we said, something might be happening here, because this is, you know, this is something that’s gonna be crazy, because we saw the fact that it was targeting, it was hitting a lot of the people above 60 years and older, and that’s the kind of community we service. So, you know, we started looking at, you know, that sense, okay, we need to be strategic. So we started creating, you know, a lot of educational based content regarding COVID-19. So in February alone, we were ready to start, you know, presenting this and we had content out already. So then which then give gave us a boost, because you’re the some of the first people in our industry that was educating about COVID-19 for the home care industry.

That’s great. Yeah, February, we’re well ahead of the well ahead of the average bear at that moment in time. So kind of poised to share a lot of value and shed a lot of great insights early.

Yeah, it was, you know, it was fortunate to front up for And the truth is I have to give the the props to my one of my guys and one of the supervisors in my office, Jacob, because he’s the one that was pushing it. I mean, I honestly was still on a vacation mode when I was in. I was still like, I’m just enjoying myself. And he was like, No, no, this is something that’s crazy. I think this is gonna be thing, and he was the one who was pushing it. And you know, and that’s why it’s important to have the right people working for you. Because even though I wasn’t I didn’t give him the Go ahead. He was actually already creating content about it already. And he was already creating stuff to be ready. So then when I said, Okay, I think we should do it. He says, All right, I have the information here. I have stuff ready and lined up. So that was a great thing for him that good call by him.

Very cool. All right. So you get this agency training organization slash agency serving the home health industry, 200 plus clients on retainer doing website SEO Pay Per Click type stuff. Tell us a little bit about how you landed on the Home Health space because that’s that’s, I think that’s a niche that gets overlooked. Often

Yeah, I completely agree it’s a niche that gets overlooked. And because it’s not as you know, not not as cool as a niche like dentists or Cairo and those kinds of things, right. So, luckily enough, I’ve been in the industry for a while I’ve owned my own home health agencies and my home care company. So I’ve been running a home health agencies since 2004. I got pulled in by my family by my parents that they opened up a mom and pop shop. They, for some reason, had two marketers, they had a census, you know, about 270 clients. And then all of a sudden, they’re two marketers left, open up a couple agencies and they went down to 20 patients a month and say, they brought me in and they said, Michael, get us patients. And there was nothing I could do. So I had to like really learn how to market outside the community because nobody was training in my industry. And so fast forward to like around 2014 a lot of my good friends one of my best friend for examples is my car is a competition. He has his own agency. And so they were asking me, how am I getting patients? How am I doing this. And so I started giving them some information and what I’m doing, that’s different from what they were taught by their parents. So, and I started working well, and then eventually, you know, I started doing consulting. And that’s how we kind of got out there and YouTube came along, and I started putting videos out there. And you know, if luckily enough, you know, if somebody’s looking for home health marketing, or any of that stuff, they’re gonna see our videos pop up pretty much 90% of the time in the feed. So and that’s how we were able to generate a lot of people to start knowing about our company.

Excellent. So power. I mean, obviously, I think the most powerful positioning you can have is to have worked in that type of business or whatever niche you’re in, and then develop expert status, prove your success, and then shifted to training, coaching and even fulfillment like you’ve done. It’s it’s a great way to kind of shortcut this whole process.

Yeah, it is, you know, It completely is to be able to at least have an idea. But at the very same time as if somebody wants to get into this niche, you don’t really have to have, you know, experience to start providing services to the homecare community, you just have to know what you need to do to be able to create the right content and to be able to have the right you know, lead funnel that you can put together. Actually, the truth is, it can be also a disadvantage for me being in the industry, and because then I may be stuck to my old ways of, of marketing. You know, I’m one of those guys that have the belief of boots in the ground, walk in the door, knocking the door, do whatever, and it took other people, you know, around me to kind of explain to me, no, no, you need to actually do this. I mean, to be honest, I did not have a website for my home health agency until around 2000. And I think 2009 is when I finally had a website up. And you know, and so, it all took because I had employees that said we need a website, you know, and then eventually I had an employee said, you need to do SEO, I learned this thing in school. And I’m like, what’s that and so luckily enough, it’s I would not have gone to where I’m at right now, if it wasn’t having people that pushed me, because you know, when you stuck in your old ways, having new ideas come into you, it may not even make sense for you. So I’ve learned enough now that you need to open up your your mind a little bit and say, Okay, if there’s something new, if I don’t understand it, that means I actually need to get into this right away more and know about it, because it could be something different.

Great, great, great. Great insight there. Okay, so

you got these. You got these 200 plots, home health organizations, you’ve got this great background that kind of helped parlay you into the industry. How did you get your first couple of agency center clients like that, that actual willing to pay you a monthly fee to manage their internet marketing stuff?

Yeah. So the way it kind of worked was that we started having a lot of clients. I was out Here’s what we were doing, you know, so, you know, for example, we started having clients and hey, you know, I see that you guys are doing these posts. How do you guys do that? So we would actually have people asking those questions. And then, you know, then we just said, Okay, well, this is what we’re doing. So at first, you know, when, in our consulting part, we were just just looking into how can we train your marketers, your owners how to market your company, wasn’t about the whole online stuff. But what the very same time is once we start having people asked, and we started getting into it a little bit more. So it was more of like, we already had current clients that we were consulting for with certain things. And that’s who ended up we started servicing for SEO for, you know, for pay per clicks for their companies, and then content creation. It’s wasn’t until last year where we actually decided that let’s go push full forward because when you start seeing the fact that in the consulting business that I have that, you know, 80% of the money is coming from, you know, SEO Pay Per clicks and Facebook marketing and content creation, then, you know, let’s get rid of the whole other part a little bit. And so then we went full on on this one. And so, you know, I started learning I started, you know, pretty much putting myself in learning courses like I, you know, went to a couple we were doing click funnel courses a little bit here and there, you know, learning as much as possible. And that was the main thing and willing to invest into, you know, into somebody that’s going to be able to actually teach us something, you know, and so most people, sometimes they want to dive into YouTube and just watch YouTube videos for free because you’re thinking about, okay, let me watch something for free. Because I don’t want to spend 1000 $2,000 when the truth is, you should spend the 2000 $3,000 because that’s what’s gonna guide you faster. Why do you want to waste three months of your time and then try to figure out how the process works. When somebody can give you something that you know in a matter of a week or so you have something strategy to implement and then you can apply it right way. So it’s a matter of learning right away and how fast because the thing too is how you’re going to lose a lot of money. By, you know, by not getting in clients, you know, people say, Okay, I’m going to save $2,000 I’m gonna learn for three months and then apply. But what if you can just pay the $2,000 start working that first month, and then you start bringing in clients the second and third month. So that’s pretty much what our mindset was that you know, I don’t care if you spent the money, it’s tax deductible, it’s training anyways, you know, it’s an investment in myself or my staff, and then move on from there. So that’s why

I’m 100%. And I think that’s a common trait. It was absolutely a common trait amongst amongst high performers, just about every highly successful person. I know. Every person I know that’s in seven figure agency that’s gone to seven figures and beyond. Have a high propensity to invest in training in coaching and mentorship. You know, I personally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on training, coaching and development. And it’s like, it’s just what you said, it’s a great way to shortcut the learning curve. Yeah, you can figure some of the stuff out on your own. But if you can, you know, shortcut even just two to three steps by getting ideas and insights from someone that’s already done, what you’re looking to do, that’s money well spent, and it’s going to get you, you know, where you want to go faster.

Really agree, I definitely agree on that one.

So So let’s talk a little bit about your service offering like what is your What is your program? What are your services look like? Do you have any kind of packaging in place for the the clients that you serve on the agency side?

You know, to be honest, we have to revamp our actually our website, we haven’t even we haven’t even had time to do that. And yes, we, you know, packages is literally where you are, where you need to actually have you need to create packages because it makes people make more sense of things. You know, just you know, and the best way to, for us to kind of put it together was you know, like how cable set how You know, spectrum or Comcast sells you, they will try to sell you a bundle, because they’re going to try to sell you the phone, the internet, they’re going to try to sell you the cable, you know, and then they try to give you three channels. So that’s what we kind of put ourselves together was that creating packages is such an important thing. So, you know, for us wise, our breadwinner for our company is our SEO services as well as our content creation and content posting. So those are two of the main things that we’re doing. So if you know in our company in our website, for example, it’s still separate we still have our SEO strategy or SEO in our postings when the truth is my sales team is selling it as a bundle now, you know, and you know, cuz like, we gave them the Go ahead, you can sell this you can add this, you know, and that’s what we’re doing at this very moment. So, you know, so yeah, we created a packages. Our SEO is pretty much you know, telling somebody that you know, we want you to do your search engine optimization, but then when we tell them that you won’t see an ROI until probably around Six to 12 months later on is when we start, you know, showing that a lot of them don’t like that. Right? A lot of them cannot make sense of me selling them a package of 1200 1500 dollars for SEO Services, that they’re not going to see any results yet. So six to 12 months later. So that’s where creating a package starts happening where we start saying, okay, but then we’re going to give you the training so that you can know how to market now and get more clients. But then we have our Facebook advertising that we can do for you. So that can get you your patients and your clients right now. So we do Facebook strategy right now for the current, then we can move you on to your SEO so that 12 months from now, once you’re ranked up, that’s just easy money coming in for you. And then so that’s so yeah, packages, I think is probably the most important thing that anybody should should do if there are if they are offering these type of services to you know, to the clients.

Excellent. So can you talk a little bit about price points in terms of what you charge your agency to do? Like the SEO pay per click, Facebook ads stuff. Sure.

So for SEO, for example, our packages starts at 997. That’s, that’s our base SEO package that we have. And then it goes all the way up to 2499. So you know, so we have the the base package, the 997, then we have the 799 that we’re doing and then the then the upgrade stuff. And we offer those three packages, because you should never offer just one, you should offer three all the time, because people are not going to want to go for the lowest most of the time or the most expensive, but they go straight in the middle. So you know, those are the packages that we offer. Then we have our content creation for Facebook strategy for Facebook marketing, for example. You know, we’ll create the posts for them will create videos, means or whatever we need to do. But our main goal is when we work with a client is to have at least two to three posts a day, two video posts a week. So for 499 that starts them off at that level. So we can do that. And then it goes up to 799, where we’re doing, you know, pretty much five videos a week. But then at the very same time is when we start having that creation, we also then add a couple more social medias. So now we can say, All right, we’ll add Instagram posts, we’ll handle your Instagram. And we’ll also handle your LinkedIn page. And we’ll post them those. So you know, for the beginning package on our Facebook strategies, literally, it’s just for Facebook, and then we start increasing. But the very same time is, once you have content created, it’s it’s pretty easy to go. So what’s nice about working in the home care industry, we just have one niche. So all we need to do is have things already made. And then we can just go in and use Canva or Photoshop, whatever you guys are using. And if we have a new client, we can just change the fonts, change the colors, add their logos, so the content is still pretty much all the same. It just needs some changing here and there.

So watch out for that client. in that market with their details,

exactly. And then for pay per clicks, and that’s not really we only have like maybe about 10 clients that we’re doing pay per clicks. There’s some people that charges percentages, we don’t believe in percentages. So the way we work is we have a base, a base fee of 499, for your pay per clicks. So no matter what if we’re running your pay per click strategies, we’re going to charge you 499 base. And then, you know, it’s up to you how much you want to be able to spend. It’s just so that we can have the money because you’re doing percentage 3% 4% getting somebody to pay $10,000. And they have unicorns out there that are willing to give you 10,000, you know, hundred thousand a month, but it’s very rare. It’s a little bit hard. So I would rather just go ahead and let me get the 499 upfront as well. So that’s pretty much how that works. And if we go to Facebook Ads Manager is different. You know, there’s two main things do you want us to do? One ad or do you want us to do retargeting ads? So if you want us to do retargeting, then of course it’s going to cost more for you. So those are the different stuff. And then you can package them together and then make it look really good. So that’s how I like it.

I like it. So with these with these organizations, this whole organization, so you’re doing the SEO, are you working on their existing site? Or do you put up a new website for them? Or how does that work in that in that environment?

So this is actually a you know, and just anybody who’s listening to this, I’m going to give you guys a staggering, staggering percentage here. So we reached out we went, we did a marketing push in Texas, we were looking at the Texas area, home health and home care. We found out that this was five years ago that over 30% of the agencies don’t even have a website. Right so they don’t have a website. It’s pretty crazy. And then this is Texas. So we look at Texas and say okay, let’s just consider Texas United States, if it’s 30%, it goes lesser. And this means spending money of people calling agencies and saying, what’s your website? I need your information. And that’s how we call over 1000 agencies. And that’s what, that’s what results we got. So, and if you start looking at their websites, for example, it’s just basic websites, they don’t even, you know, I mean, some of them even still have flash websites. Oh, my God, you know, so it’s so you know, it’s pretty crazy. And so, you know, just jumping into that. So, yeah, so our goal is to really work, you know, start either if they have a WordPress website, then we’re going to work on that. Right. If they don’t, they will encourage them to have a WordPress website. Because that’s just the easiest one and you know, my team, that’s where they’re comfortable in doing. So we’ll create the websites for them. And the truth is, if they don’t even have a website, right, if they don’t have a website, we’ll even say, we’ll make your website for free.

Just included in the overall package. Yeah, I like that.

If you We’ll create and it’s nicer because we create from scratch. So we’ll throw in the website, if you want to do SEO. If this is something you want to jump in, we’ll throw in the website for free. You know, but then, you know, the question a lot of people may say, Well, what if they decide to stop then you wasted your money on your website? Not really, because I already made my money that first month. Right? This you know, for, for me to have a website created a basic five page website that has a blog in it, it’s only going to cost me less than $100. Because you know, it’s about it’s all about the cost more is on the hosting. So, plus, also, we hold the, the hosting hostage, it’s under us, we own the domain name, we own the website. So if they want the website back, they will have to purchase it. If they end the contract after, you know, in less than six months. If after six months and they leave, we’ll be willing to give them and transfer everything to them. But that’s how that kind of works. So, you know, there’s ways to kind of make sure that you retain the Clients but at the same time is not doing it on a, you know, pretty much in a mean aggressive way. There’s, there’s a way to say okay, well, this is what we’re doing. But if you’re providing great services, they’re going to stay with you.

Yeah, no doubt. So okay, so you’re coming in, you’re trying to see if they have a decent website. If not, we’re gonna put one up as part of what we do. Do the SEO do the blogging, content creation? There’s two things that stuck stuck out to me that I’d like to learn a little bit more about, which is all of these videos, and the and the content production that you do. Can you talk to me about what’s in those videos? Like, what are these? Like, obviously, you’re making one video set that applies across the entire client base, but just Can you talk high level about that? Sure.

So you know, videos are meant, you know, are not meant to try to push people to sell something. So we totally believe in the educational based marketing, material stuff, educational basis, such an important thing. And so and if somebody doesn’t figure that out, then you know, you Should that education is how you get clients. So what we do is, you know, we’ll have for example, you know, medication safety videos. So we’ll have videos created that’s you know, that has a voiceover you know, talking about how to keep your loved ones safe through their medication. So we’ll talk several things about those. So you can have like maybe 1020 different contents just talking about medication, you know, medications, then you can move on to you know, home safety ball Prevention’s. You can start talking about, you know, how to prevent fraud from happening, you know, to your loved ones, and how to, you know, how to be able to choose the right nursing home, how to choose the right hospital, how to choose the right caregiver, there’s so many things that you can talk about, about education. So it’s about creating those videos put together Now, a lot of people can say, well, it’s going to cost so much for videos to be created. No, it doesn’t. There’s, you know, there’s so many different video platforms out there that we use that is, you know, we have one video training platform that we’re making create our videos, we pay $49 a month. And this is where we create most of our videos for our clients. Can you talk about what platform

that is? Or is that proprietary?

No, no, not at all. Please use it use as much as you want. So I mean, you know, it used to be called content samurai, but I just got an email from them, like two days ago that they called it something with a be bid been bid bid something so but if you look up content samurai, you’re able to see it so content samurai, you can literally let’s say for example, I have a, let’s say I have a blog, or let’s say I have, you know, a two paragraph, you know, marketing collateral, I can put that into content Samurai and it’s going to automatically make a video with um, with captions on it that you know, the real nice looking captions and they also have AI voiceovers that you can choose that actually does not sound like a robot So you know, it’s able to create all those contents. So what’s nice is you can make the 16 by nine videos on it. So the 16 by nine videos for your YouTube and all those kind of things, but at the very same time is you can then convert it into Instagram type posts as well the square stuff. And so that’s how you deliver it because when you start doing these posts on Facebook and YouTube, we have to understand and listen and know the people and how we actually look at Facebook. So when people scroll down in Facebook, for example, most of the time their audio is off, so you need to have a caption showing and that’s what attracts people right away to make them want to actually stay into the video. Um, so yeah, so we use content Samurai is one and then another one is in video.io. That was an that’s another one that we use and we use those videos when we’re doing like, you know, five steps, tutorials or three steps tutorials because it has some really nice, you know, graphics in it that we can use. So content Samurai We’re spending, we’re spending $49 a month for that right now. In Video, we’re spending just 3999 a month, I know that but you know, there’s a limit of only 60 videos that you can make. So what we kind of do is we have a lot of videos that are created already, because we’re servicing the whole us. So we can use the same content for different places if we need to, or unless they want to change the colors. So we just need to have a nice intro video about their company and a nice outro video. And it’s now their content that we can post in there and redo it all the time.

A lot of it still created this kind of this inventory of education based content that you can put an end cap at a front cap on for each of your clients, and then have new content that you can roll out for them on a perpetual basis. That’s correct. Cool. It’s really cool resources shared there. Like Comment, that’s helpful. The context Samurai and the video did not know that you can take a written blog post, upload it into content samurai, whatever the name of the tool is, it finds like B roll footage and will like spit out a usable video.

Yeah, it pulls out already stock videos already in it. You can choose you can choose stock videos. And so let’s say for example, in the term it says dentist it automatically understand okay dentist, so it’s going to look for a video of a dentist in there. If it’s you know, homecare, it’s going to look for a you know, senior citizen now, there’s going to be some times where the key word on each slide, you know, they choose the wrong word. So you have some weird video and

then tweak it a little bit i’m sure go through and say

okay, let me let me go use this. Let me go use that. Let me change this. And so you know, so we do batch creations. So we have close to about right now. 500 videos are just, you know, senior education stuff. And so we can just reuse those. And so that’s why we can do five videos a week. We can do 10 videos a week if we want to And and we’re perfectly fine how it works because it’s already created.

I like it great insights there and how to create and whether you’re in home health or any vertical great way to create educational based content for your clients to add value to help educate their prospects and get clients to come in. The other thing you said that I think was pretty interesting is the psychology of your kind of higher on the on the buying cycle you’re not speaking to Are you looking to hire a home health person today, you know, type of content, it’s more information that somebody that has a parent at home that they know they’re going to have to get some type of nursing support might be interested in it sounds like that’s, you’re kind of starting higher up and bringing them down the funnel once they kind of know like and trust your clients organization.

Yeah, that’s pretty much how it works, right? We want to develop you know, first thing is they have to know you like you and trust you, right and so if they don’t know you, you need to first grab their attention to say this is what we want. And if I hit you on a good book that I love, I read Just like in an airport like six years ago, it’s like Jab, Jab Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk Yeah, and you know, just having that belief of that you know, everybody’s always going for that right hook trying to get that sale right? You know and but when you have the mindset of like, let me give you so much information that I’m literally guilting you you’re gonna be guilty you’re gonna be feeling guilty because you don’t want to use and work with me because you’ve got so much information Plus, if my agency is educating you so much about your parents how to take care of your loved ones how to do this, how you know how, how to save money, how all these different things. If I gave you so much information, then doesn’t that doesn’t that put me as a person of value? Doesn’t that put me as a person of this is a person I want to work with my parents because they know about this stuff. And, you know, so by us doing that, that’s how we generate our clients for my agencies. And so, you know, we blanket the whole stuff with education when they you know, they search you know, they search for a home care services they’re gonna see yes. I mean, this is how we actually moved ourselves away from doing paper plates. You know? So my own agency, we don’t do paper clicks anymore because we’re, we have a high generating stuff. But there are a lot of companies that I tell them, like, If you still don’t have that command, if you’re not high ranking in certain areas, you should do pay per clicks to get people to know you. Right? Because the first thing in the mind, they must first know you. So you know, whatever you need to do to get them to know you do it. So that’s, that’s exactly like, Can we start from the high educate them and bring them down and then get them to work with our services is the main goal.

I love it. Very, very cool insights, very cool service mix that you have there. Can you talk a little bit about how you get clients, and that’s something that everybody wants to learn more about. So it sounds like you don’t even do much pay per click. You’re very organic based. Can you talk us through where most of these clients are coming from, at this point, kind of how you did that?

Yeah. So No, unfortunately we can’t do Facebook marketing for to find homecare clients, agencies to work with us because it’s such a small amount of stuff that we cannot Facebook doesn’t recognize it. So we’re we’re not lucky like, you know if you’re in a doctor niche or your niche or any of that stuff. So for us wise it’s straight up cold calling. Um, that is literally where we are cold calling cold calling cold calling. So I have a team that does cold calls. So we have you know, you know, I was lucky enough to be able to put together in December, a whole, a whole set of team to do calls for us. So we cold call them. Now there’s one thing you get hung up on, but it doesn’t matter is every time that we call, we just need one thing from you. And can you give us your email, if you don’t want to talk to us? Let me have your email. Because if I can grab something, eventually if I have a good follow up process in place, eventually I may be able to convert. I don’t believe in that first call. sale right away.

The first call point mean even Hey, you run a healthcare organization, you want to schedule a quick chat, right? Doesn’t sound like that’s the approach you’re taking?

No, no. So we literally we want to be able to discover them. Right? So there’s, there’s two questions that we always ask clients, you know, there are three things that you can improve on right now at this very moment. What would that be? Right? So you know, so and then at the same time as addressing them, when we call them and say, Hey, listen, you know, so when we call the client, for example, our main goal is to get as much information as possible. If I can’t get the second level of information, I’ve seen your email and who the main contact is. So cold call is where we get a lot of our clients, but the truth is, if I really look at my metrics, the call is not really the client stuff. It’s where we follow up once we start giving them educational based marketing stuff. And so you know, just like how we try to get homecare clients, I mean, seniors to sign up for agencies for the way we get our clients is the same exact thing. So we will send them a bunch of information. So just like you know, when you send out your emails you’re giving information to them. But at the very same time as if I gave you some information, maybe you want to click this button right now, maybe you want to see something of more value. So So that’s how we get them. And so once we call, the clients will call an average of about 140 clients a day. Because, you know, for the guys out there who don’t know anything about the senior, the senior homecare community, there is right now over 11,000 medical home health agencies in the United States. And there is an average of about 20,000 non medical home care companies in the US. And in hospice. We’re looking at about 8000. So that’s a whole amount of you know, I can’t cover those, you know, and the truth is when we when we do cold calls, I’m not gonna call everybody in the list. If I call you, you’re gonna be in my call list for the whole three months mean we’re calling you every week until we get something from you. So are so when we call call, we don’t believe in just calling once we call we talk about follow up is such an important thing. There’s that, you know, there’s that one study where they say it takes about an average about five to 12 touches before you actually get that real sale. So our goal is to actually have a touch with you at least 30 times in 60 days.

Wow. So how big is that call list and we’re talking about 140 per day. And you’re said you’re hit them again and again and again for three months, about how many people on the list that you’re targeting.

Right now we have a 5000 company list.

Okay? And, and the and the approach each time is a little bit different. So it doesn’t sound like you’re taking the same Hey, we want to schedule a time with you and Michael to talk about how to get more patients. Is it is it a webinar invite Is it a like a free report, he talks to us a little bit about what that initial offering on the call is.

So the first call is to kind of find out where they are at right and then at the very same time is offer themselves something small write something for free, pretty much what we say. So, you know, we’ll say, Hey, you know, we have a quick 20 minute, you know, webinar talking about this, would you want to be interested in seeing this? You know, and if but if but at the very same time as the sales team must be trained enough to kind of kind of, you know, figure out certain things, right, if you see that there is an opening for, to go straight in, especially if when they share that first, you know, there are a few things you can improve on to be able to, you know, have the business that you want, what would that be? And then they say, or they say something well, I want more patience, right, right there alone You can that gives you the permission to jump into, well, typically, sir, what we do, is this, what we do for clients, and then you start, you know, stacking up from there, but then you have some of the clients that you’re going to get, well, you know, I’m perfectly fine where I’m at. Okay, so we get something like that. That’s just an objection. So now we say, Well, listen, can we share something with you? You know, if we can get you an extra two patients, would that be good for you? And they say, Yes, sure. So then yeah, so we’ll provide them a webinar. are that they can have it’s an evergreen webinar. Um, you know, I don’t believe in the stuff that you know, you can walk, you know that you have to wait a certain time to watch it sometimes when you’re starting to get them to know you, you must work with them to figure out when they can have time to watch the video,

like an on demand access webinar.

Exactly. So we’ll do the webinar stuff. But pretty much all the stuff that we do is video content. And the reason for that is just that allows people to either listen to it or watch the video. A lot of these because we’re targeting administrators, owners of companies, they don’t have time to actually read something right now, unfortunately. And so can we get them the videos right there, but in the videos, there’s ability that they can actually view a PDF transcript of the video as well. Right. So, you know, when you know when people say that they don’t know how to make content. If you make a 20 minute video, you can put that into a blog form. And then you can do micro content from every single One of those and so one big video that’s 1020 minutes long, you can make probably another 30 more contents under all that. So. So that’s what we’ll kind of do. And so that’ll be the first call. The second call is that we’ll start offering them, you know, are you having problems during your marketer, so this will give them solutions for that. The main goal is, for every thing that we do and reach out, the main goal is to be able to have 12 different pain points that each agency is facing. So, before you start, you know, doing the follow ups with calls or whatever, know the pain points, because, you know, what are the 12 things or 15 things that they’re facing, you know, and so if you can solve at least half of those, they’re gonna want to work with you. Right? So that’s our main goal is on each call is to address you know, what pain points that they have. And the fact that I’ve been in this industry, I know what my pain points are, and working with other clients, I know what their pain points are. So why don’t we just create content already? Just for those pain points, you know how to find the right caregivers, because in our industry, caregiver turnover is at 47%. Meaning that I hire a caregiver, I put them with a client, they, there’s a 47% chance that they will actually go on. So you know how to hire the right caregivers how to provide training, how to be able to get past the gatekeepers, when you walk into a nursing home, how to be able to speak to a physician how to be able to speak to the administrator, so each one of those are small problems, and then we solve those by giving them education. Right. And the truth is, when they watch all those things, technically, there should they should be good. And they should actually can start marketing with information that we gave them, they should be good to go and they don’t need our services really, if they don’t if they want to be boots on the ground marketing, but the truth is, they always end up coming back and wanting more so because you have so much information. If I gave you two hours of information that is going to be valuable for you. You’re probably thinking well if he gave me two hours for free He probably has like, hundreds of hours of other things that he can share with me of insights. Yeah. So that’s pretty much how that works for us on

a powerful powerful. I mean, when you give value in advance, you tap into the power of reciprocity. Yeah. And they and once they believe that, once you show your value, then they’re just like, wow, if you did this for me, what else can you do for me? Right? I think that’s, that’s amazing. And it works really well in our agency as well. That’s, that’s wonderful. So so the outbound call team, are they are they US based or the international like, that’s something people are always like, oh, like, how do you find these people that will make these calls and send these follow ups?

Sure. So you know, my team is based in the Philippines right now their call team. My call team is based in the Philippines I’m loyal. No. So you know, so my team is based in the Philippines I you know, I was there December where we brought in more more more people to train Unfortunately, the whole COVID thing. We half of them had to go because they couldn’t even cross the town to go to our office, huh? So because there’s this thing called a, you know, moderate EQ, or, you know, pretty much pretty much transportation to shut down in the Philippines right now, so they couldn’t get into it. So we actually ended up renting out the loft above our office and then use that as a as a place where they can actually sleep if they want it. Hmm. So, you know, just to get so yeah, so we have our sales team in the Philippines. And, you know, we trained them, I mean, you know, there’s, you know, there’s a big push of vas right now, virtual assistants and all that stuff. And that’s perfectly fine. You should, you know, I always believe in hiring a virtual assistant. But I also come to the part is that if you’re a virtual assistant, and they’re working for me part time, it’s not gonna be as good as me hire somebody full time. And I really have them and I actually can train them continuously. Because if I’m going to use you as a one off, meaning you’re going to do some stuff for me for you know, for 30 days and that’s it. You know what’s going to happen there, I’d rather bring you in and that if it’s my once I bring you in to hire you now it’s my problem to find out how much work I can keep on giving you It’s my problem now as an owner to get more clients to be able to make sure that you keep your job. And so you’re not just sitting around doing nothing. Right. So, so my call team is in the Philippines, we have a total of 11 guys left right now that, you know that that handles all our calls for us. You

got 11 people cranking on the phone all day every day. Yeah. Phenomenal.

Yeah. So we have 11 of them in the phone, you know, calling every day. And it’s not a continuous thing. I mean, so you know, we, you know, we can’t call certain times and the truth is they work at nighttime over there. So, since one o’clock here in Florida, It’s one o’clock in the morning over there, so you know how the time works. So yeah, so to call teams over there, but at the very same time is if the call is not a lot, they’re also trained to make content creation as well. So, you know, so they need to do content creation, you know, we use canva.com as our as our main, you know, to create Prop, you know, programs and all these different collaterals So they’ll do those as well. So, you know, so far, it’s pretty good. It’s really good to be able to plus also the value is really good. Because if you have to hire somebody here and you know, I have people that I hire here, I, you know, that’s the truth. You know, I do have people that I hire here that works for me. But in the Philippines, um, I can pay somebody $5 an hour, and they will be the happiest person and

yeah, and they’re well compensated, right. There’s not like, you’re not like they’re, they’re happy with that level of pay.

Because the rate over there, you know, the truth is yes. And here’s the thing, there’s, there’s a push over here in the US of people teaching people how to hire VA s and only pay them $2 and $3 an hour. I don’t like those people. I just don’t. I’m one of the first people that’s gonna say No, you’re wrong. You’re completely wrong. Yes. The average income of a person in the Philippines is at $1 dollar 25 an hour. I understand. So for them to make $2 that’s going to be making them happy. But my thing is that why pay that when you pay them a little bit better. And they’re going to really want to work hard for you. Because they know that they’re not going to be able to replace that $5 an hour that you’re giving. And then my sales team is they also have what they call reoccurring bonuses if they sign up people, for for, you know, for our system, they get a recurring bonus, as long as they remain employed with my with my company, so they’re going to want to keep their employment. So you know, so they have that capability. Now, you know, my call team over there. They do also call for other businesses that I own. So it’s not just for our SEO as well and for our services and our consulting because we have other other services that we offer for the home health industry as well. Got it.

So you got you got this team of Philippine Philippine people that are making calls setting appointments, are they also closing deals like would they close one of these SEO contracts or does that go to a closure of some sort,

a closer so the closers are based in the US, so those guys are too close.

To get appointment centers in the Philippines and in the event like the the sales closers in the United States,

I know they’re trying to close in the Philippines. Okay, is that the last thing? What if I’m if I’m training you to be a to be an appointment setter, that can cause problems with me because you’re just doing appointments for me? Because then that’s when that’s when we’re gonna get the part of, you know, somebody says, Well, you know, they set up the appointment, but they didn’t show up, right. So, you know, my thing is that I need to train you to be able to close, but if you can’t close, then do an appointment setting. So the guys over here can do the closing, guys. So you know, if you know so the close rates in the Philippines right now is at a 7%. Okay, so you know, for so we’re able to close 7% of any kinds that we have. But here’s the thing, it’s not 7% of a one time call. It’s 7% of us calling in a 6090 day period and following up so I don’t want people to have them and say like, Oh, you’re so if you call 100 people a day you have seven clients a day. No, no We’re calling these people every day, the same clients every day for the next 90 days, every week, following up with them with an email with a text with a call, making sure that they’re doing good. How can we help them? And then we close them. So that’s how our 7% kind of works on that.

Got it. So I mean, I think it’s a great insight, just the idea of look, phone prospecting, and having an appointment setter is still viable, you’re proving that it works in your agency. And, you know, you can put Philippine workforce to work even on the sales side of the equation. A lot of times, like you said, they think you think of the Philippines is a great source of just OPERATIONS SUPPORT on virtual assistant type stuff, but there are people that are well spoken that are assertive and can step in those types of roles. Even in the in the Philippines.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people a lot of a lot of people in the US don’t understand that Verizon, T Mobile, Comcast at&t um all these large organizations their call center is based in the Philippines right so the Filipino call centers are Filipino with the call the BPO industry um you know these guys are trained to speak American accent English, British English and Australian English so they actually go to training to learn those types of stuff so they’re so if you are able to get a hold of some of these call center people it’s such a great thing. I mean, the truth is, like if you go there’s a various area in the Philippines and besides Cebu, for example, they have a city there it’s called the it Park. It’s literally a city the size of Tampa, the main the main downtown of Tampa that size, all call centers. And it looks like you’re in the US. So it’s a it’s a great place to be able to find it. But here’s the thing is you have to find the right people. You have to train them the correct way. And that’s where I think a lot of people have problems is they’re not they don’t know They hire thinking that the person said that they know what they’re doing, and then they let them be and they don’t follow up with them. They don’t check on them. They don’t do that. And that’s when problems happens and they start feeling that it doesn’t work.

Yeah, hundred percent great, great insights there. Okay, so that’s that’s how we’re getting clients. I just from a percentage basis, how much of its coming from the inbound stuff because it sounds like you’re pretty well positioned as the go to trainer that comes up when you’re looking for how to market my home health organization, how much comes from people finding you via that path, versus the ones that you assert yourself on kind of with the the outreach process that you’ve got in place?

So, you know, with the YouTube stuff, so as I said, last year, we had 75 clients, right? So we’re on 7075 clients, and that’s through YouTube that’s through just basic me doing boot camps, for example, me being invited to the senior homecare Association events to do a talk and stuff like that. So with that kind of That kind of thought process, we got 75 people, and that’s in the three, four year, you know, marketing stuff. And from that when we implemented a call team and outreach and a real push for outreach, that’s when we reached our 200 range. So, you know, it’s it’s strictly, you know, going, you know, playing offense is the most thing rather than just waiting for people, you know, to just come in and find you. I mean, even the fact that Yeah, we are, you know, if you search home health marketing, fine, we’re ranked in YouTube, that’s perfectly fine. But really, it’s the, it’s reaching out and going after people and and so that’s where doing advertising things is such an important thing, because that’s, that’s being on offense, and just cold calling people. That’s an offense. I mean, like, right now, if, you know, if you’re not doing anything, you can’t go in the office, pick up that phone and just start calling people.

Yeah, you know, great insights. I mean, once you put this call team in place, it really accelerated the growth rate from that 70 level to the 200 plus client level.

Yeah, we started with five last year, we bought a call team put a five and then we just saw the growth. And I said, that’s it. I’m going. So I literally went to the Philippines flew out there in November and I stayed there for two months and hired people and started training them and getting them ready. And I said, let’s do this, you know, so that’s pretty much

Yeah, well done. Kudos paid off, paid off in spades. It sounds like and it’s gonna continue to pay off going forward.

But it was a good vacation. Yeah, you know, it was it was a it was a good vacation, so I can’t complain at all.

Very cool. Okay, so let’s shift I know we’re getting close to the hour mark. But let’s shift for a little bit. Let’s talk about fulfillment, right. So we get all these clients they need. They need SEO work done, how you get this stuff done in your in your world.

So for example, for website design, my team can do that. So my guys in the Philippines can handle website design. You know, they need funnels, those kind of stuff done, we can do it. Facebook ads, we can do that as well on SEO now, right? I have one guy that’s good at SEO. But what I do with him is his job is to make sure that he looks at all the SEO stuff being done for a client. So we actually outsource all our SEO services. So all our SEO is send out to a white label SEO, right? Because my thing is that, you know, they there’s that thing where they say, you know, work on your strengths, not your weaknesses, whatever weaknesses you have given to somebody who’s it’s their strength, right? You know, because, you know, you’re just gonna mess yourself up. So, you know, we have a guy that does SEO, what he does is he makes sure that all the outsourcing of SEO Services we’re doing, they’re actually doing and he actually talks to their managers, the team manager for the CEOs for the white label company, he talks to them. So so they have that connection, because if somebody if their manager talks to me or Jacob For example, we have no idea about SEO, we just know how to sell it. We just know how it works, the little small things, but if you start telling me about well, this is how you do an h1 and h2 and h3, this is actually how start heading will help you. Right? So. So that’s what we do. So we outsource all of our, all of our SEO services. So we work with several companies. So the cost of SEO to outsource is at $400. So if we’re charging, let’s say 12 to 1500 dollars for an SEO basic package, now we have $1,000 you know, profit some people for some reason they want to keep that $500 and try to learn SEO from scratch and like No, well then you might lose that client within three months because you’re not giving them what they need. Yeah, outsource that sucker. Learn from it, learn and then eventually later you can start practicing with certain clients and doing things so yeah, so that’s that’s one thing that we outsource is the SEO pay per clicks we do it in house because we don’t do a lot of them anyways. But You know, that’s pretty much how that works. outsource it. Outsourcing outsourcing that’s how about

account management with 200 plus clients who deals with the clients goes to the reports works on keeping clients engaged and retained.

Yeah, so a good example is like you know, with one of the white labels we work with, they have a nice dashboard that we can have reports pulled out for them, so it’s easy to get those reports out right. So you know, we have a couple people in the office whose sole job is to work with the clients so you have to have you know, a client reach out, you know, happening so one way to kind of implement that is we each client will receive a phone call every week from us just just a Hello right because sometimes you know, if they don’t hear from you they get upset but for some reason they just want a Hello or hi so unfortunately you know some people don’t believe in it, but we use a robo call. So we’ll create a a voicemail say hey, this is you know, like for example, Janet will do it, Gemma, hey, this is Jan in the office. If there’s anything that we can do for you, please go ahead and let us know. I will And so we’ll just send that out to all to or to 75. Rather than paying somebody to, to call them every day, or you know, for the first day on a Monday, we’ll just send those out on a Friday, you’re going to receive a text just as a follow up from us. But then that’s where we don’t want them to ask for the reports. We give you the report right away. We don’t wait for clients of, Hey, where’s my reports? No, we tell them, Listen, you’re going to get a monthly report regarding your SEOs, you’re going to get, you know, weekly report regarding your pay per clicks, you’re going to you know, so we will let them know what they’re going to have. And that’s when we make sure that we pull it out. But that’s where you actually have to have a good CRM system in place to, you know, to remind you that you’re supposed to do that.

So I like that. So are you getting like a cell phone number for all your clients? And that’s where you’re making these outbound voice drops.

Yeah, so we do actually, you know, we have their cell phones because you know, our main goes, who’s our main contact and your facility and once we find those out, we send you that Voice drops right away, so they get it automatically. And of course, you know, that’s where we can also send you a text message as well. Um, we’re kind of goofy that we will send you a meme just just for the fun of it once a month just to kind of change things up a little bit. So, yeah, so that’s where we do a lot of our stuff. I mean, nowadays, I don’t think anybody have even answers are home phone or even have a home phone. So you know, yeah, get your cell phone, that’d be the best thing for I was just

thinking he often like if you dial the office number with the voice drop, it’s gonna go to when the receptionist right, and then that voice drop wouldn’t get connected to a cell phone number. But if you got the cell phone, then you can have that, you know, that direct one to one communication, which is perfect.

Yeah, and a lot of a lot of people, a lot of agencies are gonna say, Well, how do you get the cell phone number? For some reason a lot of people don’t like what I say, I always tell the clients like, Listen, we want to be able to have a direct connection with you, so that we can let you know right away. I mean, wouldn’t you want to know the information right away in your hands? And they say, Well, yeah, great. What’s your phone number so we can contact you directly your cell phone Don’t worry, I’m not going to spam call you or any of that stuff. So we’re going to create those objection walkers. And they’ll say yes. And if a client doesn’t say, doesn’t want to give you your cell phone, you can do a thing where we have an electronic business card and we’ll say, Hey, can I send you my electronic business card? They’ll say yes, text message to them. Now you have their cell phone number. So there’s different ways to kind of go around the system a little bit, but you crazy and call them nonstop,

right? What do you what do you use for those voice drops? text messages and things?

What system? Yeah, call them all? Okay, excellent. So yeah, call them all on is what we use. And actually, we use column mall for another business that we created. So, I mean, so there’s just so much stuff that you know, once you create a business, there’s like so many, once you start finding all the problems that these agencies have or business have, you can end up creating smaller businesses around there. So which is you know, so yeah, column was what we use. Um, it has a nice platform, and it’s easy. You can have recorded messages already and then you get reports. If the calls don’t come in. You can even send out surveys as well, you know, or you know, questions like, Hey, you know, this is a survey we’re doing press one for this two for this three for that for for that and all of a sudden when they do that you can actually get the results later on in a CSV, Euro, or Excel file. So, um, you know that that’s what we suggest a lot of common law system.

I think that’s a great insight. So definitely comment on this if you thought that was cool. The whole idea of like, yeah, like get the Get your clients cell phone number, you can easily access them anyways, because you’ll be able to call and get straight to them and be able to answer their questions. But then you can leverage some of the automation with text check ins and voice drop check ins and it gives you that like the number one reason a client’s gonna leave is perceived indifference. So you can kind of take one less step and just do a straight to voicemail. Hey, just want to check in, give me a buzz back if there’s anything we can do to help and it kind of gives you one of those check marks in your favor that you’re checking in and you’re, you know, just being proactive. I love it.

Exactly. And you know, what we tell the client is that you also have direct contact with us. Do you have my cell phone as well? So that’s what we tell them, right? You’ll so they’ll say something like, oh, you’re gonna have Jacobs direct cell phone, and you’re gonna have Michael’s direct cell phone number, but the truth is they don’t have my personal cell phone number. It’s right, although

number inside the system, right, that way they can reply back and get engaged.

Like our phone system, we can receive text messages, fax, faxes, you know, anything in our you know, and it looks like and it’s not a cell phone. So it’s an app that we use. And that’s, you know, that makes it easy for us so they can text messages and we’ll get a text message and we’re perfectly fine. But it’s not my personal cuz I don’t want to give out my personal to people. But you know,

yeah, it’s nice to have, it’s nice to have that buffer there and to be able to engage via SMS, but still, you know, have your own personal sphere that’s kind of separate.

Plus, I hated the part where I was holding on to four different phones. I got one point. I mean, like two years ago, I had four different cell phones until I discovered, you know that there’s an app that you can actually have that you can just have all your phones. Your phone and you’re running through there. So that’s what we kind of use. So. And what’s nice is the app that we use is the same phone system that we use for our team in the Philippines to our manual calls.

So they’re cranking out those phone calls on that same system.

Yeah. And it automatically records the calls, you know, the outbound calls, it automatically records it. So we actually can, you know, listen into all our, all our client service agents when they’re making their outbound calls. Very cool.

Well, good stuff. I this has been great. I really appreciate you sharing. Again, we’re getting close to the one hour mark, real quick. So you’ve had this growth, you’ve had the success, you’ve got the seven figure business which is continuing to grow, what would be three of the biggest lessons, you know, that you’ve taken away over the last, you know, five, six years share?

Yeah, number one, time is valuable for you. So you have to look at where you can save time. If it’s going to cost you money to save time, then spend the money That that is my most important thing. Number two is education, and what to talk about educate yourself in regards to making sure that you’re investing in yourself, there’s, you know, you have to invest in yourself to be able to learn, right, that’s how we grew was that because there were people that was willing to teach me but I was willing to pay the money to be able to learn from things. So, you know, and you know, so with education, and learning and stuff like that, and then saving time, that’s a great thing. And the next thing is, you know, what, if, if you’re scared to something, you have to go forward, right? And you have to actually really, you know, most people are scared of something when you’re scared of something that means that’s something that you need to tackle. So every time I have a fear for something, then we go straight after it. So pretty much everybody that starts a business like this, so we’re doing the number one problem and think that they’re scared of is marketing and getting clients. like everyone’s always wanting that payday in the end, but they don’t are not willing to put in the effort to make that so you know, so like I said, spend money to save time, time is worth more than anything. Else, educate yourself, always learn something. And then the third thing is like, whatever you fear go after it. But pretty much, you know what I’m more going after is marketing your company and your services. You know, hundred percent of your profit is your marketing. So why aren’t you spending more time in your marketing? So that’s pretty much what I want to I want to be able to share.

Good stuff, man. Well, hey, congratulations on your on your success. Thank you so much for your willingness to share and kind of in the group, you’re really active and answer questions. I appreciate you taking the time. I appreciate your your willingness to share. So if you got value from this, be sure to tag Michael in the group say, hey, thanks so much for the great insights. It’s not seems like he’s pretty good with answering questions as well. So Michael, thank you. Any last thoughts before we wrap up today?

No, I just want to say thank you so much for what you do. I mean, like, you know, when we were getting into this industry I you know, I there was nobody really out there that was putting people together. Everybody had that thing where like this Is my secret that I’m not going to share? Right? And so the fact that you’re willing to share it with a lot of people, that’s such an amazing thing and then creating that group that allows people to bounce off ideas. I’m I like I said, I’ve learned so much from other people, you know, within the group itself that that’s amazing.

Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, man. I really appreciate it. And we’ll send you off now. If you’d like to listen to more interviews like this, be sure to go to seven figure agency comm slash podcast, you can access it right there. And if you’re not in the local agency success group, you can join that by going to seven figure agency comm slash group up several thousand digital marketing agencies from across the country, sharing ideas, best best practices, and helping each other out. So definitely join us in the local agency success group. Definitely. Thanks, Michael.

No problem. Thank you so much for having me. It’s really appreciate it.