The Success That is Possible

Stephanie is an out-of-the-box computer connoisseur and industry-leading advertising agency founder that focuses on serving chiropractors. People are her passion, and technology is her love language. Stephanie’s goal is to show visionary entrepreneurs how to grow a business that facilitates the life of positive impact they always dreamed of. She loves to see people succeed while taking the stress and mystery out of the tech so that the product/message can reach its full reach for maximum ROI. 

Episode Highlights

6:37 – Creating her reality out of necessity. “I started my journey with digital marketing about nine years ago. I was a stay-at-home homeschooling mama of four and also running a side business. I was trying to make ends meet and had been working online for a company that had been feeding me courses, as I'm a voracious learner. As they're feeding me all these courses, I'm learning how to do webinars, funnels, ads and all this stuff, but then the business was sold, and I didn't know what I was going to do. My husband was already working two jobs, and I honestly was very scared because I did not want to go to corporate. I could have commuted about an hour a day to go work in Dallas to make good money, but I wanted to be with my kids. I have always been one to challenge or push the envelope of what is possible. I would create my own reality if necessary and, at that point, it was necessary. One night, I'm lying in bed with my husband, and I asked him, ‘what do you think about me reaching out to this local chiropractor and asking him if I could run some ads for him.’ My husband was supportive of it, so I reached out to Dr. Caleb Braddock out in Van Osteen, Texas. At first, he said no, but I'm persistent and he eventually said yes. We ran ads for him and had about 80 leads that came in that first month. That equated, because he had an incredible clinic already, to about $60k of extra revenue that month for him and his practice. We started working on a lot of things. We did a webinar together. He invited about 10 of his chiropractic buddies from all over the country to learn about what we had done together and 9 out of 10 of those guys signed up on that call. It changed my life forever. I got started on the agency path, learning and growing every day. I've been in masterminds to learn how to serve better. It's been an incredible journey, and we now have a team of 25. We serve chiropractors all over the United States and I love getting to do this because I'm super passionate about chiropractic.”

9:35 – Finding alternative options after her mom struggles almost became hers. “I unfortunately lost my mom due to some complications with degenerative disc disease ultimately. Whenever I was younger, she had fallen off of a donkey in Haiti, where we were living for a short period of time, and she ruptured a disc in her back. We came back to the States and her back kept getting worse and worse and worse. She was going to doctors, who started recommending medications and eventually surgery. She had some sort of disc surgery, but it was legitimately botched. She got money for it and had to have another surgery, which eventually led to a disc fusion. This is back during the Oxycontin boom, so my mom was given all the meds and there was some addiction that developed there. After about a decade of living in this chronic debilitating pain, she fell again because she was so unstable and wasn't functioning very well in life because of all the medicines, the back and forth between the doctors, the surgeries and injections - just all the things. I had a front row seat of what it looks like whenever people don't know that there are other options other than surgery. I got my hardship license at 15 so I could drive my mom to appointments all over the place because she couldn't drive. As I entered my 30s, I started having some neck issues. I had sharp shooting pain down my right arm and really bad headaches. The doctor told me to go get an MRI and it turned out that I had a bulging disc between C6 and C7, impinging on my spinal cord by five millimeters. I pretty much blanked out as soon as the doctor told me that because all I could think of was everything I'd been through with my mother. Here I was, with no real reason to have a bulging disc in my neck and there was absolutely no way I was going to have surgery. Fortunately for me, Dr. Caleb Braddock was using Facebook Live, which was a brand-new feature on Facebook at that time, and I had been seeing his stuff and giving him some feedback. I went to go see him and it changed my life. I signed up for a care package that I could not afford at the time it and totally changed my life within two weeks. The numbness and tingling were gone. I had no more debilitating headaches. I got to see the power of chiropractic care. Whenever everything happened before my agency, my first thought how could I help him grow his practice and what he does? That's what we do at Social Sparrow. It's all about being able to help people know that there's other options out there. Maybe if my mom had known that there was chiropractors and other options, then maybe she'd still be here today.”

17:17 – Changing the lives of patients and doctors alike. “I have to give so much credit to Dr. Braddock and Dr. Chad Glynes for just everything that they have created within Genesis Back and Neck. I shared my story earlier about my mom and I facing surgery and how that went and now, with Genesis Back and Neck, the DRX 9000 and the system, we're able to save people from surgery, ultimately. People come in, addicted to pain meds, and receive their treatment plan so they can walk out and actually live a pain-free life. It's absolutely phenomenal to be a part of. At Social Sparrow, we go out into the world and stop the scroll. We get people's attention that might have a bulging or herniated disc and get them to come into the practice. We've grown from literally one practice to over 40, where we're changing lives of the patients and doctors. Doctors are growing their practices, getting more time with their families, and saving their bodies because adjusting can be difficult.”

21:31 – The success that is possible. “If chiropractors just understood that there is a difference between warm traffic and cold traffic. At Social Sparrow, it's about cold traffic. It’s about being able to create a system where you're able to know that if you put this much in, you know you’re going to get this number of leads and KPIs, and it's going to equate to success as long as we can keep those KPIs what they need to be. You can do that with cold traffic, whereas with warm traffic, obviously you're depending on potentially a referral or something like that, which is awesome. Everybody should have both warm and cold traffic, but whenever you dive into cold traffic, it takes a whole different mindset. Overall, all of our most successful clients are able to make that mindset shift between what it's like to get someone who's a warm traffic lead versus a cold traffic lead. They understand that it takes a different set of skill sets or different tools in your tool belt that you got to pull out, use and learn that might be something that you're not used to. Once chiropractors make that jump, especially in Genesis, it’s crazy the success that is possible.”

24:06 – Cold traffic leads vs warm traffic leads. “Cold traffic leads are typically coming from some sort of social media or cold outreach via email, which we don't do that yet. We're going to be doing that towards the end of the year. The cold traffic can be Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Those are popular places to find really great qualified leads, if you are doing it correctly. If you're not doing it correctly, you're going to think that all of them are the worst leads ever. Warm traffic leads are your referrals, your people who have been seeing you for a long time or maybe a Google ad that is showing up after they have actually searched chiropractor in Dallas. They're warm because they're searching for a chiropractor whereas the leads that we focus on is the cold traffic leads. They're the people who don't know you and might have seen an ad from you maybe, but most likely not. We stopped their scroll. They weren't necessarily looking for you. We're using very strategic direct response marketing in order to get their attention in the newsfeed so that, if they have a bulging or herniated disc, then they know that that ad is for them and that they can come in.”

30:30 – Adopting AI into everyday uses. “I used to geek out back whenever chat bots were first released. I thought that was exciting, but this is an actual mark in our history as human beings. While I am cautious, I do believe that the AI could come alive someday and be fully sentient and shut our electricity down. But the truth is, there is no stopping where we are right now. It is not going to go anywhere. As a business owner with our current reality, if you do not set up and pay attention, you're going to get left behind because the exponential growth that is possible with AI is ridiculous. It's going to be bad for you, for your family, and for your business. For where we are right now, it is very important for us to pay attention to this and what it looks like in our businesses. We actually are taking a multifaceted approach and playing with a lot of different things. I think the most exciting thing that I'm working on right now is an outbound dialer that essentially is an AI bot that can literally pick up the phone and sounds just like a human. It has the cadence of a human without those weird pauses. The goal isn't necessarily to just make people think that they're talking to a human, but to give them such a seamless experience that they don't mind having the conversation with the AI bot. If anything, the AI bot is going to be able to serve them quicker because obviously somebody wasn't available to take the call in the first place. This AI bot has the potential to allow the lead manager or the front office staff to manage the AI by being able to look at the conversations the AI is having. The AI can actually make multiple calls at one time and these conversations are logged as memory. If that person hangs up and calls back, it's going be able to pull it right up. Not only that, but it’s also going to remember if it said that they had a back or neck issue or any of that stuff. It's so incredibly exciting. That's just one of like four things we're doing with AI.”

36:19 – ChatGPT is the new Google. “Let's just say you don’t want to build an AI agent because you have no idea what to do there or whatever. Just start with ChatGPT. For example, at Social Sparrow, I have created a folder inside of ChatGPT called Employees and I have a chat for every single employee, where, within that chat, I have uploaded their personality styles, things that I know about them, their job description and more. Whenever a situation comes up and I want to make sure I'm not having any blind spots and communicating with them best considering their personality style or mine, I asked ChatGPT for help. I don't do a ton of the HR stuff or just employee management as much anymore because we have a team that does that, but it's freed up their time because it takes a long time to write up a performance improvement plan or a roadmap. Now, in literally two to five minutes, all of that work can be completed. I would just highly encourage you guys, at a minimum, utilize ChatGPT. ChatGPT has become my Google, and I promise you, that's where the future's going. ChatGPT will become Google, so the quicker you're using it, the better.”

Episode Resources

Stephanie’s Website

The Embodi Experience