
Dr. Nick Silveri has been a clinic-owning chiropractor for 12+ years and regularly saw patients for five years. Since then, his practice grew from a struggling, stressful office collecting $250,000 per year to a systematized, thriving practice that is on pace to collect $1 Million this year. He has a passion for marketing, specifically leveraging helpful website content and paid campaigns to spread the message of chiropractic. Dr. Silveri founded LVRG Media to take the common frustrations out of working with an agency for colleagues in his profession.
In this episode of TechTalk Podcast, Brad Cost, Dr. Jay Greenstein, and Dr. Nick Silveri sit down to discuss:
Shoe salesman to brilliant businessman - Dr. Silver's story.
Knowing how to intentionally spread your practice's messaging.
Staying 100% honest with yourself on both your weakness and strengths.
SHOW NOTES:
2:09 – Selling shoes to self-sustaining successes. “I used to sell women's shoes at Macy's with the goal to go to dental school. I was in my master's degree and getting ready to apply when this odd guy, who would ring up our sales, asked me how dental school was going. I had recently decided not to go, so I let him know and he told me I should be a chiropractor. 45 days later, I was at Logan for chiropractic school. Once I graduated, I bought my first practice, which was a satellite clinic, and I was going to turn it into a real clinic. I opened a second clinic from scratch, and, while running those two clinics, I had a heart attack at 30. This was a real wake up call. I love chiropractic, but I’m not willing to die at 30 for two mediocre practices. At that point, I knew I needed to make some changes. I have a friend that I used to get together with every Tuesday night to have a nice time and bounce business ideas off of. He was a chiropractor about 30 minutes away and he taught me a lot about business. A month after I'd had the heart attack, we got together - he slid into the booth and said one word: leverage. He said we need to be leveraging things in our lives, our businesses, and that led us down the road of realizing we need associates in our practice. When I started my agency, the mantra we were trying to help chiropractors with was leverage. Leveraging their expertise through content, through their online presence, through their website, through any platforms and opportunities that didn't exist when I started my practice in 2007. LVRG Media that's been serving chiropractors for almost eight years. I also still run my practice, but I live 3.5 hours away. It's associate-driven and this will be the third year in a row that we've broken a million dollars.”
7:24 - Three key pieces to create team-driven practices. “The first part is that I am brutally honest with myself of what I really wanted to do. When I was laying in the hospital from that heart attack, I decided that I needed to get help, but I didn't know what that would entail. When my friend and I had that leverage conversation, that was it. These schools exist to make chiropractors, but they don't Nick Silveris. I am special in certain ways, just like everybody's special in certain ways, and the thing that gives me the most energy is brainstorming, marketing, promoting, and building businesses. Execution does not give me energy. Showing up every single day and see patients or not making money was a bad business model for like my soul. Associates were the answer. The second part is associates. I don't know of any chiropractors that have the biggest practices in the world with a single doctor. It's all like team driven. If you want to keep growing, you have to attract new people. At some point, you run out of the capacity to do it yourself. The third thing is I think that I'm good at like finding and investing in people well. I like setting up a situation where they get to do the thing that they love doing, whether they’re chiropractors, massage therapists, trainers, front desk people, office managers. I've got all kinds of different people that work for us, so it's just a matter getting to do the thing that gives me energy. I try to find people that do the things I need done that gives them energy.”
15:22 – The meaning behind LVRG Media. “LVRG Media started in 2017 because I found Gary Vaynerchuk and his message really resonated with me. He wrote a book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, which really changed the way I thought about marketing. Give value! I built my practice through spinal screenings, yellow pages and events like dinner talks. I was always trying to add value, and those patients always worked out pretty well. The problem? It wasn't very scalable or leverageable. In 2015, I got this idea of needing to create more content around chiropractic because it’s message is the truth and there were lots of people living in my town that did not understand what natural health is all about. I needed to find someone who can be the execution arm of my ideas, so I hired a marketing director for my practice, who is now the COO for LVRG Media. We were consistent about creating content, but the secret was she took care of everything. She set the camera up, she edited videos, she posted it, she boosted it, she did whatever needed to be done. All I had to do was be the talent and give my expertise. The practice started to grow because people would see us on Facebook and sign up for a new patient appointment. At that point, I had this realization that content marketing agencies for chiropractors didn't exist. You would either have to go to seminars or buy courses to figure it out yourself. I bought lots of them and struggled with it because when you're a chiropractor, you're busy. Something needed to be made that does not take a “completely done for you” approach, rather a “done alongside you” approach. LVRG Media Services look vastly different than when we launched in 2017, but it's always stayed to its core that chiropractors should be sharing the chiropractic message with their local audience.”
20:44 – Educate, educate, educate. “I'm trying to educate and spread my message to my little bubble, which is about a 10-mile radius around my practice. That helps you stand out because the people that I'm meant to attract will be attracted to the content. If every chiropractor took the approach that I take of creating consistent content and spending money to make sure people see it, it would change the world. There are 70,000 licensed chiropractors in America and maybe 40,000 individual offices. If all 40,000 spent $1,000 a month, sharing whatever they think is important, whoever is meant to hear it is going to hear it. A lot of chiropractors don't like creating content because all they care about is new patients. Every strategy they're attracted to is spending the least to get the most. When you think about content, your duty to educate your community, and how one video might reach one person to turn their life around, isn't that worth it?”
30:42 – Intention vs attention. “There are basically three types of content that you can create: video, audio, and written content. People are going to consume however they're going to consume. One of my superpowers, when it comes to marketing, is identifying things that are and are not going to matter. If you only have so much time or energy to create content, you need to focus in on the things that are going to move the needle the most. For a local chiropractor, a podcast doesn’t make sense if you're maxed out on your written and your video content. It would be way more beneficial to just focus your attention on video and written. There are also two types of marketing. There's intention-based marketing and there's attention-based marketing. Intention-based is when somebody is looking for a solution. Attention-based is when the solution is put in front of somebody. With intention-based marketing, we're mainly talking about Google and YouTube at a local level. In terms of ranking for relevancy, Google values written content over video content while YouTube values video content over written content. You can get all the traffic in the world, but if it goes to a worthless webpage, it's not going to convert those people and that's what you should care about. You're in the conversion game.”
34:07 – Don’t be a speakeasy. “The things you talk about in your practice every day are the things you should be sharing outside of your four walls. Most of the offices I talk to are basically running a speakeasy because you have to know somebody to get in to learn the secret information. Whatever you're explaining to people on the first four days of a patient’s experience is the content that is going to attract people into your practice. Share the stuff that is already in your head on film or on a written document, then optimize those things so people actually see it. Right now, everybody's having these one-on-one conversations with all of our patients out there that love chiropractic, but we still are at 11% utilization rate. That 89% is not searching for ‘chiropractor near me,’ which is what every chiropractic website is geared to rank for, but if you don't know that chiropractic can help with migraines, why would you search for it? Pages and keywords on your website matter. There's no easy way to do it, but this is the way human nature is. People want value.”
39:26 – Services of LVRG Media. “My first step is a strategy session. I've done strategy sessions with people that are still in school, with people that are looking to sell their practice, and everything in between. Our strategy session starts with me going through a deep dive on your online presence. How do I feel about this website, the social media, the content, the ads that are being run? After my deep dive, we talk about what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. If you want my help with that, we have a service that helps with almost all of the problems you have. I try to make it to where it is the most valuable hour of your month, and whether you do anything about it or not, at least you are now aware of what is possible.”
45:12 - Don’t be afraid to start. “The two things that keep most chiropractors from creating content is the first and third step of content creation. It's a three-step process. First, you have to have a strategy and idea of what you should create content around. Second, you have to do it. You have to record the video or write the content. Third, you have to have the technical expertise of what you’re supposed to do with it, like optimizing it for these channels so that someone actually consumes it. We help with steps one and three. I'm not going to do the content for you. You've got to do that to make an impact in your patients’ lives - only you know the message you crafted in your practice. The strategy for most chiropractors is going to be very similar, but the content itself is unique because every office is unique. The third step is the technical piece of it, which is what stops a lot of chiropractors as well. Having the technical expertise, like editing videos, managing copyright, uploading to different platforms, optimizing your page for SEO - all the things that go into actually making the content useful to you to drive your business KPIs forward. That is the part that we do.”
CONTACT NICK
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