Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, we're talking with Craig Alsup from Ft Worth Texas.
Craig has a neat business. He has an office that does a lot of family and marriage counseling, but with the current situation, they're shifting to do a lot of virtual, telephone and zoom type of sessions.
We talked a lot about the transition to this model, and I shared a lot of the experiences I had in writing a book with a marriage counselor called Stop Your Divorce, which we've had online since 1998 at stopyourdivorce.com.
Craig's business model is similar to the way we were working back then, but now it's become very possible for people to have a meaningful conversation in a virtual way. In fact, as we're all getting used to gathering in this way now, it might turn out to be a more preferable way for people to meet.
We had a great conversation about the model, and how to expand the opportunity by narrowing the focus.
There are a lot of great ideas for us all in this one.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 181
Dean: Craig.
Craig: Hey, Dean, how are you man?
Dean: How are you?
Craig: I'm doing well.
Dean: So Fort worth, Texas, is that where you're calling in from?
Craig: Yes, sir.
Dean: Look at you. So you are staying in space or in... what did we call it?
Craig: Yeah, the social distancing or staying at home or something.
Dean: You're right, exactly.
Craig: All of the above.
Dean: Okay. Well, there's good news that we can always meet in the cloud here. Just like this.
Craig: That's right. -
Dean: There's no restrictions.
Craig: I've been doing a lot of Zoom meetings.
Dean: Yes, as has the world. That's exciting. That's a good thing. I've been saying to people that this is going to mark the big migration where now everybody is going to be comfortable with Zoom because all the kids have to be there for school. So many households are Zoom equipped now. I can't wait. I know just a little bit about what you've got going on, but I'd love to hear the story and what you're up to.
Craig: Sure. We're in Fort worth, Texas, and a couple of years ago, my wife and I decided to launch a private practice, counseling practice, primarily working with married couples and teenagers. Man, it really has taken off over the last couple of years. We started off with one therapist that was hired on with us and now we're up to four. Actually at the time that I messaged you, were at three and then we brought on another one and we're at four now. But tons of room to grow in what we have, tons of room in the space we have, I think. Just lots of need around here for people to get marriage counseling and things like that. I know you've done some stuff with divorce before or helping people to stay away from divorce before.
Dean: Well, I'll tell you, that is exactly right. In 1998, I was eating breakfast, before the internet was really the main thing that you do in the mornings. So I'm the restaurant and eating breakfast and looking through USA Today, which was my routine then, I would look through the USA Today newspaper, and I come through the classifieds and I see a gentleman offering counseling for divorce. Then I saw in the business opportunities section, he was running an ad that he was looking to set people up in his business kind of thing. Looking for people who wanted to do divorce counseling.
Just like serendipity that it was the very first day that he had run the ad. I called him just because I'm a marketer by then. I knew some things that he could do that would help him out, and I met Homer McDonald, who was in San Antonio, Texas. When I met him, he was 76 years old and had just shut down his traditional practice. He had an office and stuff where he had been doing marriage counseling for 45 years at the time. So now in retirement, he was doing telephone counseling, and he was running ads in USA Today, spending $2,500 a month in ads to bring in $6,000 or $7,000 a month in counseling over the phone. I got talking with him and helping him with his marketing.
I introduced him to free recorded messages and helped them with the package, the letter that he would send people when they responded. His business started going up. But at the time I asked him if he'd had any books or CDs or anything like that, at CDs, dating it there, if he had any audio, and he didn't. Two things, his fear was if he had a book, then people wouldn't need him kind of thing, they wouldn't hire him for the counseling. And that if a publisher would give him an advance so he could take some time off and write the book, maybe he would.
I just struck up a friendship with him. I was helping him as I could. Then I said to him one day, "Homer, while we're waiting on that publisher, why don't we just go ahead and get started with the book?" I interviewed him over the phone for about 13 hours over the next few weeks. He was really good, very articulate. I was able to discover what he knew kind of thing, and I would help shape what a chapter would be. We would talk about like, "What are the things that people do that don't work?" I would ask him that. He'd go away and he'd come back, he said, "Okay, there's eight things that people try that never work." Then he would come on and we would record a session, and he would just talk about all eight of those things.
We got that all transcribed and turned it into the book, and I said, "Homer, I think that what's going to happen is just the opposite of what you think is going to happen. That the more people are going to read the book, the more they're going to want to have counseling with you." So we did a handshake deal where I would drive and spend the money for the advertising for the book. I would get all the money from the book and he would get all the money from the counseling. We had that relationship for almost 20 years. He died maybe five or six years ago now. But he made it from '91 or 92'. He had such an amazing practice where he got to the point where he was doing $30,000 or $40,000 a month in counseling on the back of the book. And we sold millions of dollars of the book over that period of time too. It was a perfect elaborative relationship, and he saved a lot of marriages. That was great. The beginning of telephone counseling was an odd thing back then.
Craig: Yeah, I was going to say. That was before its time.
Dean: Yeah. It was premium prices in the beginning. But it was a great thing. That's my sort of story about that experience. As I was reading about what you were up to, that's, of course, what came to my mind. Tell me about how your model works.
Craig: Yeah. We are a group practice, which basically means that there's more than one therapist working under the same roof. Currently we have two counseling offices that our therapists are basically... We have EHR, electronic health records system where we have a calendar online that we book clients into. My wife does most of the scheduling when calls come in. She's the one answering the phone typically. Then we schedule for these four therapists within our offices, and they share the space. Right now they're doing a lot of telehealth stuff, but really it's been a model that-
Dean: So people come to your... they come to your location?
Craig: Yeah. Before all of this virus craziness, all of our people came to our location. Those two offices were being split up between these four therapists. We have one of our therapists is only seeing about six people a week, but then the other three are trying to see 15 plus. That was the method. Now we've gone into telehealth a little bit as well. We've got a lot of people that are just doing either through the phone or by video. That's growing. That's the model; four therapists working in these two offices, also doing some telehealth now. The idea behind it is that my wife and I are behind the scenes doing marketing stuff, keeping the website going, finding the clients basically and pushing those out to these four therapists who are actually seeing the clients and continuing on that side of the business.
Dean: Okay, great. What is the typical engagement for you guys? How is it? Somebody come one time or they come in so many times a month? Are they staying for ongoing? How's your relationship work with the patients or clients or whatever?
Craig: That was one of the things I wanted to talk with you about, was client retention. Right now... actually I thought it was a little higher than it was, but I did a little bit more digging yesterday to prepare for the call and realized that we're sitting about four to five sessions per person on average over the last 15 months, is what I looked at. We'd like to see that move up. Generally speaking, for marriage counseling, we expect that people would probably need... depending on their needs because everybody's different, but we would typically see eight to 10 sessions as being a good number for them to get the best outcomes. We're sitting at about four to five right now.
Dean: How many did you say you feel they need?
Craig: Eight to 10 probably.
Dean: Eight to 10.
Craig: Often we start people out coming weekly, but then over time, maybe after the first month, maybe they're able to come every couple of weeks, so that extends our time frame out with them a little bit. But really our goal as a practice is to be solution focused, to be as efficient and effective as possible. It's not really built up around keeping people in there for a long time. We try to point that out on our website and a couple of other places, that we're the practice that doesn't want to keep you around forever, keep you coming to counseling forever. We want you to do better and move on with your life, and be able to use the skills that you learned in session over the long run.
Dean: Who is your counseling style or what school are you from kind of thing... what school of counseling?
Craig: I'd say a lot of it is built around cognitive behavioral stuff. There's a method to marriage counseling called the Gottman, G-O-T-T-M-A-N, method. A couple of our people have some training in that. Just solution focused, brief type counseling with a cognitive behavioral and Gottman methodology.
Dean: Yeah. Results-based.
Craig: Yeah. We're private pay only, I should mention that. A lot of therapy practices take insurance and things like that. Because we primarily see married couples, it brings in a lot of issues with us as far as insurance ethically because of the need with insurance. You typically would need to diagnose one of the people of the couple with some sort of mental health diagnosis, and that's really not our goal.
Dean: How much do you charge for the sessions or do you sell it as a package?
Craig: We've not done the package deal. We have two therapists that are licensed professional counselor interns, are a licensed marriage and family therapist associates. They basically haven't completed their hours yet to be fully licensed, but they see clients for $100 a session. Then we have two therapists that are fully licensed that see clients at $130 per session, which is pretty equivalent to the area around us here in Fort Worth, I think. There's some that are higher than us, there's some that are lower, but I think we're probably in the middle somewhere.
Dean: Okay. When you're presenting it to someone, is it session by session? They're just saying, "Come in for one session," or do you have it as a 90 day program or a 12 week -?
Craig: I don't think we've pitched it as an eight or 12 week program thus far. It's actually something I've thought of but just haven't figured out how to implement.
Dean: So how do you present it to people? You say, "We charge $100 per session if you want to work with an intern or $130 if you want someone fully licensed." How do you present the difference?
Craig: I guess the way we typically present it is, you say, " Our therapists work on different days of the week. If there's a specific time and day that works for you, that will help to narrow it down as far as maybe who you would want to work with." We also encourage people to take a look at our website where you can see the therapists biographies, just a little bit of info about them. Sometimes people pick from that based on the age or, race or whatever, different factors. Then some people are just kind of, "Okay, I'm totally open. Who do you think would be best?" And then through asking them a series of questions like, "Okay, what's going on? How old are you guys? How long have you been married?" Those types of questions, we narrow it down and say, "Okay, this might be the person for you."
And we're trying to keep it fairly balanced across the therapists too so one person isn't just stacking up while the others don't have anybody. Sometimes that's difficult to do because we want to make sure that our clients we get the best for them. But we haven't pushed out a package or, "This is a 12 week cycle." Instead, we're just saying, "Hey, this is how much it costs for a session. We can schedule you this week," and then we really leave it up to our therapist. Towards the end of every session we're asking them, "Hey, make sure that you're asking your client, 'Hey, when can we get you back on the calendar?'" We've even encouraged them to say, "Hey, let's go ahead and schedule your next two or three sessions so that you've got your spot locked in, your timeframe"
Dean: Okay. And so far that's working to be for about four to five sessions? Is what the average is.
Craig: Yes, correct.
Dean: Okay. The thing would be to test that against a six week program, because if you were able to get people on a six week program automatically, you're one further than what you're getting right now with the week to week, right?
Craig: Right.
Dean: I think that maybe puts people in a frame where that's kind of, "There's an end to it." I think what people often don't want to dive into this bottomless thing that they're coming every week to therapy now or whatever. It might be thing to put a frame of reference around it, that it's going to be a six week or a 12 week program. Six week or eight week or... something like that, that kind of packages. Then I think that you'll find your average will go up.
Craig: Okay.
Dean: That I think would be a nice thing. Now, how do you find people? How does your before unit work?
Craig: Most of that is through either organic Google search or Google Ads. I would say 90% of our people come through either organic search or Google Ads.
Dean: Okay. Walk me through the Google Ads.
Craig: Right now we have $600 a month going out in Google Ads for couples and teens. Well, before all of this telehealth, before we really started doing telehealth, we were running ads within about 10 or 12 miles of our location. That's about a 20 to 30 minute drive here in Fort worth. We were running ads to about 10 or 12 miles to our location. We had multiple different ads or comparing against one another within the Google Ads system so that we find the best ads and things like that. So Google would automatically run the best ads over time. Obviously looking at different keywords and stuff around ads that people are searching for.
Also, have a long list of negative keywords so that people aren't finding us for couples retreats or different stuff like churches or what have you what that has to do with that, or different types of therapy like physical therapy and stuff like that, we don't want to be found for. We also don't want to be necessarily found for like when somebody searches for their insurance company, therapists that work with Aetna or whatever. We've narrowed some of that out. So I think our Google ads are pretty targeted.
What I would like to find out... and actually probably this is a thing I just need to contact Google, I'd like to find out how to re-target the people that had clicked on our ads prior and maybe they clicked on it, but then they got off of it and then they can't find their way back, or they clicked on it, weren't quite ready for counseling, but were looking for information, and how do we keep the conversation going with those people?
Dean: I got it. So you're not doing any retargeting?
Craig: No, not currently.
Dean: Okay. So not even - full on your landing page for retargeting?
Okay. Well, that's certainly an opportunity for sure. How do the numbers work out for your AdWords? You're spending $20 a day basically, is your budget, right?
Craig: Yeah. Write that down.
Dean: Okay.
Craig: We're seeing, probably from AdWords, maybe 20 clients a month coming in, something like that.
Dean: What does it cost you per click? What are you paying per click for the...
Craig: It fluctuates. Sometimes it's under a dollar a click. Today it's running $3 a click so far, or $3.40 a click. But over time... Let me try to look at this year so far what's our average. This year so far a 1.44 a click is the average.
Dean: Okay. Are you generating leads, or are you sending them to a landing page, or you send them to your website where they look at everything?
Craig: What I'm sending them to is depending on the service, whether it's marriage counseling or teen counseling. They are getting sent to a specific service page that talks about that service. And then at the top, there's a place obviously they click to call us. All of our clickable email addresses and phone numbers are spread throughout the site and different places on the pages. And then at the bottom of each of those pages there is a place where if they want to just email us, they can click, it pulls up an email form and they can shoot over a form to us. Also, there's a place where they just click to call because most of people that are coming to our site are coming on mobile. That's probably the case for everybody. So just that way I'll on mobile, all they have to do is click our phone number and it calls us.
Dean: Okay. So you're getting about just... I'm just doing a quick math here. So you're getting about 400 visitors a month to your site from AdWords?
Craig: Right.
Dean: Okay. How many are you getting organic?
Craig: Let's see. I wish I had the numbers right in front of me.
Dean: Well, do you have the total number of how many you're getting -?
Craig: Yeah. Probably about an average of five clients a month that are coming from organic that are actually scheduling. We're getting a few more calls than clients coming in, but really we've done well as far as those people that actually call us are typically scheduling.
Dean: If you're getting 20 out of 400... So the 20 clients that you were saying are strictly from the pay per click, you track and you know that's where they've come from as opposed to organic?
Craig: Right.
Dean: And the five or coming organically, so it's 25?
Craig: Yeah, that's an average.
Dean: Okay. So when you look at it, that 20, you're spending about $30 as your cost of acquisition for a client, right?
Craig: Yeah.
Dean: ... who stays an average of 4$00 to $500 worth of sessions.
Craig: Right.
Dean: Or $400 to $600 depending on which counselor they're working with.
Craig: Yeah.
Dean: Right. Okay. And then how does the money get split then from that? The client is paying $100 or $130, and you're keeping... you do a split with the counselor?
Craig: Right.
Dean: Okay.
Craig: Yeah. So on average the therapists are getting about 55% because we pay the interns a little bit less percentage wise than we do the fully licensed. But yeah, it comes out to about 55% of every dollar that comes in from their clients goes back out to them.
Dean: Okay, great. I'm just doing the math on this, and you're paying for the adverts?
Craig: - pays marketing. Yeah.
Dean: You're paying all of that. Okay. Is that profitable for you, that model?
Craig: Yeah, it has been, and more so as we're ramping up. I think we're seeing like 20% profit or something like that come out of it overall.
Dean: The $600 that you're spending, you're setting it at $20 a day to get to that $600, that's what's available, or that's you've capped budget at? Could you spend $50 a day or what capacity of what's available are you getting?
Craig: We could obviously cut into the profit that we're able to pull out. We could cut into that in order to grow the business a little bit further by increasing the ads.
Dean: No, I'm not saying that. The ads are the ads, right? The thing about pay-per-click is that you're only paying the -.
Craig: Oh, I got you.
Dean: You could argue that if you could spend $1,200 a month, that you would get twice as much traffic and your numbers would stay the same, right?
Craig: Right. Exactly.
Dean: That's what I'm talking about.
Craig: I think, temporarily, we could do that to scale that up if we can see that the numbers were actually going to work out that direction or if there's some tipping -.
Dean: Well, how stable is it in terms of those numbers working out? If you're getting twice the-
Craig: Yeah, it's been stable over the last six months, probably of about 20 new a month that way.
Dean: Okay. And are the 20 -.
Craig: That's how we've been able to scale.
Dean: ...to same time. They're coming in today, they're going on the website, they're looking, they're calling, they're booking, or is the 20 people who came to the website 60 days ago and came back and get it?
Craig: That's something that I don't know exactly. I'm not sure how to measure that. If we knew it was apples to apples going to increase revenue this month or next month, then yeah, we could spend double because there's nothing extra out of our pocket that way. The concern is that maybe it doesn't turn over that fast. Then we spend $1,200 this month, but bring in just a few extra clients but not enough to make a difference.
Dean: Right. That's why I asked those questions about, is it the single visit that they find you, they call, they book?
Craig: I'm going to write this question down.
Dean: With what certainty do you have that the 20 are from AdWords?
Craig: Well, on our intake paperwork that we send out to people when they schedule, we have on there where they can a bullet point basically that shows where they came down on, where they found us. The only issue with that though is that most people don't know if it's a Google Ad or if it's just Google Search.
Dean: - they say Google, right?.
Craig: So they just like Google. I guess what we've attributed it to is a lot of ads because we've looked at our organic rankings and organic numbers and stuff. And then we've looked at the conversions that are at least listed on Google. So when Google says, "Hey, this many people called from your ad, or this many people converted to go to your..." I know that's not an easy practice probably for Google to know who goes to our website and then who ends up clicking within our website to call us. We've tried to ask over the phone. We know we've gotten a significant number of people say, "Yeah, we clicked on whatever was at the top of the Google page and we're just-"
Yeah. To some extent you go, "Well, if we were at the top of the Google page for that where it's probably our ad..."
Dean: Gotcha. Have you ever tried to double your budget just to see?
Craig: No.
Dean: This is what I wonder, are you reaching your budget every day? Are you spending $20 every day?
Craig: Not every day, but they average it across the month. Some days we get eight clicks or something and then the next day they may give us 20 clicks.
Dean: Gotcha.
Craig: That averages it across the days.
Dean: Right. Yeah. That's what is part of the thing, is to see how much is actually available. What the actual capacity is, because right now if it's reaching the $600 every month consistently, that means that there's more than that available. That's where you want to see. Because if t's a stable system and you've got the right numbers, that you should be able to get more visitors because you're fishing in the same pond on Google with people who are searching the same search words.
Craig: Right.
Dean: It's just whether when they reach $20 for today, then they don't show your ad, right?
Craig: Right.
Dean: Because then you're done. You said, "I only want to spend $20 a day." So you could be missing out that way. And that's a good thing to know that you want to see how high is high with that. Now, as you branch out into more of the online counseling, there's, of course, the opportunity to spread out geographically because you're not going to be bringing people into your location. That gives you an opportunity to test in a whole different way, where you can test a market that there's no possibility of coming in live.
Craig: Right. Yeah, that was part of what I was going to say a minute ago, I forgot to say. But yeah, at first we were just running our ads to within 10 or 12 miles of our location. But once we started doing the teletherapy thing, I actually added the extra location for anywhere in Texas, which obviously opens us up to millions of people instead of thousands of people.
Dean: That's right. Now, have you had people from other parts of Texas that just do the telecounseling?
Craig: We've only had a few so far. I really opened up that ad about a week ago, and we've had a couple. Probably two so far, actually.
Dean: Okay. And is there anything on your site that people can opt in for? Are you generating any leads from that?
Craig: We have a "make an appointment" or "submit your information" page on our site, but it's not any kind of lead magnet saying, "This is something we're offering."
Dean: Not a free -.
Craig: Right, right.
Dean: Okay.
Craig: No book or anything like that. Then on a couple of our pages we've got something that says, "Ready to give therapy a try? Call, email or fill out the form," and then it's just name, address, phone number.
Dean: Yeah. Gotcha. That would be one of the first things I would look at, is to see if you could get to do some opt-in on the page so that you could not only get the people who are calling to set up an appointment, but to get the people who are looking into it, either who want more information kind of thing.
Craig: Right. Okay.
Dean: Yeah. Part of the model of having a hydel... our book, of course, was called Stop Your Divorce, and that's got a big promise on it. We were gathering the people who that's what they wanted, and typically Homer worked with one person. Typically, the one person who doesn't want the divorce. It wasn't about couples who realize they're heading down the wrong path and they want to turn it around. This was individuals in crisis because their spouse told them that they want a divorce and, of course, they don't want it. So they're trying to they're trying to stop it. So having that title... nobody's going to download or buy a book called Stop Your Divorce if they are not interested in stopping their divorce. So it was built into their interests. What would be a really interesting thing is for you to build a list of people who are interested in improving their marriage. If we separate out the marriage from the teens, what would be the breakdown of the marriage versus teen counseling?
Craig: I'd say right now we're probably about 80% marriage counseling.
Dean: Okay. How would you characterize what people are saying or what they're looking for that they're trying to do? Is it that fundamentally they've got a good marriage that they want to make it great or are they in crisis and they want to have somebody hear them out? One of them is dragging the other to marriage counseling or... what's the typical scenario?
Craig: For most of them it's an SOS. It's a last ditch effort to save the marriage. Most of our clients, I would say, are coming in both dedicated to trying to make it work. There have been some where the wife really wants to come to counseling, the husband's really reluctant or vice versa. But I'd say primarily we're seeing mostly people who are both at least interested in trying to make it work.
Dean: Yes. Gotcha. What I always look for, of course, is... what would be the title of the book that would summarize the greatest hope of your audience?
Craig: Something like Save Your Marriage?
Dean: Yeah, that is an amazing thing. It's very funny. When I did Stop Your Divorce, it was really alone in the market. Of course, then as a marketer then, I was sharing and teaching on the back of the success with Stop Your Divorce. The ebook business; telling people how to write and publish an ebook. I was using Stop Your Divorce as an example of picking a good market. And out of that, some of the people who went through the thing, ended up becoming my competitors from that with the Save the Marriage, Divorce Stoppers. It became a full mature category after all of that. It's funny.
Craig: Wow.
Dean: But the sentiment is the same, right? I mean, it's certainly that people want to save their marriage. When you look at it, some hints might be in the keywords that people are using.
Craig: Okay.
Dean: Are you able, with your AdWords tracking, to link it to specific keyword conversions?
Craig: Yes. Yeah, I'm able to click in and see the different keywords that people were searching for.
Dean: What's the most popular or the most successful?
Craig: I think it's just something along the lines of "marriage counseling near me," or something like that. I mean, it's something fairly standard. It's not "help save my marriage," it's not something like that.
Dean: No, that's pretty -.
Craig: This is a person who already knows what they need.
Dean: Yeah. That's it. They're looking for a marriage counselor to go to.
Craig: Right.
Dean: That would be why your conversions are relatively high to get 20 -.
Craig: Actually marriage therapy is the biggest, and then marriage counseling.
Dean: Marriage therapy, marriage counseling. I think that it would be a really interesting thing for you to experiment on your landing page to have even a PDF that has your programs and prices so that people could... because right now the ones... Do you have your pricing and stuff on your website?
Craig: We have it on a frequently asked questions page, but it's not on each services page or anything like that.
Dean: Right. If you were to put, front and center, a PDF download with your 2020 programs and pricing guide, that would be a very popular download. We've experimented and done that with gyms and workout studios and stuff. And it's funny that the simple plans and pricing membership guide outperforms like the "10 ways to burn fat" or "lose 10 pounds" or any of the action type of things for the fact finders.
Craig: Yeah, -.
Dean: Right. So the people who are looking for counseling specifically, if they had that PDF that they could download with their name and email address, now you'd get the 20 people who call to get to come in for counseling, but you might get 60 additional people who download the programs and pricing guide.
Craig: Right?
Dean: Yep.
Craig: That's great.
Dean: Then you've got a list of prospects, where now you can, in Profit Activator 3, educate and motivate people. Where you can start giving some weekly marriage articles, tips, that type of thing.
Craig: That makes perfect sense. I was trying to make it way more complicated because I had thought, "Okay, how do I come up with a book or some sort of lead magnet?" But I was thinking way out.
Dean: Well, I would still do that. I would do that too. Since most people are typing for marriage therapy or marriage counseling, if when they came to your thing, they see the 2020 marriage therapy programs and pricing, that's exactly a match for what I'm looking for, right?
Craig: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. I was just trying to over complicate it as far as what to post on those pages.
Dean: Right. Once somebody leaves their name and their email address, then you start engaging in a dialogue with them.
Craig: Right.
Dean: And you've got the opportunity to always lead to the next step kind of thing.
Craig: Sure.
Dean: Whether that's, "Watch a video or..." Do you have a sort of approach to counseling that would be outlinable kind of thing. Homer... basically his mindset was, "There are five basic things that you need to do," and it's that simple, really. But they're so against what the natural inclination is when you're trying to win someone back. Immediately you're constantly saying, "But I love you and I'll change, what about the kids?" You're always trying to argue for your way, which is what that is, right? You're just wrapping it up in a nice rapper, but you're really arguing for your way. So he's saying to instantly and happily agree with whatever your mate is saying, and to stop arguing for your way. It's amazing how the things go, is to stop initiating contact with them in a pursuit kind of way. Literally, it's magical what happens when you embrace these things. And he gets a whole psychology behind it, but it's something. I've never seen anything like it.
I got to record some audio programs with Homer, and this guy was a genius. Just the lessons in psychology of how that all came about. Here's a guy who spent his entire life doing nothing but saving marriages. So he got to see the dynamics of it at work.
Craig: Wow. That's good. Yeah. So what I would do is maybe talk with our therapists actually, and just have them help me spitball and brainstorm what that would look like if we were to come up with a certain number of steps to say, "Okay, these are some immediate things."
Dean: Yeah.
Craig: That's good.
Dean: Yeah. Because that way that becomes the basis for either a six week or a 12 week program, but I would sort of get out of the defaulting to one session.
Craig: Gotcha. Gotcha. Stop talking about - session.
Dean: - session. Yeah. Because if it's worth $100, it's worth $600 for a six week program.
Craig: Yeah, I love it.
Dean: Yeah. And that way that gives you the opportunity to build a list of people that you can communicate with. Now, the other thing is... tell me about the teen side.
Craig: Yeah, teen counseling. On our website, we've got a list of, "Is your teen struggling at school, at home, with friends. Are they sad and unhappy, nervous, or anxious, yelling at people? Or are they getting into arguments or fights? Are they losing interest in things? Are they failing in school?" Those kind of questions are asked there. So then it's really working with those teenagers on improving their behavioral stuff, improving emotional stuff, communicating, making school a priority, those types of things. Rule breaking or following, those kinds of things.
Really, we're doing a lot of the same stuff for teens as we are couples. And that just revolves around Google Ads, blog posts that are helping with Google organic rankings. We've got a teen counseling page that our ads lead to. We don't have any kind of lead magnet or anything or an offer, I guess, on our site for that.
Dean: If you open yourself to a national market where you're going to do things on a wider scale, then you can niche yourself more specifically to the higher stakes things, right? You could have eating disorder kind of counseling, or cutting.
Dean: Right. The things that are quite alarming for parents, not just rebellious, depressed teen, angst sort of-
Craig: Normal sort of struggles -.
Dean: Right. Exactly. As opposed to things that have... not to downplay it anyway, the regular teen eight, but I mean, this elevated stuff that really requires professional intervention. And that becomes a thing where if you can almost counsel the parents in addition to the teens, right? Because the parents are the ones who really are the most motivated for that.
Craig: Sure. Yeah, often we end up of doing that alongside the teen, where our therapists are meeting with the parents a little bit every time they come in as well.
Dean: Right, exactly. And so you start to think... now if you're geographically going to an untether yourself, then you have an opportunity to be very specific in the target audiences. That you're able to serve. I always point out an example of the photographer in the UK that has weshootbottles.com as their website.
Craig: Yeah, I've seen that.
Dean: Yeah. And then they have a sister website called weshootcans. That's the equivalent of "what to do when your child was cutting themselves" is a category. That's a real thing. I was amazed at how big a thing that actually is and how they even learn that collectively. Where would they even learn to do that? Apparently it's a big thing. And the eating disorder behavior is a big thing. So if you can squarely look at the big challenges and proactively look to creating the most effective program for that, solution for that. There's so much opportunity there.
Craig: Makes sense. Yeah, I love that. I love to look at what interests our therapists have primarily around those topics and then go, "Okay, let's focus in and really niche in on a specific market, a market that we can be -"
Dean: Yeah.
Craig: ... Try to capture a lot of.
Dean: Yeah, I think so. The world's your oyster right now. Right there from Fort worth, you can be a lighthouse beaming to the world for all of these-
Craig: I love it.
Dean: ... all these problems. Down here you got Cloudlandia. There's no borders in Cloudlandia.
Craig: Right.
Dean: Right?
Craig: Right. That's funny.
Dean: 20 minutes drive, forget about it. 20 seconds -, that's all you need.
Craig: Exactly. I love it. I think our therapists are going to be so accustomed to teletherapy by the time this is all over that we'll just probably-
Dean: Everybody is going to be excited.
Craig: We may have to shut down our offices, which-
Dean: Yeah. Why wouldn't you?
Craig: ... will cut our budget a lot, which would be nice.
Dean: Of course, it will.
Craig: Or our expenses.
Dean: Yeah. And that's awesome, right? That's really the thing. And it's an intimate environment and there's a little bit of an intimacy. It's a little bit of a comfort layer there too in being on Zoom, or Skype, or whatever mechanism you choose. But I think it's the way these things are going. Why would anybody drive 20 minutes to sit and talk to someone when they could, in 20 seconds, do it. Plus, I think people would be more inclined to do it.
Craig: Yeah. It takes away some of the barrier to making the decision because it's like, "Oh, well, I don't know if I have time to drive all the way there. I don't know if I have time in between work or school or whatever."
Dean: Right. That's exactly right.
Craig: But yeah, it does take the barrier away because they can do it while sitting outside on the playground kind of thing. You know what I mean? Almost sitting in their car waiting to pick their kid up from school, they could a session.
Dean: Exactly. Yeah.
Craig: Especially around here, where those lines are really long because there's a lot of schools and lot of kids.
Dean: Absolutely. What's your takeaways summary here?
Craig: Yeah, so I think there's some possibilities in looking at doing six, eight or 12 week programs, reframing it from once a week or onetime scheduling to mentally reframe that to, "Hey, we're offering a six, eight, 12 or whatever week program for marriage or for your teen or whatever." So that it hopefully increases our average number of sessions. I need to figure out Google Ads retargeting for all those people that do make it to our pages. And I think I could do that just with Google on the line.
Dean: I decided that I've thought about how it could change the dynamic of sessions to; where rather than it being once a week, because you've got to physically come there, it could change the dynamic, that you could do twice in one night, where you could have somebody come at 6:30 for 30 minutes and then you assign them something to talk out or go do an exercise, and then we'll meet back here at 8:30 and we'll talk it through. Now you're amplifying the effectiveness of sessions, right? You've got a whole new way of being able to deliver stuff that's not constrained by having to do one hour once a week because of the physical friction to get together.
Craig: Well, I like that. And I actually have heard of some therapists that offer a marriage workshop where it's over a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Friday, Saturday, all day, where you-
Dean: That's what I mean.
Craig: ... knock out the equivalent of 10 sessions in two days. But going along the same lines of what you were just saying to where you could just have an immediate exercise and an immediate, "Here's what we're going to deal with today. Let's go do something and then come back and talk about it." I love that. That's cool.
Dean: That's what I would encourage. Just unbridled creativity like that of what could do without any physical limitations.
Craig: Gotcha. That's cool. I'm trying to figure out, do they book after one visit to our website or multiple? That may be just something that we can add to our intake to say, "How many times have you visited our website?" Then have bubbles where they can... or "When's the first time you visited our website?" Might be a good idea. To say, "Today, or within the last week, within the last, or it's been over one week, or it's been over one month," that kind of thing. That way it gives us some idea of how quick that turnaround would be perhaps.
Dean: You'd be able to do that with the opt-ins. You'd be able to have a sense of it too.
Craig: Oh yeah, that's true. That way we can look at that Noptin and have, "Okay, this was when we got them on the docket versus when they booked." And then also, how have we tried to double or increase the budget? What would it look like to ramp it up, and would the numbers continue to climb? Adding some sort of PDF, 2020 kind of programs and pricing guide onto each service page on our website so that we're collecting some of that opt-in stuff other than just the calls that we're getting. And then talking with therapists about an approach to counseling that can be outlined in steps that might be an additional opt-in or something like that that we could give away. And then just looking at very specific target audiences.
I also had thought about some stuff yesterday. I loved your guide that I was able to walk through and answer questions form because it made me think. So yesterday I was able to think of some stuff like follow up emails after their initial sessions. We haven't been doing that, but that might be an interesting way to just... because we do have people that come for one session and then they either don't reschedule then or they reschedule but then they end up canceling it for some reason, and then they just fall away. And so looking at sending a followup email after the initial session, and then maybe after every so many sessions or something might be interesting.
That way we can just touch base with them and say, "Hey, I'm still here for you." That kind of thing. A pre-session email answering any of the questions that they may have about what's counseling going to look like. We've actually written some blog posts around that, and so I could really just cut and paste some of that information and send them a pre-session, maybe the day before their session, to say, "Hey, here's some questions you might have and here's some answers." So yeah, I love it. I'm trying to think anything else that I had thought of and see what you think.
Dean: I love it. No, you're on the right track.
Craig: We've thought about some kind of graduation experience as far as when you finish couples counseling. If you do your 10 sessions and you feel like, "Okay, we're ready to go out on our own and do this on our own." Working with other businesses, maybe restaurants in the area to donate gift cards or something so that we could say, "Hey, have a date night on us. Congratulations." That kind of thing.
Dean: Right. Very nice.
Craig: That might be a way to... I think I looked at your level five and six around creating a great experience for people. So having that graduation experience that hopefully gets them to talk about us to their friends. One thing we can't do as therapists directly is ask our clients for referrals. So that's been one thing that's been difficult, but if we can create an experience that then they go talk about, that might be an end around instead of actually asking.
Dean: What do you mean you can't ask for referrals?
Craig: There are ethical standards for counselors like the American Counseling Association and different state licensure boards that make it where, even on our website, we can't have something that says, "If you enjoyed our services, please refer us to your friends." Or even in-person, we're not even supposed to specifically ask for referrals. So we're not supposed to say, "Hey, if you enjoyed this session or whatever, or if you guys hear of anybody else that might need counseling, then send them our way." We're not supposed to do that.
Dean: Wow! That's interesting.
Craig: So it's interesting. And the same thing with customer testimonial, we're not supposed to ask for those. If somebody just outright says something like, "Oh, I've really enjoyed this, this has been great," we can say, "Hey, can we use that without your name attached?" But we're technically not supposed to ask.
Dean: Wow!
Craig: It's a little debilitating for a service business.
Dean: So then give somebody your book, certainly you could do that.
Craig: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think you could provide them with a book or you could send it as a PDF and then, of course, they can forward it along. That kind of thing. But to specifically ask them to do that would be sort of a no-no as far as the-
Dean: Interesting. Oh, there you go.
Craig: A lot of the boards and stuff. Some of that's interesting.
Dean: Love it.
Craig: Awesome.
Dean: I really enjoyed that. That went fast.
Craig: I appreciate it. Yeah, it was good. And I'm constantly listening to your stuff and keeping up with everything that you guys are doing and man, I appreciate it. I've been able to send your info over actually to a few real estate agents that I know.
Dean: Oh, that's great.
Craig: Yeah. So hopefully they get something good out of it as well.
Dean: Well, you keep doing that. I'm allowed to ask for referrals. That's so great. I encourage it.
Craig: Right? A little.
Dean: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Welcome.
Dean: Have a good day. Goodbye.
Craig: Appreciate it. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Dean: And there we have it. Another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, we'll go deeper in how the eight profit activators can apply to your business. Two things you can do, right now you can go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com, and you can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book, and you can listen to the back episodes, of course, if you're just listening here on iTunes. Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the eight profit activators are part of the breakthrough DNA process, and you can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the eight profit activators at breakthroughdna.com. And that's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about breakthrough DNA as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there. So, that's it for this week. Have a great week, and we will be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.