From BCBA to Marketing Entrepreneur: Matt Harrington on Building, Marketing, and Doing More

Introduction to Matt Harrington's journey from BCBA to entrepreneur 0:00 Welcome to the BCBA's Who Build, a podcast powered by Headstart Health for clinicians who believe there's a better 0:05 way to deliver care in the ABA field. Here we share real stories, resources 0:11 from BCBAS who have built, scaled, and supported ABA practices firsthand. 0:16 Whether you're dreaming of starting your own practice or growing the one that you already have, this podcast is for you. 0:28 Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. I'm Dr. Sarah Feldman, board certified behavior analyst. And today I am super 0:35 excited to have I feel like I need to call you Matthew because all my friends that are Matt, I say Matthew, but Matt 0:42 Harrington. You know him from ABA digital marketing, which is now a train 0:48 open CEU. I see Matt all the time on LinkedIn. And I get lots of snippets of 0:54 learnings of how to do marketing better, but he's a BCBA entrepreneur, trailblazer for really how you can take 1:01 your skills as a BCBA and generalize them to other industries. So, not just 1:06 marketing and bisdev, but just truly what it means to be an entrepreneur. So, Matt, welcome. I'm so excited. Thanks. 1:12 Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for that kind intro. I'm going to have to see if I can live in live up to the LinkedIn expectation. 1:19 I know. I know. I guess to kick it off, like what's one thing about you that would not be on LinkedIn that we might 1:27 need to know? I think that I am right on the borderline of being a Disney adult. Like 1:33 I'm at the area where I like have an annual pass, but I live in Florida. I 1:38 stay on property, but only for a day or two at a time. So, like depending on your perspective, I could be a Disney 1:45 adult, but like realistically, I'm not there yet. So, give me a couple years, 1:50 maybe some more income, maybe I'll get there. Is this an aspiration? We want to become an a Disney adult, or is this like a a The science of behavior change applied to marketing 1:57 red flag, you're maybe a little concerned about this new habit that's developing? 2:02 I think that in a perfect world, I become a Disney Cruise adult. You know, I think I I skip the parks and maybe I 2:10 don't like stay for like 10 days straight at the Wilderness Lodge and instead I stay like 10 days straight on 2:17 like a European Disney Wish cruise. Like so I think I if I can skip a level that'd be ideal. That's my aspiration. 2:23 Yeah. My aspiration is also just skip a level up incomewise and and do that. 2:29 That sounds great. Yeah. I'll I'll go on a European cruise. Sounds good. Awesome. When did you discover you were 2:36 a Disney adult? Is this something that you've had since childhood or a new a new thing? 2:41 I mean, I was born and raised in Florida and my parents, you know, we were around Disney. We didn't always have passes, 2:48 but we did. It used to be a heck of a lot cheaper than it is now. And same with my wife. She was also born and 2:53 raised in Florida. So, we kind of had been around Disney for a while, and it's something that we like to do with our 2:59 kids, especially now they're 6, four, and two. So we can make the drive without them screaming at us the whole 3:06 time. And it's a really like, you know, if you have an annual pass, you have a popcorn bucket with like $2 refills. You 3:12 can really get the price pretty reasonable if you do it right. So we have a good time. So good. Yeah. I took my oldest when she 3:18 was like maybe three. And I think like the angsty teen in me still is like, "Oh 3:24 no, this won't be as fun." And then we leave and we're like, "My god, it was the best experience." And my child was 3:29 so happy. And so I I get it. I get it. Um Okay. Well, cool. I I am really 3:34 actually just very genuinely curious. Your career started in a very conventional way as a BCBA very much 3:42 just supporting individuals with autism and now it has morphed to something that is more unconventional. How did you make How referral marketing builds trust and relationships 3:49 that journey? Well, I had always been someone who was interested in the application outside of 3:56 the population uh that we serve. So, traditionally, you know, we're serving people with disabilities, individuals 4:02 with autism. What really drew me to applied behavior analysis was not the it 4:07 wasn't really the population as much as it was the science of behavior change. It really interested me that we could 4:14 have a perspective on life that completely kind of like locked down external variables and defined them and 4:22 then we could actually see that effect. So the idea of radical behaviorism in a 4:27 very simplistic way really caught my attention. I always joke that when Watson was like, you know, give me a 4:34 child and I'll raise a doctor. Like that was my version of radical behaviorism. And obviously, you know, the 4:40 complexities and the variables and that's not actually possible with how many different variables, but that was my kind of like spark in the science. 4:47 So, I worked with a lot of individuals with disabilities and I took the conventional route of like RBT to BCBA 4:54 to clinic director and I I did fall in love with population that we were serving. But I was always really 5:01 interested in seeing the application of our science applied to things that I assumed were disordered, things that 5:08 didn't really make sense to me. But now with this new language, with this new perspective, with the the way to analyze 5:14 contingencies, suddenly it did start to make sense. And so the way I ended up really getting into marketing is I was a 5:20 clinic director and on the side I like any like young 20-year-old I was like 5:25 how can I become rich by doing stuff online? Like how can I sell a course or sell a membership? Right. 5:30 Yeah. Before we had Tik Tok that taught us about Tik Tok entrepreneurs. Exactly. Yeah. 5:36 And I had been doing some version of a membership through the behaviorist book club and cus my entire time. So I had 5:42 some experience in this like digital marketing world but never really transferred it but I became a clinical 5:48 director and I was told hey you need to grow the clinic go get us more clients and I had just spent like three years in 5:54 a hospital setting where everybody in the US wanted to apply to come to our 5:59 thing like there was there was no you know get clients where I was trained. So, I started to realize that if I 6:06 wanted to grow the business, grow my income, you know, increase the impact of what our company was doing, I had to get 6:12 more clients. I had no idea what I was doing and I didn't really make any success. And I remember one night I was 6:18 watching a blog. I was watching a YouTube video on a blog and it was how to do affiliate marketing. And it was 6:24 like, hey, write this blog, put a affiliate link in it, and then somebody will click it and they'll make a 6:30 purchase and you'll get money. And I'm like, "Wow, if only everything was that easy." An affiliate sale. 6:35 Yeah. You know, mailbox money, if you will. And the next morning, I went to my actual 9 toive job. The blog video was 6:43 still kind of in the back of my head. And I did care collaboration with a psychologist in the area. And we had a 6:49 really good meeting. We made some great progress for the client. And at the end of that meeting, she turned around and she said, "Hey, it's so nice to have a 6:56 BCBA that I can trust. I'm going to go ahead and recommend a few folks to come your way." Okay, so keep an eye out for 7:02 the phone. Here they are. And in that one meeting, I got three new clients, all 30, 40hour clients, which was 7:09 basically my goal for the quarter, you know, at my small company. And I sat there and like the two sparks connected. 7:17 And I was like, "Holy crap, I just made an affiliate sale, right? I just did something. I I put out 7:23 content. I put out my my skill set and somebody provided me revenue in return. 7:30 They did a real life click. And at that moment on, I started looking at human 7:35 behavior, purchasing behavior, marketing behavior, very similar to behavior analysis. And I realized that it 7:41 literally is the same stuff. And it always was. There was never anybody hiding that behavior change in behavior 7:47 analysis works the same way that behavior change and marketing does. You're just driving to two different 7:52 goals. Yeah. Yeah. When you think about like I mean you've had a slew of different kind of like entrepreneurial gigs and and 7:59 full-fledged companies. Has entrepreneurship always been something that like feels good or has it ever been The importance of systems and processes in scaling 8:06 something that was a little bit more scary? How did you get into running your own company? I always really liked the concept of 8:14 giving myself a raise. You know, I I was I got my BCABA before my BCBA and 8:21 so I had a 50k salary in Florida and I 8:26 was climbing up my M's program, climbing up my supervision and I was like, gosh, I got to get I got to get to the BCBA so 8:33 I can get that raise, get the BCBA to get the raise, get the blah blah blah. And I and I remember I watched a YouTube 8:40 video because of course that's where I get all my solid information, that and Java. And somebody was like, "Yeah, I 8:46 sold another membership, so I gave myself another raise." And I was like, "That's awesome." Like I love the the 8:52 direct input leading to a direct output under my control, not under someone else's. 8:57 That's Yes. That's where I feel like you got you have control over this. I'm not waiting for somebody else. 9:03 Yeah. And that got me into kind of the bug. I didn't really consider myself an 9:08 entrepreneur though until I started my marketing agency. I always considered it as like a little side hustle, some 9:14 income on the side. You know, the reason why we were able to get leather seats in the car instead of standard seats in the 9:20 car, you know, it wasn't the reason we were buying the car, the the used car for anything, 9:25 right? Yeah. Yeah. So, it was always it was more of a passion project than a hobby than 9:30 anything. Of course, it it grew fairly well. And the book club at its peak was, you know, making more than I had ever 9:37 expected it would, but it was never reliable enough to really like lay my 9:42 hat on and leave my 9 to5. The marketing agency changed things. The marketing agency was what I considered to be my 9:48 first true business venture, even though in reality it was like my fifth or sixth. Yeah. Yeah. When you think about 9:55 creating the marketing agency, moving into that entrepreneurial role, kind of I'm interested to know how being a BCBA 10:03 has influenced how you think about marketing because there are people who are out there who go to school for 10:09 marketing and it's very specific and it's like here here are all these things coming in kind of at the side door as a 10:15 BCBA, more of a practitioner. How do you think about marketing that might be different or maybe more beneficial as a 10:22 BCBA? Well, I can't speak to how you're supposed to learn marketing because I never did that. I think that the way I 10:28 learned marketing was from backwards to front. And so what I mean by that is as a BCBA, you're taught to do a functional 10:36 analysis and do an assessment and then say, what is the most impactful behavior 10:42 that you can change to increase quality of life? You know, regardless of what the ABLE says, like what is the thing 10:48 that's really going to move the needle? what are the pivotal responses and the skills that you can put in? And so that 10:54 was the way I approached marketing. So the first little bit of marketing I did was rewriting websites because I figured 11:01 if a parent's already on the website, I can probably describe ABA with what I 11:07 know about copywriting and and marketing in a in a much better way than they currently have it on their site. And if 11:14 I can increase the that percentage, if my intervention has an effect size of 5%. Then that's five that's an increase 11:22 in leads by like 5x for the company. And so I looked at those like really impactful things. And then just worked 11:28 backwards. And that's kind of where I learned marketing is, okay, here's now your website looks good. Um, you don't 11:35 have any traffic to your website. Okay, well let me try and get you some more traffic. Let me learn SEO. Okay, now you 11:40 have traffic to your website, but it's not coming fast enough. All right, well, how can you get that faster? You can do 11:46 ads or you can do referral gen. Let me learn both of those. And eventually, I kind of worked my way into a specialty 11:52 of referral gen, which is where I stayed for a while before ultimately going up 11:57 the full growth strategy at Cool. Cool. All right. Well, I want to dive in a bit more on just like 12:02 marketing mistakes that you see APA owners use. at this point you are a well-versed expert in ABA specific 12:10 marketing. So there was something that you said in our first conversation that really resonated with me and it was 12:15 really this idea of often you tell early stage owners and early stage ABA 12:21 entrepreneurs stop spending money. What do you mean by that? Because that feels a bit counterintuitive of like stop 12:28 spending money on marketing. Sometimes that feels like it's the only thing you're supposed to do. So marketing is 12:34 going to cost something. It's going to cost you time or it's going to cost you money. And the reason why I think so 12:40 many people get it wrong is because they're not comfortable with marketing that nothing in our clinical experience, 12:46 nothing in, you know, like how to start an LLC really talks about putting yourself out there. Marketing can feel 12:52 like this thing that is scary and intimidating. And so you want to delegate it. You want to push it off to 12:58 someone else, which means you're not spending your time, you're spending your money. So, the first I think mistake 13:04 people make is they end up having to spend money because they're delegating it. And as a new entrepreneur, marketing Common marketing mistakes and how to avoid them 13:11 and sales and closing, and I know we don't like to use those terms because we're dealing with kids that we love, 13:17 but that's what we're doing. That's something you should keep very close to the chest. The other thing that I see, 13:22 and this is where I literally mean like tear up the credit card, is people who are spending an amount of money that 13:30 isn't going to get a small result. it's not going to get any result. I see this a lot with Google Ads and 13:35 meta ads. Yeah, we call it like the ad ceiling where depending on the market you're in, 13:41 there's a there's a ceiling where you need to spend more than that ceiling to poke your head above water. And the 13:48 reason why is because the more competitive it is, the more we'll say cost per the person who clicks on it, 13:54 right? If you don't have more than one, three, five people clicking on your ad a 14:00 day, a week, a month, then you're not going to be able to actually send any information back to the ad platform for 14:06 them to optimize their own tools. So that ad ceiling, what it specifically 14:12 means is you're not giving the ad platforms enough data to actually do anything with your information. So 14:17 they're just going to continue throwing spaghetti at the wall. They're just going to, you know, scattershot and you're never going to get anywhere. And 14:23 what that translates into is, you know, entrepreneurs who come to me and they say, "Google ads don't work." And I say, 14:29 "All right, tell me about your Google ads." They say, "Well, we've been spending for 18 months. We've spent 14:35 about $1,200 every month for the last 18 months, and we've gotten two phone calls." And the reality is is they've 14:41 probably spent 22K over those last 18 months. If they had taken that 22k and 14:47 they had compressed it to 3k to 5k to 8k a month and spent it in three to four 14:53 months back to back to back, they probably would have ended up with an additional you depending on the market 14:59 three, five, eight clients per month, which then would bring them enough revenue to either shut that budget down 15:05 and pay attention to other marketing means or continue that budget or you know actually have enough money to spend. So spending too little is 15:13 oftentimes just spinning your tires. And you should have honest conversations with either yourself if you're doing 15:20 your own marketing or the PE person who's selling you the marketing. If they say, "Oh yeah, 500 bucks is fine." Ask 15:25 them to prove it. You know, ask them to show you case studies where they got it with 500. Yeah. And see what 15:31 how do you how do you know what it's enough? You're spending enough money or even if like spending money is the even 15:37 the right strategy right now. Yeah, it's hard to know on a market bymarket basis 15:44 without having the privilege of, you know, like Atrain's been running behavioral health digital ads for 20 15:50 years. So, we have 20 years worth of data telling us where those ceilings are. If you're an independent provider, 15:56 you're someone who's running ads on your own. I would generally say if you're going in with less than 2,000 a month, I 16:02 don't think it's going to work for you. If you're going in at 3,000 a month and you're in a saturated area and you know 16:08 you're in a saturated area, you just don't want to admit it to yourself, I start to get worried for you. 3K in a 16:13 rural area, totally different story. But to your point, and this is I think is the the smarter angle on all of this is 16:20 do you even need to spend money on ads to get your first set of clients? And the question is you you absolutely 16:26 don't. that I would say that the vast majority of practitioners who become entrepreneurs or early stage 16:32 entrepreneurs get their first clients from family and friends, you know, shaken down their professional network 16:38 and referrals from other providers. And both of those two things don't cost money. It does cost time. And so if 16:45 you're an entrepreneur with zero clients, I'd rather you spend your time right now and go through that referral 16:51 gen and collaboration process versus spending money because right now you have 40 hours a week of time and you The role of timing and data in marketing success 16:58 have zero dollars of cash flow per month. So time is actually the easier resource to spend. That's what we talk a lot too with BCBAS 17:06 who are getting started over here at Head Start is the idea of client acquisition and that outreach in those 17:12 first couple of months. that is your full-time job until you get the privilege of being able to serve 17:17 families independently and that becomes, you know, more of your full-time job. And so that mentality shift, I see a lot 17:24 of BCBAs really struggle and I I personally struggled with this too of the idea of like sales feels skezy. It's 17:31 not I'm selling my soul. A lot of entrepreneurs and BCBs are getting into the field because they are not getting 17:38 into the field but getting into entrepreneurship because they don't like what they're seeing out there and it 17:44 seems about money and profit and things of that nature. What would you say to those BCBAs who are maybe using that as 17:52 their barrier for getting out there and putting themselves in front of other people? I would sit them down. I would slide 17:58 them a nice cappuccino, maybe a little vanilla cappuccino, and I would look them in the eyes and I would say, 18:04 "You're being a coward." And if you really care as much as you actually do about the population you're serving, you 18:11 would get over your fear and market yourself. And I I say that firmly because I have 18:18 been the clinic director. I've been the BCBA at a company where all we did was sit around and tell each other that we 18:25 were the best shop in town. And the reality was is I still believe this. I think we were I think truly that the 18:31 team that we had and that we grew provided better ABA services than any of our competitors, whether they're private 18:37 equity, whether they're BCBAowned, whether they're investorowned. We were we could truly provide the best quality 18:43 of life outcomes. And then we wouldn't call our leads back. And then we wouldn't get on the phone with parents 18:50 and help them through the diagnosing process. and then we wouldn't go out and talk to a pediatrician about our skill 18:57 set. And so every client who we lost meant that they went to another company. 19:04 And nowadays I take that personally. Like if you are twice as good, then that 19:09 means what you're saying, if you truly believe it, that a client who comes to you is going to make twice as much 19:15 progress as a client who goes down the street. And if you're four times as good as that big box who you just love, you 19:21 know, crying about, then that means that a client who goes to you for one year 19:26 makes four years of progress. And by allowing yourself to believe a false 19:31 narrative about sales being icky or not being the honorable way to go about 19:37 business, what you're really doing is you're costing your clients time. And that's the most valuable thing that we 19:42 have in early intervention in teen services is time. So what I would say is all that aside, marketing is about 19:49 stating the facts and telling the truth and proving over and over again that you stated the facts and you told the truth. 19:56 So marketing is about building up relationships. Sometimes you might hear the saying you need seven touch points. 20:01 You need 21 touch points before you can sell something to someone. All they're really saying is you need to build up a 20:07 certain amount of trust and trust exists on a continuum to so to you know drop 20:13 some ABA into the mix. Trust is past verbal behavior corresponding with 20:18 current events. So if you can systematize a way where you are going to a provider and you're telling them 20:24 something and then you're following up with that provider and that thing has happened, that is a trust building 20:30 moment. That is a contingency that builds trust. And if you can do that over and over and over again, that is 20:35 how you build a relationship with these providers. That's how you build a relationship with the parent in front of 20:41 you who might be going down the street to a parent support group and singing your praises. So, the reason why stating 20:47 the facts and telling the truth is so important in marketing is because if you don't, you never get to build trust, 20:53 which means your marketing will feel sleazy. And I have this conversation sometimes with owners who they say, you 20:59 know, they they don't want to feel like they're like lying on the phone when they're like telling people about how 21:04 great they are. And my first question is, wait a second, stop. Are you lying? Yeah. 21:09 Because if you are lying, that's a problem. If you're not lying, then you're not lying. Move on and talk to 21:15 the talk to the person. Yeah. What do you feel like is showing up inside of them when they're feeling 21:20 like they're lying? I mean, if we were to put this in like an act matrix, what what is showing up inside of them that's 21:26 causing them to maybe run away or put less level of intensity into what they 21:32 should be doing because they've got the story in their mind. I think that most people who feel like 21:38 they're lying, what they're actually feeling is that they don't have enough evidence to support their claim. And 21:45 when I say evidence, what I really mean is learning history. So, this kind of comes down to what people would like 21:51 loosely classify as imposttor syndrome, right? They don't want to, you know, Overcoming imposter syndrome in referral marketing 21:56 turn around and tell a parent that they're going to be able to get their their kid to talk in in a month and a 22:02 half. And the reason why most BCBAS won't say that is because we know that the evidence shows that that's not 22:08 something you can guarantee, right? So, when you're talking to a parent, I would challenge you to consider what can you 22:15 guarantee? And if you can't guarantee anything, what can you say honestly? And if you keep the conversation focused on 22:22 what is actually going to happen and then continuing to prove time and time again that that does happen, then a lot 22:28 of that fear goes away because there's nothing to be scared of because you've said something multiple times and it's happened multiple times. So in your 22:34 learning history when you make a claim of our techs, I know you're I know you're concerned about tech 22:40 cancellation. At your last company, you had a ton of tech turnover. We have really low turnover. I really care about 22:45 our staff. So on average, our RBTs stay with a client for nine months or more. 22:51 If you say that without your retention data backing it up, then you probably feel bad. If you say that with your 22:57 retention data backing it up, you probably feel different. So typically it is on a learning history. You know, 23:04 making a claim they can't truly support. Okay. So let's say you are a new entrepreneur. You aspire to have really 23:11 low turnover for your RBTs. you hear their pain point when it when you come down to that. What could you say to a 23:17 family who is or how could you market yourself with maybe no particular data 23:23 for your company right now? Um but how could you start to frame the vision and 23:29 the values of your company without having those cold hard facts yet? What would you do to have a high 23:35 retention? Put that into a task analysis. Make sure you can do it and then tell 23:41 them that. So if you are on your road to proof, then what you really have is a 23:47 system and you can't make claims about the results of the system, but you can be very direct about what the system is 23:53 going to look like and what's actually going to occur or excuse me, what the parent or the client is going to 23:59 experience during the system. So you can't make a claim about nine months on average of staying, but you 24:05 can say that I hear you. You know, I have the same worry about RBTs leaving. 24:10 And so in order to make sure that that doesn't happen here, what I do is every single week I sit down and have a coffee 24:16 with my RBT. We talk about the case, we talk about life, and then every single week I'm not just via telephone. I'm 24:23 actually in person supporting that client. And I make sure my RBTs are feeling supported by XYZ. And so you lay 24:30 out the system. And once again, it's you made a great point of what if you don't have proof? If you don't have proof, 24:36 then you can't state the facts and tell the truth. So, you need to go back to something you can state the facts and 24:42 tell the truth about. Yeah. And I think that goes back to character, like your your authenticity, 24:47 your character, your intention, and your personal priorities of how you're going to run your company. So, I think a lot 24:54 of times we have this level of ideal perfection of what we want to say 24:59 systematically our companies do, but you're a brand new entrepreneur. And so essentially I talk with a lot of 25:06 entrepreneurs about it's successive approximations towards that perfect state of your system. But there is this 25:13 level of this is going to be okay for right now. But that's all you can guarantee because it's the consistency 25:18 over time like you were saying with building trust that it chips away. If you say you're going to do something and 25:24 you aren't able to do it because it's a superhuman feat of starting your own company in general, don't don't say it 25:30 yet. just wait until you have those processes in there. So, I like that the idea of systems and things. So, when you 25:37 think through of when you're going to start your company, before you even get the privilege to go out and market, what 25:43 would you say a BCBA needs to kind of have down pat when it comes to their 25:49 systems or processes or things of that nature? Well, I think that you need to 25:55 know what makes you unique and know what your differentiator is and make sure you at least have systems and processes 26:01 around that. I'm very much a move fast and break things kind of guy. So, I my style is not let me line up 26:09 exactly what's going to happen no matter what the different situation is, no matter what the you know edge cases are 26:15 and make let me make sure I have everything documented out. But if I'm going to make claims or if I'm going to 26:21 go talk about myself, I do want to make sure that I have every piece of that handled. And if I get asked about 26:28 something that I don't have a system for, then often times I just ask for help from the person who's asking it. 26:35 And that almost always results in a deeper conversation and more of a trust building relationship moment than, you 26:42 know, turning around and being like, "Oh yeah, we definitely do this." and then walking away feeling bad because you 26:47 know that you just lied. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. You know, like if a if you're in some sort of intake, a 26:53 family asks you, well, how often are am I going to get a printed progress report? And you're having this moment of Building authentic relationships with referral sources 26:59 that is one system and process I did not think about. Then just following up with, well, what what would be most 27:05 helpful to you? I would love to hear a little bit more about what what are you looking for in that progress report or 27:11 what data? you know, hopefully you're doing progress reports, but for the for the purpose of of this example, okay, 27:18 let's shift to referral generation, referral marketing. I have followed you 27:23 for a while. I've listened to you speak about referral marketing across a lot of 27:29 different platforms. So, let's first pause and for the benefit of the doubt, what is referral type marketing? We kind 27:36 of hinted at it earlier, but what is that? Yeah. So I would say that referral marketing can be defined as going to a 27:43 place. So I'm going to define it in like broad terms and then narrow down for ABA. It's going to a place where your 27:49 ideal customer already lives and trusts some trusts somebody and then getting a stimulus stimulus pairing of that trust 27:56 from somebody else to you. So, what that means for like the everyday entrepreneur is that you need to find where your 28:03 ideal client, let's just say a 10-year-old with autism, typically hangs out. Where are they? Who are they 28:09 talking to? Who are they trusting to provide them care? And then you need to build a relationship with that other 28:15 person so that they can say, "Hey, you might need this other service. I know 28:20 that this person provides it. Let me go ahead and recommend you over there." And that's where the referral happens. 28:25 That's that stimulus stimulus pairing of trust. What's unique about referral marketing versus other marketing is that 28:31 if somebody finds you via a Google search and they say ABA near me and they 28:36 end up at a website and they read a little bit about the you on the website and then they click the contact form, 28:41 that person's trust with you is like minuscule because the only content they consumed is a little bit of a blog or 28:48 something like that. You go even further and you say all I showed them was a meta ad and then they clicked. Then they 28:54 haven't even read anything. They've just like looked at picture and yeah they might be calling for the social security office. You don't know 29:00 exactly. So that is typical marketing. Referral marketing is unique because there actually is a transfer of trust 29:07 there. There is a I really trust this person. They haven't led me a astray in the past and I don't think they're going 29:13 to do it again. So they actually start that conversation much more open and open and broad than that you typically 29:19 are. So good. I I find with referral marketing, this is a little bit of an 29:24 area where um I see BCBAs show up with that little bit of imposttor syndrome 29:30 where it's who am I to go and speak to this pediatrician? I'm quote unquote 29:36 just a BCBA and getting over that hump can be really hard. And so as a result 29:41 of kind of some of that imposttor syndrome, I see a lot of pediat visits, 29:46 but I don't see them being quality referral generation activities. And so 29:52 then we use those subpar results from poor implementation and use it as this 29:58 story in your head of, well, referral marketing just doesn't work for me or I can't win with referral marketing 30:04 because all the big box ABA, corporate ABA, they they have them all. What are 30:09 what's your thought on that is I don't even know where the question is yet in that but mostly that's how I feel of 30:16 like I see a lot of people come up and they're just like it doesn't work for me and usually if I'm sitting down and 30:22 piecing it apart it's a fidelity of implementation problem. I I don't think it's totally the it's not totally error 30:29 on user because I think that people don't truly talk about the amount of 30:34 work that referral marketing takes. And you know, to their credit, we haven't really laid it out either. We've said 30:40 that it costs time, but how much time? We've talked about visiting a pediatrician, but how many pediatricians? We've talked about 30:46 dropping off a flyer, but how many? Then we've talked about touch points, but how many touch points? And so I think that 30:53 there's a big misunderstanding because, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago where it wasn't very saturated. You 30:59 really could stop by a pediatrician a couple times every 6 months, drop off the latest flyer, not say hi to anybody, 31:06 and get referrals from them, right? There was just not much competition. But the more saturated the location is, the 31:14 more competition you have in your area where other people are doing the same thing. So when other people do the same 31:20 thing, you have to say, "All right, how can I do more?" And it's gotten to the point where truly referral marketing is 31:25 a game of doing more than your competitors and doing it better and more accurately. So when I typically talk to 31:32 folks who say referral marketing doesn't work, you know, referral gen, it's a it's a failed experiment, my first question is how many visits or how many 31:40 contacts did you attempt? And if they tell me anything, they'll usually say, oh well, I did 50. And I was like, 31:47 great, you did 50. in one day, right? And they say, "No, I did 50 over three months." And I say, "All right, so that 31:53 means daily you did less than one, so I think that you just need to do more." And then I say, "How many meetings did 31:59 you get?" And they say, "Oh, well, I got two meetings and one of them didn't show up." And I was like, "Great. How did that one meeting go?" I was like, "Oh, 32:05 well that meeting went pretty well, but I never followed up." And I'm like, "All right, so imagine this. Imagine if you 32:10 had followed up with that person another 10 more times over the next three months. You had built a real 32:16 relationship. Do you think you would get referrals from them? Well, probably. Okay, perfect. We have our numbers. Then 32:22 that means in order to get one referral, you need to have 10 relationship building moments after one meeting. To 32:28 get one meeting, you need two scheduled. To get two scheduled, you need 50 outreaches. Can you do 50 outreaches 32:35 every 3 days? If the answer is yes, then after 3 months, what will that be? you 32:40 know, 45 referrals, uh, connections coming in that they then renew on a a week- toeek basis or a month-to-month 32:47 basis. And obviously, it's simplified for the example. But when we talk about volume with referral gen, what I 32:52 typically recommend is at the bare minimum, I'd like you to be contacting 30 new providers every week. Of those 30 33:00 people, everyone who doesn't respond, I'd like them to get three individualized follow-ups. of the people 33:05 who do respond and get meetings, I'd like you to have six touch points per month with that person, four of them I'm 33:13 okay being automated, but two of them have to be truly personal. And as you stack up those personal connections on 33:19 the back end, what ends up happening is you start getting referrals not because of the meetings that you're taking, but 33:26 because Dr. John's known you for four months and he knows that you're the only game in town dealing with this specific 33:32 type of behavior and everybody else who is ever sent with this specific type of behavior has come back unhappy. So he 33:39 sends to you and you build those one-on-one relationships over the long haul. Okay. So what is building a 33:46 relationship? Because I hear lots of different things and entrepreneurs at 33:51 the very beginning are they are scrappy. So, it's, you know, there's not, we're not independently wealthy. We didn't 33:58 come in with a bunch of capital. I can't necessarily afford to pay for lunch and learns for large practices and things 34:05 like that. So, is this buying friendships? Are you how what makes that level of like authentic relationship The importance of speed and follow-up in client intake 34:12 building? I think that what you said there at the end, is it buying friendship? What makes 34:17 it authentic? I think those are at odds. If you go in expecting to buy, then 34:23 you're never going to form authentic connections. So, the first thing that I would I would encourage is there are 34:30 times to ask for referrals. The beginning of building the relationship is not one of them. You need to be 34:36 talking to these people as if you are actually interested in what they're doing and how you can collaborate with 34:43 them and share back and forth with them. And you don't need to be saying, "Hey, we're a new shop in town. I would love 34:48 to, you know, accept your referrals, right? Because that immediately puts it from a friendship to a business 34:54 transaction. It's like walking into somebody's house brand new and just taking something out of their fridge and being like, can I 35:01 have a snack? And like, I don't know who you are. Then even worse, handing them $10 after 35:06 you take something out of the fridge. Right. It it it shifts it from a relationship to a business transaction. 35:13 Yeah. Okay. But then you asked, how do what is building a relationship? So I would define building a relationship as 35:20 successive touch points that things that you say are going to happen turn around and happen again. So the same thing with 35:27 building trust. That's what I want your touch points to look like. Now ultimately the question becomes Matthew. 35:34 There's too many like things on my plate. I can't have personalized moments with all of these people. Fair. I I 35:40 don't think that I could handle 50 relationships all at once. I typically forget to text my brothers back. So you 35:47 they're listening and they're like you haven't followed up at all. Yeah. Exactly. So you need systems for this. 35:53 So you know if you're if you're thinking about putting all this in your brain and just thinking that you're going to remember that you know Dr. Jane the 36:00 pediatrician has three cats and you should probably mention the cats next time you talk. You're not going to. So 36:07 the simplest version of this is a spreadsheet. A more complex version of this is a CRM, a customer relationship 36:12 manager. They don't have to be expensive. They can be dirt cheap. I used to do all of my stuff in an Excel 36:18 spreadsheet. So, you can definitely just, you know, relive your glory days before online data collection and just 36:23 spreadsheet it out. But you want to have a tracker that at the very simplest has 36:29 their actual information like name, email, phone number, location, etc. You then next to that want to have a log of 36:36 prior visits and notes. So visits means phone calls, emails, whatever, any types 36:42 of relationships. Um, you want to make sure you actually fill that out because most people never fill that out. 36:47 And you need to talk about uh you need to fill it out with information that is business related, like you need to 36:53 remember that this psychologist actually doesn't diagnose OCD. They only diagnose ADHD and autism, but you also need to 37:00 have, you know, the same type of information that you would expect a friend to remember, like their three cats or their two dogs or whatever. Then 37:06 after that, you need to have a first touch point, a last touch point, and a 37:11 next touch point. So every single day, you scan your list and you say, "All right, it is Friday the 28th. Next week 37:19 I have five people due for a touch point. In the past, for those five people, I've talked about XYZ. This time 37:25 I'm going to talk about the next XYZ." Then and and this is the this is kind of 37:30 to wrap this whole thing together. You you know that you have to reach out to these people. until you know that you now have notes on them. The question 37:37 becomes what to say and it's going to seem like it's out of the field. Have you ever watched How I Met Your Mother? 37:44 So, I haven't, but I I know many people have. That metaphor is like no longer hitting 37:49 like it used to. It used to be like absolutely, but I think like friends metaphors, too. That used 37:55 to be like everybody knew and then now no one knows. So, heaven forbid I make a office 38:02 that I got you. Yeah, there you go. Okay, but I'm ready. Listen, I'll listen. One of the main characters name is Barney and he has a playbook of how to 38:10 get with women and it's his like 100 plays of how to get with women. And the joke is that he sees a woman he likes 38:17 and he opens up his book, picks a play and then does it. And all of them are proven to work. And you know, they work 38:24 every time. And it's like this whole this whole funny scene. Okay. You need to have plays for your 38:30 relationship building moments. If you're staring at a blank page on your CRM, it's going to be hard to come up with 38:36 something. So, I have resources on my website that are 100% free. It's in one of my referral gen workbooks, but I have 38:44 10 plays that you can pull out and do with a with a relationship. So, they're 38:50 everything from, hey, you know, finding a finding a park that's sensory friendly and then emailing that provider and 38:57 saying, hey, bunch of the kids at my clinic were talking about this. It might be useful for your uh kids if they have 39:02 autism. Here's a new park they can go to. That's so good because then it doesn't 39:08 take as much effort and it is actually helpful. And the mental load is Yes. Yes. 39:14 Exactly. Um another one that I love is um the announcement. So you have 15 39:21 people and you hire an RVT and that RVT has a specific specialty or one of your BCBAS has a new specialty or you go to a 39:29 conference and you pick up a new specialty. So then you call that other provider and you say, "Hey, I just 39:34 wanted to let you know we just got additional training in XYZ. This is something that we're really confident in 39:40 now and I just wanted to let you know we're letting all our partners know. By the way, how is it going over there? I haven't heard from you in a couple 39:46 weeks, etc., etc." So there's 10 different plays. Some are more complex like a peer-to-peer introduction, right? 39:52 Introducing the daycare to the psychologist. And some of them are are dead simple, like the announcement play, 40:00 dropping off a resource, something like that. But at the core of all of them is you need to have a reason to reach out 40:06 and it can't be focused on you. It has to be focused on them. And so that final piece of like what to talk about is 40:14 where those other touch points come in. And that finishes off your CRM because then you you make the touch point, you 40:19 fill in your notes and you move last touch point to today and then you set yourself another touch point in two 40:26 weeks and then you repeat. That's great. I there's something in there that you mentioned too of like it's about them. It's not about you. And 40:33 I find a lot of times when we're talking with BCBAS, they are very much about 40:38 supporting others and wanting to make sure that they're supporting the families or their RBTs. And when you 40:43 start to say marketing, they think it's a spotlight on them, but really it's making sure that you're able to provide 40:51 and support others. And so it's really flips it into that different into that 40:56 different role. So I I like that. I think that's going to be really helpful for a lot of people. And I would even encourage people to be 41:03 a radical behaviorist in the way they deal with their own fears because when you speak about marketing the way that 41:10 we have been, it's really not a spotlight on you. It's a spotlight on the environment that the child is going 41:16 into. So if you really feel like you cannot spotlight yourself, fine. I'll 41:22 give you that. You can have the rest of your cappuccino and peace, but at least spotlight the environment that they'll be going into. you know, the 41:28 contingencies that are in place, the systems and processes, etc. And then maybe you won't feel as, 41:34 you know, icky about it. And also, sorry, just one more thing on that. It turns out I'm not done with it. 41:40 I'm not done. If you're feeling icky about it, that doesn't give you permission to waste 41:47 four years of a kid's life because you're scared. like at the end of the day like that kid doesn't that kid would 41:54 rather have the best provider in town than that provider not feel icky. So 41:59 it's kind of like a you know what's a bigger deal? You feeling slightly uncomfortable the first time you do 42:05 something or a kid making 10 times more progress with you than they would with somebody else. 42:10 If you really are that good, prove it. I like it. Okay. Good. Good. All right. 42:16 Let's I want to jump in chat quickly about Okay. you got that lead, you it's 42:21 been delivered to you. Marketing is is working. Where are you seeing most ABA 42:27 businesses start to fall apart when it comes to getting that conversion from a 42:32 lead to an actual client that starts on day one? Yeah, this one I will give them I will 42:39 give folks a little bit of leeway on because this one is legitimately hard, but I promise you that it is worth it. 42:44 The reality is is that speed to lead or getting back to your clients or your 42:50 potential clients sooner rather than later is going to be the number one 42:55 thing that you can do to up your conversion rate. So, let's say you get 43:00 10 referrals in. And of those 10 referrals, you some of them come in at night, some come in when you're busy 43:06 with a session, some come in, you know, on the weekend. And you say, "All right, I'm just going to knock all of these out 43:12 on Monday morning." and you go through that stack of 10. Some have been there for five days, some have been there for 43:17 four days. And then it turns out that only two of them answer the phone, and only one of them ends up as a client. 43:22 And you're like, "Man, this referral thing really sucks. None of these people are even real." Well, if you want to up 43:27 your conversion rate, if you had called those leads back immediately, as in to be specific, within like 30 seconds, 43:34 within five minutes, you know, then your conversion rate by that move alone is going to double or triple by that that 43:41 one thing by calling your leads back faster. Then the next big lever to pull with intake is following up. Not just on 43:49 somebody who doesn't answer the phone, but on somebody who does answer the phone and says that they're going to get back to you and then they don't. So, 43:55 there's an old saying in sales, it's called the fortunes and the follow-ups. That's what we're talking about here. 44:00 So, speed to lead, getting back to folks, and then following up. And then finally, kind of the, you know, the the 44:06 the kinder surface of the whole thing is that intake is a process where a parent 44:13 just received a diagnosis. Likely they got 35 plus pages. They're completely overwhelmed. They're talking to 15 44:19 different providers, not just ABA, but SLP and OT. Plus, they have an IEP meeting. Plus, they're trying to figure out if they need to quit their job to be 44:26 able to drive their kid back and forth to therapy. Intake should be helpful. Like, if you can provide value in the 44:32 support that you give to the people who come your way, once again, another reason why you should get back to them quickly because you can help them 44:39 faster, then that person is going to associate your help with good quality 44:44 services and they will choose the person who helps them more over the person who helps them less. So, I've been the busy 44:50 clinical director with a case load plus trying to manage intake. I know how frustrating it is to call a parent every 44:57 single week to check on a diagnostic report that they swear they're going to find. They just haven't found it yet. 45:02 But if you can be helpful, if you can get to your leads, if you can follow up, that those three things are going to 45:09 completely change your intake game to where you're actually making the most out of your marketing. Not just from 45:14 referrals, but like intake is like the biggest lever on basically any marketing, right? Digital ads, SEO, etc. 45:22 Yeah, intake is also such a fun thing to look at and analyze because you can put 45:29 every system, every process, every subsystem in there and use data to 45:34 figure out where people are falling out of the funnel. You have so many touch points and there are so many different 45:40 things that you can tweak as you're starting to see like, okay, I I'm losing them between this event and this event. 45:47 That's a micro step that I need to go back and kind of start to tweak and I have baseline data and now I have, you 45:53 know, from this change. So, I I get a little nerdy when it comes to intake data because it's just it's so 46:00 actionable. You the data is there. It we just need to change what our behavior is. We can't control the family What causes ABA practices to fall short in converting leads 46:07 But we can control what what our behavior is in that situation. Most of the early stage folks that I 46:13 talk to don't look at intake as a science. They look at it as an email and 46:19 they make the phone call once and then that's their intake process. So I think that having systems, having you know 46:27 your spreadsheet, having your CRM that does force the conversation about like all right, how come these two people 46:34 moved to the next column but these two people didn't? What was the difference in the inputs that caused a difference 46:39 in the outputs and looking at it over a large scale? So, I think that most of the folks who I talk to who struggle 46:46 with intake, it's not that they don't know their data. It's that they don't 46:51 have data because they don't have intake. They just have an email and a phone. The other thing I really wanted 46:58 to ask and just see is there are some BPs I speak to that want to really make 47:04 sure that they create boundaries for themselves of I'm not working every hour of the day or I'm not working over the 47:10 weekend, things of that nature. But when it comes to being scrappy and at the beginning of getting the ball moving for 47:17 your company, sales don't sleep. So intake never sleeps. What are your thoughts on always being available to do 47:24 intake versus saying, you know, these are our operational hours and how do you 47:30 make the shift to something like that? Because some of the large ABA companies, they're not taking 24-hour calls for 47:36 leads, but some of them are. Some of them are a lot of them are. Okay. So, tell me. 47:42 Yeah. I I would say and and maybe this is just because I I talk to a lot of them and I I walk through their intake 47:47 processes, too. I have the privilege of because I've spent so much time in the clinical world to get to talk to you 47:53 know the the startup entrepreneurs but because of a train and our growth that we als I also get to talk to some of the 48:00 bigger names in the field and the reality is is that most of your competitors are calling most of the 48:06 competitors who are really a thorn in your side the ones who you're like oh my gosh I hate that another clinic opened 48:12 up they're calling their leads back within 30 seconds they have 24-hour intake teams and that's not to say that full 48:18 languages, right? And that's not to say that that is the only strategy that it will take for you to succeed. Like I I don't think 48:24 that you have to duplicate. I do think you have to have an honest conversation about what it is worth to you and what 48:31 is more important. So, when I think about like being more available or working more hours or things like that, 48:37 if we know that getting back to leads faster increases the conversion rate, then regardless of an assumed dragon 48:45 down the road of like, oh, now they're going to think that I work on a Sunday, which generally speaking does not 48:50 happen. Like, sure, you might have to reset expectations every once in a while, but like that's why they pay you the big bucks. Like, you can handle 48:56 that. Most of the time, it comes down to being more available gets more clients. being less available gets less clients. 49:02 So, is being more available worth more clients? And once you kind of lay it out 49:08 like that, then you kind of start to think if it's not, then you should probably be okay with not getting as 49:14 many clients as you would. And if it is, then great. You made that choice. Don't complain about it. Just do it. 49:21 Yeah. And I'm I'm I guess I'm a shade pragmatic about it because I've that's been my perspective on my own business 49:27 and life for a long time is I I think that once you make a choice that you're happy with and you've analyzed it from 49:32 all sides, um I try not to think back and be like, "Ah man, if only I wasn't working on Sunday." It's like, "Yeah, 49:38 but like these are the things that I want to get in my life and I decided that they're worth working on a Sunday." 49:44 And that's okay. you know, I don't miss the Sunday more than I miss the result that I want to get that I might miss 49:50 that I might not get to. I I agree. I think you have to be willing to do what most are not willing 49:56 to do if you want the livelihood and the outcomes in the life that most are not 50:02 going to just get by going along to get along. So, I think that's super wise that could be that could be applied to 50:08 so so much so much. Okay, let's make a shift and let's have a little bit of fun. I have, as you suggested, we have 50:16 Smasher Pass. I love that. So, here we go. I didn't think that that was going to make it to the podcast. 50:22 100%. Anything I can do to do something that would be slightly inappropriate, but also behavior analytical at the same 50:29 time. I mean, there are no rules. Like, let's make it happen. Yeah. Okay, cool. Smash or pass. And you 50:37 you need to go you you need to go quickly. All right. Google ads. Smash 50:42 with the right budget. Okay. Really smash with the right budget. Okay, good. Are we getting hand signals 50:48 with this, too? This is great. Okay. Meta ads, Facebook ads. Smash, but like reluctantly like like 50:55 generally speaking, smash, but like I'm not going to like call my mom about it. Okay. Reddit ads then. 51:01 Pass. YouTube ads. Okay. Okay. Good. Learn new things. All right. Cold outreach to 51:08 pediatricians. Just cold calling a pediatrician's office. Smash. If you have the kahonas, smash. You gota You 51:14 got to be up for the You got to be up for the denials, but smash. Okay. Posting every day on Instagram. 51:19 Nice. Okay. All right. Cool. Blogging pass. For for startups, pass for most 51:26 people. Pass. For like highly developed experts with established businesses with 51:31 traffic, smash. But almost always pass. So like chat GPT blogs not helpful. 51:37 Definitely pass. Yeah. Google. Speaking of told us to pass. Yes. Okay. Okay. Paying for leads. 51:45 Yeah. Smash. Okay. What about those companies that promise you Yeah. Wait, Astrus. What kind of paying 51:51 for leads? Do you mean like like you get an email and they're like, "Hey, do you want like 10 kids with autis?" Like, 51:56 what do you mean? I've seen subscriptions like where you subscribe and they say that they're going to send you leads. 52:02 Okay. Gener almost always pass. I mean, if it's cheap enough for you to experiment with, it it can't hurt. But 52:10 most of the people who do guarantees, subscription based things, they're really just hoping that you don't 52:15 remember there's a guarantee on the back end or that they can extract enough value until they get it. 52:21 There is no guarantees in marketing. Yeah, that's why Netflix never asks for a new credit card. They want you to not 52:26 remember you have that. Okay. Okay, cool. And there are no guarantees in marketing. And that's really important, too. The experimental nature. Okay. um 52:35 hosting community events like autism walks, things like that. Smash, smash, especially at the 52:41 beginning. I smash all around you. The the right events are the ones that have the highest probability of your ideal 52:48 client being next to you. So when people are like, "Oh, should I go to this like niche community event?" It's like, well, 52:54 is it going to cost you $500 to see one adult who has a kid with autism? 53:00 Probably not. But if you're going to see 30, probably. Okay. So, like more niche autism specific type events, not 53:08 necessarily all kids. Audience audience percentage. So, I want to have a high enough percentage of kids 53:15 with autism or ideal clients to make it worth my while. Okay. Yeah. Otherwise, I mean, those are 53:20 they can be a slug. Like that's that's a lot. That's a lot of work. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Email marketing 53:26 smash. Okay. using LinkedIn for BCBA recruitment. 53:32 Probably pass. There's It's going to be a pass for me. Okay. It's like the most saturated location 53:38 you can you can make it work, but it's very saturated with people who do it full-time and have way better systems 53:45 than you. Like if you're a recruiter and you're like, I get mine from Yeah. It's because you do it full-time. You have 53:50 teams. Oh, it's an art. But yeah, just like posting on LinkedIn and sending a couple DMs is not going to 53:56 drive any real results for you. Okay, last one here. Hiring a marketing agency during your first year as a scrappy 54:03 entrepreneur. I'm going to translate scrappy into lean in terms of budget- wise. And I would 54:09 say I would say probably pass with the asterisk that freelancers can work for 54:14 very specific projects. So like if you can't build a website and you don't want to use AI, like hire a $500 to $1,000 54:21 freelancer and get a WordPress site. But there is nothing worse than a bad 54:27 website and like and standing behind it like I'm so proud. 54:32 You It's kind of like I think that if your budget's small then you need like just to be frank like 54:38 there are no good deals. Like you lose things when you when you stay cheap. 54:44 Like if you have 500 bucks and they're doing SEO and they're running ads and they're doing your website and they're 54:49 not doing all of those things. They're just not. So, I had I had somebody come to me the other day and said they've 54:55 been spending $700 with a marketing company for the last two years and they were doing all this SEO and they were Rapid fire: marketing tactics and their effectiveness 55:01 doing all these Google ads and they were and I said, "How much are you spending on Google ads?" I'm not sure. What are they doing for SEO? I'm I'm not sure. 55:07 They weren't doing anything. They had just set up the subscription and then walked away. And that is a that is a 55:12 very real business model that entrepreneurs need to be concerned about. The old like there's no such 55:18 thing as a free lunch definitely applies. Now, you don't need to spend as much as like an A train to get good 55:24 marketing. Of course, there's plenty of good marketing agencies all throughout the spectrum of cost, but there is a you 55:30 get what you pay for. And at a certain level, like if somebody's doing your SEO and your ads and your this and your 55:35 that, they're not doing it for $500 very well. Okay? So, if it's like an all-encompassing thing and it's in the 55:42 price that you can afford, it's probably not not what you're hoping for. You're 55:47 going to be paying for it at the end. If that price is $500, it's probably, you know, if the price is $50,000, then 55:54 yeah, like sure, that's reasonable. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, at the end of the day, there 56:00 are businesses built off of they're turn that we call you call them churn and burn businesses where you spin up a 56:07 website, you onboard a bunch of entrepreneurs who have very small businesses from ads. The whole idea is 56:13 you acquire them for 200 bucks via meta ads and their first month they pay you 56:19 500 and they don't care if you stay because they already made their 300 bucks and then they do it to the next 56:24 person and the next person. So that's a real business model that people like succeed with and you don't want to get 56:30 caught in that churn and burn trap. So guarantees are almost always a red flag. You can guarantee inputs, you can't 56:37 guarantee outputs. and all-in-one services that are way too good to be true, I would also get nervous about. 56:42 That being said, once you get a little bit of money to spend, I would say up to, you know, maybe two and a halfk to 56:50 and up and onward. Now, you can start having conversations with like freelancers or smaller agencies who might be able to provide 56:57 that allin-one. And then as you look at their results and if you're happy with them, never change. If you don't like them, then 57:04 maybe you should up your budget a little bit and try again. And then keep going. It's the monitoring that you we can't we 57:10 can't delegate the monitoring of it. Yeah. Exactly. I'm curious to know your thoughts on 57:15 hiring uh marketing support. Let's say mostly like digital ads and that kind of 57:21 area from people who are not in the ABA field specifically. So maybe somebody 57:26 who's done marketing more for dental or pain clinics, things like that. How 57:33 generalizable is that approach to marketing to ABA? 57:39 There are certain things that are going to be more generalizable than others. So when you talk about Google ads, for example, there are what I would call the 57:45 generalizable skills is picking an audience, setting it up technically, doing all of the backend connections 57:51 between this trigger and that trigger and that form and this form. All of that's very gen generalizable. What 57:57 tends to not be as generalizable is the copywriting, the words that the ads say, 58:02 the knowledge of what is your customer searching for. For Google ads, you have to bid on a keyword. So, if me as 58:10 somebody who's been a BCBA for a long time knows a stack of keywords that I know parents are searching for because 58:16 I've sat next to them in caregiver training for five years straight, that's going to be a different knowledge set and thus have a different result than 58:22 somebody who's been doing it for a dentist and might not know that parents don't actually use this terminology. 58:28 They use that terminology. So things like that tend to not be as generalizable. That being said, things 58:34 that aren't generalizable doesn't mean they're not teachable. So if you're hiring somebody who has great experience 58:40 technically but doesn't have great experience in ABA practically, then just budget additional time of yours or 58:47 additional money for them to learn on what the ABA market really is. And this is where we get to like the fundamentals 58:53 of like time and money again, right? You might save a little bit of money by hiring internal um you might pay them, 58:59 you know, 60k salary or something. But if you then have to spend three months training them plus lose those three 59:05 months of clients, then now you're spending time versus if you were to go to somebody who already knows all that 59:11 stuff on the front end. Let's say they on average cost 75K. You traded 15K for 59:16 all of that time. Is that worth it? Maybe, maybe not. Depends. Yeah. Yeah. How long should you be 59:24 waiting to see if there are good results from any kind of switch to marketing 59:29 support? This is I want instantaneous. That's not This is hard because different marketing 59:36 matures at different timelines. This is another big thing that people don't understand, but I'll just run through it 59:41 kind of really fast in terms of quickest acting is like shaking the old coconut tree of your cell phone, right? Who is 59:48 right next to me who can give me a client? my brother's sister or my brother's wife is an OT. Let me take her 59:55 to coffee. Right? That those are quick acting things. You should be seeing results within one to three weeks if 1:00:00 these are true personal connections. Then you go into the next one which is meta ads. Meta ads mature on average in 1:00:07 about 15 to 21 days depending on spend meaning that they are pretty you're 1:00:12 you're you should be seeing results in that 21day time frame. they'll probably get a little bit more efficient along 1:00:18 the 45day time frame, but generally speaking, if you're not seeing results within 30 to 45 days, something's up. 1:00:24 Next up, you have Google Ads. Google ads are a totally different beast. They're ve the algorithm is 100% different from 1:00:31 meta. So, those Google ads mature at a rate of, I would say, 60 45 days at the 1:00:37 fastest with big spend, 60 days more realistically, 90 days with low spend. 1:00:43 So, that's a three-month process. referral gen I typically put at a two to five month process. It's more variable. 1:00:50 So hard to be that patient. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean the long it's a slingshot. The longer you wait the the 1:00:57 faster it comes in. So referral gen's at that two to two to five months. And then SEO it depends on where your website 1:01:03 starts at. If your website starts at like zero traffic like you're going to need to give it six to nine plus months. 1:01:09 like I'm sorry like you can't you can't get a website from no traffic to 500 1:01:15 visitors in a day in two months and you're not going to be on the first page either. So SEO typically matures 1:01:22 around the 6 to 12 month mark depending on how much traffic your website already has. If you're starting up it's probably 1:01:28 going to be longer than you expect which is why SEO is one of my most preferred long-term strategies for folks with the 1:01:34 budget to support it and least prefer preferred strategies for startups. I can't remember the last time I 1:01:40 recommended SEO for startups because every single penny or minute of time 1:01:45 that you spend on a a play that's going to take 12 months to mature, you could just drop that right into the referral 1:01:51 bucket or the ad bucket and get clients much faster when it actually matters. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. There's so much 1:01:57 I could ask you like a million questions and just keep going. There's going to be a good faction of people who are are 1:02:02 listening to this thinking I'm a BCBA and the idea of working outside of an 1:02:09 autism field is really interesting. It's really thoughtprovoking. So, I really 1:02:14 would love to kind of just give our listeners just a little pep talk about kind of if you're a BCBA and you're 1:02:20 thinking, I'd like to do something out of the traditional application of autism, but you're not sure if you're 1:02:26 qualified because there's a lot out there that says, you know, we have this very specific lane. How how would you 1:02:32 approach that for them? What would you tell them? I would tell them that they need to find their unfair advantage. And 1:02:39 what I mean by that is I want you to think about all the times that people have complimented you on your work. I 1:02:46 want you to think about all the times people have come to you for help. And I want to think you to think about all the times that after someone's came for you 1:02:53 to help for help when you've told them this or when you've taught them this, then they've left feeling like very 1:03:00 satisfied. That's what I would call your unfairformational advantage and it's not your BCBA. It's not something that 1:03:07 happened on a test. It's something that you were able to grow as in addition to 1:03:13 your ABA skills. And I would take that skill, whatever it may be, and I would 1:03:18 start to look at where other places, other locations really need that skill, whether it be through an entrepreneur 1:03:24 pathway of, you know, you're incredible at parent training. Well, if you're incredible at parent training, then 1:03:30 should you start an ABA company that solely focuses on parent training? You could, right? What about for me it was, 1:03:37 you know, getting clients. All right, maybe I can get clients for other ABA companies or I could get clients for the 1:03:43 flower shop down the street. But you need to find your unfair advantage. Once you find your unfair advantage, you need to not throw out the BCBA with the 1:03:50 bathwater. You need to look at the objectionable the objective skills that you have as a BCBA and the way you look 1:03:56 at problems and you need to stack that with your unfair advantage so that now you have a system for your unfair 1:04:03 advantage and then you need to go and find somebody who is most in pain that 1:04:08 your solution solves and either get hired by them or sell to them and and 1:04:14 that's how you get out of you know ABA or at least insurance based ABA. Insurance based ABA for sure. Yeah. 1:04:21 Yeah. I like that. There's a lot in this conversation that's really come back to just figuring out what's the most 1:04:27 authentic version of of you. How can you show up and just be yourself? So, I like 1:04:33 that. What is your secret sauce? What's what's the thing that people are grateful to have encountered you for? I 1:04:39 love that. Every time we do a a listener takeaway and so I I have a lot of 1:04:45 questions for you. So, we're going to do some rapid fire questions, which is the same as spash smash and pass, but 1:04:51 selfishly, I want to know the answers to this. It's more respectable. It's a very refined version. We could use accents, 1:04:58 but my accents are very bad, so we'll just go with this. All right. So, for a BCBA who hasn't 1:05:04 opened their practice yet, I'd love to know what's one marketing decision they should be thinking about right now. 1:05:10 How are you actually going to be different from the people down the street? And how can you say that non-stop in your marketing on your 1:05:16 website, in your name, in your flyers? Don't just be the the buzzword century of like meaningful steps to make 1:05:23 meaningful progress like with with compassionate care. That's quality. Yeah. Compassionate. 1:05:29 What are you actually going to do differently? And yeah, tell people about it. Yeah. It's the mantra. It's just your 1:05:35 mantra. Enchant it. Yeah. Okay. for a BCBA who just opened their their doors, 1:05:41 they just opened their business, they're starting to take clients. What should they be focusing on then? 1:05:48 Nobody can be your client if they don't know you exist and nobody cares about you enough to go seek you out. So, go to 1:05:55 them. Okay. Um, for an owner who is stuck and they are not getting clients, where what 1:06:03 system, process, or thing should they audit first? What got you the most clients in the 1:06:08 past? And is the level of activity that you were doing equal to the level of activity you are doing now? The answer 1:06:15 is no. So pick it back up more before going to new. Yeah. And I feel like people look really 1:06:23 at like the right then, but they don't realize that three months ago you had this really high activity which resulted 1:06:28 in two months later having those. And so it's not a onetoone correlation for what 1:06:34 did you do in that one month and that's that trips people up a lot. That's so good. Yeah, I'm good at taking my foot 1:06:40 off the gas. If if you're getting the outcome you want, you just kind of you get busy with other things like at 1:06:45 the very beginning not having clients is a fire and so you're willing to do whatever it can to relieve that fire. 1:06:52 And then three months when you have five clinic five clients, it's not as big of a fire. But then one of them leaves, one 1:06:59 of them moves, the other one goes to school, and suddenly you're like, "Oh no, like why aren't we getting referrals 1:07:04 again?" So what worked in the past, get back up to that level of activity and probably double it. 1:07:10 Okay. And then for an owner who is ready to scale, I've got clients, they're coming in, but now I want to open up 1:07:16 four more locations and I want to replicate it exactly the same way. 1:07:21 First thing, homefield advantage is very real. And so your first clinic will always be your most successful and you 1:07:28 cannot expect if you've lived in the same place for 10 years, you can't expect to duplicate that, you know, an 1:07:34 hour and a half down the road. So home field advantage is real. So that that's the first thing you should be aware of. 1:07:40 And two, just generally speaking, every business can scale until something breaks. And the businesses that succeed 1:07:47 are able to look forward to the thing that's going to break. So if you look at your current company, everything's 1:07:52 working fine, but what's the next thing that you're kind of worried about? As you're scaling, fix that thing or it's Advice for BCBAs considering entrepreneurship 1:07:58 going to break. And so fix it before it breaks. And then instead of being like, problem solved, now look at your new 1:08:04 size. Something's concerning you, fix that next. Yes. Yes. Okay. All right. At the end of 1:08:11 every episode, we leave listeners with a permission slip. I'd love to hear what 1:08:16 permission you would like to give to BCBA. So, you have permission to you have you have permission to do way 1:08:25 more than other people think is reasonable because you want to get way more than everyone else thinks is 1:08:30 reasonable. That that's so good. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate your time today and 1:08:36 your expertise. has been wildly wildly generous. And I think just generally your belief that you have about others 1:08:43 and their and what they are deserving to have, which is building things that they 1:08:49 love and livelihoods that intrigue them and are sustainable. And so I just I 1:08:56 greatly appreciate you being here. It's it's been a joy. This has been super fun. Definitely one 1:09:01 of the more fun podcasts I've been on. Don't tell the other podcast. Thanks. I paid him to say that, by the 1:09:06 way. episode. That's marketing. And that's marketing, baby. You've been listening to the BCBA's Who 1:09:13 Build podcast powered by Head Start Health. New episodes drop every second and fourth Thursday of the month. And as 1:09:20 always, you can listen on Spotify and Apple Music to stay connected and hear more conversations around ethical care, 1:09:26 leadership, and what it takes to build a better future in ABA.