Transcript

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I want you to do something for me right now. If you're driving, wait till you're parked. But I want you to actually do it. I want you to open your email and I want you to scroll through your inbox and I want you to find one message, just one. Where somebody had emailed you, maybe you put something out and they said something version of something that says, "Hey, this looks so interesting. Can you tell me more about it?" And guess what? You never wrote them back. All right, I'll give you some time. Good. I don't want you to apply to just yet. Because what that email represents is money. It's real money. Somebody raised their hand on their own and they asked you for more info. And it's sitting there going cold because you forgot about it, you got busy. Now here's the uncomfortable part. That's probably not the only one. There are probably a dozen or more scattered across your inbox. It could be your patient questions, your old content, your unfinished offers. What I'm trying to tell you is you're not short of any opportunity. What you're short of is visibility. And that's what today is all about. It's not about building something new. It's finding the money you already have that you've never captured.

My name is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to Bootstrap MD, the podcast for physician and healthcare entrepreneurs. And today we're going to go revenue hunting inside your own practice, inside your own career. Now most physicians I talk to, they ask me the same thing. They say, "Mike, what business should I start?" And I think that's the wrong question. Or at least it's not the primary question. It's the secondary question. The first question is where am I already sitting on money that I haven't captured yet? Because here's what I've learned. As doctors, we're great at generating ideas, but we're terrible at tracking opportunities. So, we'll think of two or three ventures before we'll follow up on that one warm lead sitting in your inbox from the last month. We treat new ideas like it's a fun differential like in a differential diagnosis and old opportunities like it's discharge paperwork. So, I want you to find this. I want you to find what I'm calling hidden revenue. Hidden revenue is money you could generate without starting from scratch. It's already in your world. It's just not visible. It's the patient asking the same cash pay question over and over again. Where it really is just an offer that you haven't packaged up. It's that discovery call that maybe you did last year in October that you never called back. It's the podcast episode you created that's secretly course. It's the price you set 3 years ago that you never touched. Hidden revenue is almost never a lack of opportunity. It's a lack of visibility. And visibility, spotting patterns inside messy, scattered information just happens to be one thing artificial intelligence is generally good at. It's not really good at inventing things, but it look at what's already there and telling you what you've missed. So, let me walk you through five places that it hides.

Place number one. It's your existing patients and clients. So, these are people who are already paying you. Your patients and your clients are constantly telling you what they'd buy. They're just not filling out a survey to do it. They're doing it through their questions. They could be doing it through complaints. The thing they ask for that you don't currently sell. A weight loss clinic where everyone's asking, "What happens after I hit my goal?" That's the auspices of developing a maintenance membership. In aesthetic practice, there's a skin optimization package in there. A primary care panel, there may be a concierge or executive physical tier hiding in plain sight. A coaching roster where three clients asked the same thing again that month. That could be a group program. The pattern is the offer. You're not seeing it because you're seeing one patient at a time and the pattern only shows up in aggregate. And that's the job for AI. Hand it the aggregate. Ask it what it sees. So, here's a sample prompt that you could do. Here are the most common questions and requests my patients bring up. I want you to identify five cash-based services, packages, or educational offers that I can ethically build from these patterns. Now, one caveat, do not paste protected health information into a general AI tool. So, no names, no medical record numbers, nothing that identifies a specific patient. You want to feed it the theme lots of patients are asking about X, but don't give them the chart. Just give them the pattern and the pattern's really all you need anyway.

Number two, the leads that you're already paid for and then ghosted. Now, before you say I don't ghost leads, you do. I do. We all do. Every consult inquiry you didn't reply to, every webinar attendee who never heard from you again, every "This looks interesting, could you tell me more?" email you read, you felt good about, and then you forgot about it and buried. Every former patient, every old newsletter subscriber that is still technically on your list. Now, that's not a dead list. That's a warm list you just stopped talking to. So, the problem was never that these people said no. Most of them never got the chance to say yes. They fell through a follow-up gap and before I sound smug, I've lost a warm lead to a follow-up I fully intended to send and I didn't, and I own that. Because it happens to all of us. The job is to stop letting it. Now, AI can't make the calls for you, but it'll do the parts that you hate. Sorting. Hand it a messy list and split it. Say, "Hot, warm, cold, needs education, needs a direct offer." And then draft a follow-up for each group, so you're just not staring at a blank screen. So, an example prompt could be, "Analyze this list of past inquiries, and then categorize them by likely intent. Then write a three-email follow-up sequence tailored to each category." All right? Again, just like the caveat I gave before, you make sure you're not you're stripping any identifying details of these patients and clients. But then, once you do it, you're going to be it's going to be very helpful for you, because you're going to be reactivating interest. You're not just spamming strangers.

Number three, the content graveyard. Now, most physician creators are sitting on years of content that they made once and never monetized. Those could be podcast episodes, YouTube videos, blog posts, that talk that you gave at that conference a while ago, old webinars, a newsletter archive, the FAQ on your website. You've already done the hard part. You've made it. You just stopped at published instead of going to being, quote, packaged. Now, this is where AI is really good at doing this. You want to feed it your back catalog, and it'll surface the themes that you keep returning to, which, not coincidentally, are the themes your audience keeps responding to. From there, it's a short hop. Here's the lead magnet. Here's the paid offer. Here's the email sequence. The episode you forgot you recorded might be the outline of the thing you should be selling. So, here's another prompt I want to give you. Here are If you're a podcaster, here are 10 of my podcast titles and summaries. Identify the top three monetizable themes and for each one suggest a paid offer, a free lead magnet, and a short email sequence. Now, I give you an example. Years ago, I started a conversation. I was on a webinar and I was talking about doctors, and they were I had some colleagues who were venting about their Yelp reviews. They had bad ratings, they was unfair, and they had no idea what to do about it. And I wasn't trying to build anything, but the pattern in the thread was loud. Everybody had this problem, but nobody had the fix. So, I started by just helping them fix the ratings. And that helping doctors clean up their online reputation turned into a company I developed on reputation management. It didn't come from a brainstorm. It just came from a complaint I happened to be paying attention to. And then what I did is I noticed patterns, and then I took those patterns, and I was able to build it into a successful business.

Number four. Now, this one stings a little. Sometimes the hidden revenue isn't a new offer. It's the money leaking out of the offer you already have. So, the offer may be too vague, the price is too low, there's no clear outcome, there're too many features and not a single promise, there's no urgency. Maybe you're targeting the right wrong buyer. There's no next step after someone says yes. And any one of those is a leak. Most offers have three or four. You just can't see your offers clearly. Maybe you're too close to it. You wrote it, you love it. Here is why AI is good for this, because they don't love it. That's exactly why it's useful here. It reads your offer like a cold prospect would and tells you where you lost them. So, a prompt you could do is, "Hey, review my offer. Tell me where it's leaking revenue." Look specifically at positioning, pricing, buyer pain, the promised outcome, the likely objections, and the follow-up opportunities.

All right. Finally, number five, your operations. And this is the boring one, but it's the one that's actually costing you the most money. Most revenue leaks aren't marketing problems, they're operational problems. The marketing worked, just that the system most likely dropped the ball. Missed calls that nobody returned, response times measured in days, no-show consults with no rebooking, no reactivation process for past patients, nobody ever asked for the referral, no offer after the visit, no follow-up sequence. Because, again, follow-up is where doctors often fall short. Now, I know this can be unglamorous, but I this is exactly where most of us are losing money. A patient who would have said yes, but he never got asked, doesn't show up in a report. They're just gone silence and probably went to your competition. So, AI's role here is to be the system you keep meaning to build. It can draft that reactivation campaign, the referral ask, the post-visit follow-up, the we haven't seen you in a while sequence. That stuff should be automatically automatic and curly depending on what you're remembering, which is established is generally a bad plan. So, you know, and I run some of this today. I'm still building a lot of it out, but I'm using AI to build out the system. And I've been helping other doctors do the same. Because, here's the difference it matters, missing leaks can quietly last forever on there. You need to just start doing one. It doesn't have to be all five, but just start doing one. So, a prompt that you could do is, here's how a patient currently moves through my practice from first contact to after the visit. I want you to identify every point where revenue could leak from a missed follow-up, a missed offer, or a broken handoff, and tell me what I need to do to fill the gaps.

All right. Now, notice what we did not do today. We didn't brainstorm a single new business. We didn't talk about about a core share you haven't made or an audience you don't have. But, every one of those five places was something that most of you already own already. You already have patients. You maybe have leads. You've already developed content. Maybe you've already handed offer that is selling. You're already running operations. The hidden revenue was never hidden because it was rare. It was hidden because you were too busy, maybe you were too close, or maybe you were too too scattered to see it. And that's not a character flaw. That's just being a doctor who's very busy with a very busy full schedule. I'll give you an example. I worked with a couple of doctors who were clients of ours, and they kept noticing the same thing. They were doctors who started to get involved in telemedicine, and they didn't know where to start. And they were just saying just out like a heart, "Here's what you should do." They didn't invent a new specialty. But, what I did is I prompted them to develop that into a package. Package these offers into a service. That service eventually became a company that is now valued at over eight figures. They didn't find a new asset. They finally looked at the one that'd been staring in the face the whole time. And that's the part AI can actually change. Not by being smart, but by being the thing that that looks at all of it at once without getting tired, distracted, or pulled into a clinic.

Here are some things that I would like you to do. So, remember that email I had you dig up at the start that the person who wrote in said, "Tell me more." that you forgot to answer or never answered. Go answer it. That's your first 20 minutes, and it cost you nothing. But, you owe that reply to somebody. Then, pick one of the five places where I think you might be losing money. Just one. The one that made you wince maybe when I said it. Open up your AI tool, give it that prompt that I gave you, and spend 20 minutes at actually looking, not just building, just looking. I'll bet you're going to find one thing worth more than this whole episode took to listen to. And if you want help turning what you find into something real, I invite you to come to our free online group, Doctors Online Success at doctorsonlinesuccess.com. You meet other doctors talking about the same thing. In fact, we're actually building up a new cohort for physicians who want to integrate AI agents into their practice or in their own business. We'd love to help you out. Go to doctorsonlinesuccess.com. Remember, guys, you can have your ups and downs as a physician entrepreneur. Do something a little each day to get you closer to your goals and keep moving forward.