Podcast Episode 31 | How Doctors Can Maximize Their Personal Brand

Ernesto Gutierrez:         00:00                I was talking to my dad and I was really depressed because this is literally something that was going to happen. We were going to have to shut down.

Intro:                            00:10                From Spaugh Dameron Tenny, it's the Prosperous Doc Podcast, real stories, real inspiration, real growth, a show for doctors who are ready to improve their overall wellness in every aspect of life. Now, here's your host, Shane Tenny.

Shane Tenny:                00:28                Welcome back to another episode of Prosperous Doc Podcast. I'm Shane. Glad to have you with us. And today, we're talking personal branding, a concept that is pretty familiar to people in business school or in marketing, occasionally, even dentists that has some exposure here and often a foreign concept. So, those of you in medicine building a personal brand, whether you're in practice, whether you're employed, your personal brand is your professional identity and that's where we're going today. As you know, medical and dental school, lots of didactic training, lots of clinical knowledge, very light on marketing, business branding.

Shane Tenny:                01:08                And so, we've got a guest today who fell victim to the lack of business training like so many doctors do and now it's his mission to guide doctors and practice owners to avoid the same fate and not only thrive financially but be able to serve your patients better and build a practice on your own terms. I'd like to welcome Dr. Ernesto Gutierrez, who is the host of the Highway to Health Podcast if you want to check that out after you're done listening to this one and founder of The Practice Growth Formula. Dr. E, thanks so much for being with us today.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         01:42                Thank you for the invitation Shane. I'm really looking forward to this.

Shane Tenny:                01:45                All right. I hope I did justice to your background and where we're headed today.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         01:48                You did really, really well. I'm actually going to swipe that and send it as an intro blurb to other podcasts.

Shane Tenny:                01:54                Perfect. There you go. I think your story has a great beginning or maybe not great beginning if we go back about eight years. 2012, I think you were the captain of a sinking ship. Start us out there.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         02:06                So, yeah. So, I somehow inherited a practice. First, I was put in charge and then the original owner just wanted out. It was mostly medical towards some regenerative medicine systems whole clinic in Cancun. And it was sinking as you very well said it. Because as physicians, we tend to think that all we need to do is to really focus on our skills, focus on honing our skills and growing our skillset, on serving our patients and being really good for our patients and the business is just going to happen.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         02:38                And truth of the matter, that's very far from it. And I'm sure that some other entrepreneurs in other fields are listening to this and going like, "Well, of course." But for us as doctors, it is a completely foreign concept. And sure enough, thanks just... I mean, we were just we're not making ends meet. We were maybe quarter, maybe six months away from having a close down. That was how bad.

Shane Tenny:                03:02                So, when you took over or I guess were handed the reigns, what were the warning signs? What caused you to realize like, oh, this is actually not... Our clinical medicine is fine, business-wise we're not fine, what was that warning sign?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         03:16                Well, the warning sign was that we had entire weeks where we didn't see a single patient. So, the type of protocol that we were doing, like you said, some medical tourism. So, people would travel from literally all over the world by the end of it and they would stay with us for a week and we'd do a whole protocol. So, we rarely saw more than six or seven patients per week but each one of these treatments is obviously high ticket.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         03:38                For a long time, we had two, three, four or even five weeks straight with no patients, at all. Nobody was coming in. We were barely getting any requests in for information. Nobody was visiting our website. Nobody was filling out requests. Basically, people didn't know we existed. So, we had this phenomenal clinic, we had one of the very only ISO 7 labs for research outside of the United States that was built to FDA specifications. I mean, everything top of the line but nobody knew we were there.

Shane Tenny:                04:11                Patient acquisition just wasn't there. And I think you're bringing up medical tourism, which of course is a pretty narrow aspect of medicine right now. But I think with the healthcare in the U.S. and the way things are evolving, I know what I hear a lot from folks and even observed personally, is starting to be this stratification of medicine and as concierge medicine or direct primary care or these aspects grow, the ability of a doctor to sign up with an insurance company and have a flood of people isn't there. If you're in a private practice wanting to build fee for service type medicine or concierge medicine or those sorts of things. Since then, I think that led to some aha moments for you. Start there.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         04:51                So, I remember... I've told the story before. And it was Sunday night and my parents had flown over to visit me. And I was living by myself at the time in Cancun. And so, they stayed with me for a couple of days. And it was Sunday night. And I was talking to my dad and I was really depressed because this is literally something that was going to happen. We were going to have to shut down. It wasn't even... Maybe it was... I mean, we're headed there, right? And so, I was talking to him and he mentioned something. He's not even a physician. He does nothing of the sort.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         05:21                And he said, "You know what? I think part of the problem is that throughout your schooling, throughout your training, throughout the previous jobs that you've had, you've always had a mentor to show you as a physician you're shadowing someone, you're learning from their skillset, you're learning how they deal with patients, you're learning how they solve clinical problems but you've never really learned any of this from a business mentor. You've never had anyone that you can shadow and you can learn how to run a business from, how to do marketing from, how to do all these different aspects that are a big part of running a practice."

Ernesto Gutierrez:         05:56                Because one of the things when we become entrepreneurs as physicians, we need to realize that we are no longer just the person providing the service, we have to be the entrepreneur who happens to manage and market a healthcare service business, right? And I didn't have that click. So, that's when something clicked that first I was offended because as every doctor is is like, "Well, that's not the thing. I don't do this." We tend to think that we don't do this for the money and that's not the reason why I started this and blah, blah, blah, right? But in reality, we need money just like everyone else.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         06:28                But after a while, they just let it marinate there. And they've realized that he was absolutely right. So, come Monday, I started just diligently as I used to study everything else, I started studying business and marketing. And somehow, I stumbled upon my mentor. And there's a book by Darren Hardy, The Compound Effect. And I've told him this. I said, "This book changed my life because I've realized that there were so many things that I just didn't know." I didn't know what I didn't know. And that started me on the path and I eventually ended up working with them directly in very, very close business forums. It was almost unbelievable. Because I went to one of these forums. And I remember the story.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         07:08                Well, I tell the story that he asks for... There's an application and once you fill the application, they say, you need to submit a $500 deposit so that we'll read your application. And if we think you're a good fit, you'll continue the process. If we don't think you're a good fit, we'll return your 500 bucks. And I remember entering my credit card details at that time and thinking, "Worst case scenario, they're going to say yes and I'll have to figure out how to come up with the other 14,500." And so, they said yes and I eventually figured it out. And I went over there. And it was a matter, I mean, maybe two and a half months afterwards that we had literally turned it around. And we were growing. And we started acquiring patients because we really didn't have the skills. That was a problem. We didn't have the skills that we needed.

Shane Tenny:                07:53                And among the many skills, I mean, I think the one that we were leading with on the top of the show here is it's just branding. And that personal branding. And so, you went from depressed, conversation with dad, aha book, Compound Effect, personal coach, three months later or some rapid timeline like this and you were already beginning to see the effect of the change in your own thinking and the change in your own behaviors, I guess, which around at the very least involve personal branding. So, help connect the dots. What is personal branding? What's it have to do with getting patients?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         08:27                So, there's a definition of personal branding. And it says that personal branding is what people say about you when you're not around. And it's basically how you're perceived by the marketplace, right? And there's a truth that a lot of physicians don't like and that I don't agree with. I wish it wasn't true but it is true. And it is that patients don't go to the best doctors. They simply don't. They go to the one they perceive as the best. And the problem is that if we as physicians don't start trying to position ourselves, trying to create that perception of expertise, of experience, of skillfulness into our patients, into our marketing, into our community, our patients are simply not going to be able to perceive those things.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         09:12                And that's why you see all these doctors complain about patients being stolen by untrained professionals, patients going to scammers, patients doing all those things. And it is because the scammers and all those people are actually being perceived as experts by these patients who need a service at that time and they simply cannot find the physicians, right? So, now, that you bring it as connect the dots, that's literally what we started doing. We started creating and branding ourselves because that was the one thing that nobody else could do.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         09:45                Sure, you can get STEM cell therapy and at the time, you could get in Panama, you could get it in Costa Rica, you could get it in Dominican Republic, you could get all over the place. Well, several places but you couldn't get it from me in those places. If you wanted to get it from me, you needed to come to my clinic. And that's exactly what it worked with so many doctors right now. We need to create your personal brand so that people will want to go with you. They will not want plastic surgery, they will not want the breast augmentation, they will want a breast augmentation with you. They will want to get any kind of services with you.

Shane Tenny:                10:19                And to your point, if personal branding is if our working definition here is it's what people say about you when you're not there, that doesn't just mean good or bad, it also relevant is are they saying anything at all. Do people even know you to make comments when you're not there? I think is a relevant part of probably what your work is through Practice Growth Formula now.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         10:40                Absolutely. Well, so, in Practice Growth Formula and it has grown as you and I were talking about before we started recording. At first, I started coaching and consulting some of my friends because they saw the results that we were having. And then they started recommending me. And when they started sending me or recommending me, putting me in touch with people I didn't know, I started charging for it. So, that's been my side gig for a while now. And as such, there's a lot of things that we do from marketing, from sales, from coaching, from consulting in general.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         11:08                Honestly, if I could say one thing that I'm focusing a lot of my time on right now is really, really banging the drums on the need for us as physicians to position ourselves as experts in our field. And there's a person that I gotten to know on LinkedIn. His name is Matthew Ray Scott. And he says, "The doctor should become the specialist within their specialty." And that is a way of branding. That is a way of really standing out, of really putting yourself out there so that patients can number one, get to know you, know that you exist but number two, also realize and understand that you're the person that they want to have around when they have the need for that thing.

Shane Tenny:                11:51                You work with doctors who are not only in private practice but also docs who are employed. And for physicians who are employed in a healthcare system or a hospital system or something like that, why is it important for them to work on their personal brand?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         12:05                Because they need options. I think that if there's one thing that a lot of doctors have learned, especially employed physicians that have learned from 2020 is that their job is not as safe as they thought it was. I've gotten so many requests to work with doctors these past couple of months because it's doctors that suddenly they got their hours cut, suddenly they got their benefits cut, suddenly they got laid off and they've lost all income. They've lost everything. I mean, obviously the private practice physicians as well, suddenly they couldn't open and they couldn't serve their patients.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         12:38                So, it's like, "Okay. Well, I can't go to work. So, I cannot make money." But the ones who thought they had a job and they had job security, suddenly they don't have any of that. And I give the example, there's a doctor that I work with and we helped her because she has been building that personal brand. We helped her really pivot and start serving a community that she had already been building on the side. We helped her pivot and start creating a health coaching program for them that is now bringing more than six figures. And just a matter of weeks, she was able to do that. So, it basically means that she has options.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         13:12                Now, let's assume that you're a cardiologist and you're employed by a hospital group. And you decide that you want to start building your personal brand. And you want to start talking about the importance of in general, wellness and healthy eating. And there's somebody that I connected with recently that does a lot of... He's a cardiologist and interventionalist. And he does a lot of work with mindfulness and things like that. So, what if he started building a community around the importance of meditation and mindfulness and all these things in order to improve your heart and your... Now, suddenly, he has a following of X amount of people. And if he's invited to give a speech at a conference, now he's fees just went up because he can sell that many more tickets.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         13:52                Now, if he wants to write a book, he doesn't have to write it and self-publish it and hope that his mom and his wife read them, he'll probably have a publishing house, right? You'll laugh because it is true. He'll probably have a publishing house come to him and say, "Listen, we'll pay you this much to write the book because we need to have your name on it so that we can sell more books of that." And also, his practice is going to reap those benefits because people will get to know him and will say, "I want to go be seen by him." It's just a matter of having options, having alternatives. And you might love your job and that's great. But if you had that alternative, wouldn't it be even greater?

Shane Tenny:                14:32                That's excellent. All right. And we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I want to ask you how you do this with people and what are some of the things they need to be aware of. We'll be right back after this.

Will Koster:                   14:45                I'm Will Koster. Bringing you this episode's financial wellness tip. A common misconception is that your expenses will decrease in retirement. The thought is that your liability payments should decrease such as paying off your mortgage or your kids will be through college and finally off the payroll. Well, this may be true. And some of your expenses have decreased. We often find that in the first few years of retirement, many of your lifestyle expenses actually increase due to the new found freedom in your daily schedule.

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Shane Tenny:                16:22                All right. So, we're talking with Dr. Ernesto Gutierrez about his vision for helping practitioners build their personal brand. And I loved your answer before the break about regardless of whether you're in private practice or employed, building your personal brand gives you options. And I can't think of many things that are more valuable than having options in life. What's involved in building a personal brand? Does this mean I got to have a logo for myself like prince? Do I have to have a podcast? Do I have to create videos or books series or how complicated is this?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         16:57                It's actually not complicated, not as complicated as we tend to think. As physicians, one thing that I've found out and I thought I was the only one that suffered with this. And now I've realized that it's almost every doctor that I've worked with. That's the exact same thing that we think, "Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You've sold me on it. I'm going to build a personal brand." And I said, "Okay. Great. So, here we are. Let me know if you have any questions." A couple of days later, I hear back from them and they say, "Well, I started looking into logos and what do you think I should have?"

Ernesto Gutierrez:         17:22                Or somebody else goes into the, "So, should I start an LLC for this?" Like, "No. No. No. You're too far away from what we need." What you really need to figure out is the first step, identify the people you want to serve. And they can be the kind of patients that you already have, they can be the kind of patients that you want to have or they can be not as closely related to your patients. So, for instance, if you're a pediatrician, define the kind of parents that you want to be educating on, define the kind of people that you want to be serving.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         17:56                And don't think about it in a way of, "Oh, I need to make sure that they're the right kind of patient for my practice or they need to live in..." No. No. No. Forget about that. Because that's not what you want. You want to create a community. And this community can be all over the world, right? So, you need to figure out, okay, who are they and how are you going to serve them? When you identify those things, you'll be able to see where they are. So, for instance, I have just been working with a physician's assistant and she loves working with children. She's been working in a pediatric clinic her entire career.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         18:27                And she works mostly with newborns. And we're creating that brand for her. And that's exactly what we defined. Okay. So, first time parents. Because they have all these questions. They get so much information the last couple of months of their first baby, the pregnancy, right? And what a chill time, they forget all of it, right? And they want to have access to somebody. Okay. So, that's how you're going to serve them. That's exactly where you're going to be at. So, we've decided that that's what they need. And because that's the kind of person, that's the kind of needs that they have, we decided on a podcast.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         18:57                But it might've been an Instagram profile. It might've been a blog. It might've been a YouTube channel. It doesn't have to be all of them. And it doesn't have to be the one that X or Y guru is telling you about. Think about the person you're trying to serve and think about what do you enjoy doing? If you hate yourself on video, no matter how much they tell you that you need to be in YouTube, you probably shouldn't be in YouTube. If you hate your voice or if you have a speech impairment, then probably a podcast is not a great of idea for you despite the fact that you heard that Joe Rogan makes a million dollars per episode or I don't know how much, right?

Shane Tenny:                19:32                And the recipe is fairly universal. I know you've helped docs in the U.S. and Canada and Europe, Australia, all around the world to the similar type formula of identify who you want to serve, how you're going to serve them and then how you're going to get that message out.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         19:48                And then be consistent. That's the most important thing. Because a lot of the time we tend to think, "Okay. What do I need to do?" And we define who we want to serve. We define our strategy. We define this. We post once, we post two times, we post three times. Then we start posting less because, oh, nobody's looking at it, nobody's reading it. And then less and less and less. And then suddenly, we have a hundred people in our email list and we email them once every three months. We'd get upset when they unsubscribe. Well, it's because you're not showing up for them.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         20:14                So, we need to identify that when we want to build this personal brand, we need to be consistent. I think the most important ingredient of this whole thing is the consistency and think that this is a long-term investment. If you want to turn things around in two months, it's probably not going to happen just with this. And I know I mentioned that it took us five, six weeks. It wasn't the only thing we did, it was definitely, we began doing that at the time but it didn't really yield fruit until maybe 18 months later. And 18 months after I had been consistently showing up for my audience, day in, day out, all day, all the time and you're there and you're there.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         20:53                And that's what I tell people like, "Listen, do you think that Dr. Oz built his brand... Whether you love him or hate him, the guy's a brilliant marketer. And do you think he built his brand by showing up once and then, 'I'm just not going to show up today.' And then the next day and..." No. The guy's everywhere. And he writes articles and he writes bows and you follow his social media and he's all the time, interviews and this and that. Because he needs to be present. If he doesn't, just his brand starts diluting and starts going weaker.

Shane Tenny:                21:24                And that's a great point about just the consistency. Because I know all of us have had the experience of going to a conference. You get excited, you sign up, you pay and then you come back home and you come back to the office, the practice, everybody else rolls their eyes and then the fire goes out and you say, "Well, that was a waste of money." It only was because you didn't execute. You didn't follow consistency.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         21:42                Exactly. Exactly.

Shane Tenny:                21:42                So, now, part of your work or your vision or your, I guess, skill and helping folks build a personal brand is around podcasting. You have posted a podcast for almost last two years. Talk a little bit about just the factors that go into helping figure out if that's an approach that someone should be pursuing.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         22:00                Well, so, the reason I began that and that actually became a spin-off company and it's called Podcast In a Box. And the reason we started that was because I realized that a lot of the doctors that we were helping, they really had this aversion to being on camera. So, whether it is the photos or whether it is the videos, they really don't like it number one. And number two, they've really have very weird hours a lot of them. And so, we found that a podcast can solve for both of those things because with the right equipment, a lot of them, they do educational podcasts, they do a mini series, they do things like that.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         22:36                So, it's very easy to record in a hotel room, to record at home in the morning, very early in the morning, very late in the evening, when they have a chance in their office, they can batch record five, six, 10, 12 episodes for them. And for us, it's very easy to manage it for them. So, that's why we went down that route. But the people then think that, "Oh yeah. So, everyone should have a podcast." No. Not necessarily. If your audience doesn't listen to podcasts, you shouldn't have a podcast.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         23:03                If you hate podcasts, you shouldn't have a podcast, right? Because it is a lot of work. It is a lot of... There is effort involved in it. Whether you do it yourself or you hire it out, maybe you're not putting in a lot of work, you're just recording. But then, you're putting in some money so that somebody else can be marketing it and editing it and putting it together and making sure that people are listening to it because it makes no sense to create all these assets and then not market them.

Shane Tenny:                23:29                And social media though plays a real role. I know that feels that alone, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Insta TikTok, LinkedIn, whatever, is overwhelming for a lot of folks, period. And certainly a lot of folks in medicine and dentistry with demanding jobs and just don't have the bandwidth for it. But you can't overlook some aspect of social in your personal branding development, right?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         23:55                Yeah. For sure. For sure. I didn't realize if you were asking me or you were building up on something. I agree but I also think that it's like the Pareto Principle, the 80-20. We need to figure out-

Shane Tenny:                24:06                Tell the Pareto Principle for everyone thats listening.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         24:07                So, the Pareto Principle, it basically means that... And it applies across the board, that 20% of our effort yields 80% of our result and the other 80% of our effort yields only 20% of our results. And this is true literally across the board. You can look at your business right now and you're going to see that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your patients. And 80% of your headaches comes from 20% of your employees. That's just the way it is. So, if we are already constraint for time, we need to figure out, okay, so, what is 20% of personal branding that I can... What is that 20% that is going to give me the 80% of the results? And I'm going to go all in on that 20%.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         24:50                And the other 80%, I'm going to ignore. And that's what I tell them like, "Don't put it into your back of your mind. Don't open up that YouTube channel just because you might want to because it's just going to be nagging at you that you're never posting there. It's much better to not have it than to have it empty." Same thing, if you hate Instagram, why do you have an Instagram profile? Seriously? Well, because they told me that I need one. But you need to be there. That's something that I always work with them. And it's also very important to understand that a lot of the times, the people that we're comparing ourselves to and the people at the other practices, the other doctors or even the other people in general that we're trying to compare ourselves with on the social media platforms, they have a team.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         25:30                So, if you're starting out, you're probably not going to be able to afford or will be even wanting to invest that kind of money and time into having a team and then managing them and making sure that they help you put all those things together. Believe me, no one person can manage all the available profiles out there. So, if you see somebody super active everywhere, they have a team doing those things for them. So, just figure out, what's going to give you the best results then double down on that.

Shane Tenny:                25:55                Now, I'm curious though, in your experience, helping build personal brands for people in healthcare, do you have a social media channel that you find to typically be more successful than the others?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         26:07                So, yes. There are actually two ways that a lot of the doctors that I work with lean on to. And one of them is obviously the ones that want to build their practice and they want to serve their patients, right? Or their potential patients. But the other that is actually very interesting, we've recently just started tapping into that is doctors that have maybe been practicing for 20 years, 25 years, they're already thinking about retiring. They're already thinking about what's next. They've realized that they don't want to keep up a hundred percent clinical at that rhythm but they realize that they still have a lot to offer.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         26:41                So, many of them are starting to see, "Oh, maybe I want to build a personal brand as an expert in my specialty so that I can be mentoring younger doctors so that I can be helping them in those regards so I can be making an influence in my specialty." And the reason I tell you this is because those two are different. What we're seeing a lot of is the doctors that are trying to build a personal brand to bring in patients, to educate their patients and to grade those things, we see that podcasting is a great starting point to get the ball rolling because it requires little effort from their part.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         27:18                You're not asking them to take a huge risk personally because they're not as uncomfortable recording audio as they are recording a video and all those things. So, it's a great way to dip their toes in. And then, other channels like Instagram mostly is one that many of our clients are seeing results in. But the importance is you need to be very consistent. And unfortunately, we're at a point right now where Facebook and Instagram they're paid to play. You want to grow, you need to put in some money. Not a lot but also, it's no longer free. It's just not going to happen. You're not going to come up with the perfect post that is just going to make you go viral. That ship has sailed.

Shane Tenny:                27:54                Yeah. Certainly not with our kittens. That's for sure.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         27:56                Exactly. Exactly. And even kittens, you need to pay for ads. Now, on the other side of the spectrum though, when we talk about physicians in general, who want to influence other physicians, we're seeing LinkedIn as a great, great, great place to get started. LinkedIn is leaning heavily on becoming a content platform. Many of us had LinkedIn before we even had Facebook or before we even... Obviously, Instagram didn't exist when LinkedIn started and things like that.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         28:24                And it was just basically an electronic CV. And that's the reason why people went on LinkedIn. They created their CV, the resume there. And unless you lost your job or you wanted to move to a different one, you really didn't log in to LinkedIn. But it's becoming a very rich content platform where we're seeing a lot of people cement themselves as this experts in their field. It's not really valuable for those looking for patients. Although there are exceptions.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         28:51                And I can give you a lot of doctors who are doing a great job at targeting their patients who are professionals, right? So, for instance, Dr. Brian Doric. And he's a GI in Miami, he's a gastroenterologist. He does a lot of posts and cancer screening. And who's at risk of cancer screening? People in their forties with certain risk factors and things like that. So, they have a LinkedIn profile. They're professionalists, they're not necessarily doctors. But on the other hand, those physicians were working with the younger doctors who want to create a difference, who want to make a difference, who want to create an impact. It's a great platform for that.

Shane Tenny:                29:23                And now, as we get closer to the finish line here, do you have a favorite success story of a doc that you've worked with who was able to go from zero to hero and monetize their personal brand?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         29:36                I think that's actually a really good question. Because there's many ways to monetize it. And that is a tricky question. Whenever I'm talking to somebody and they're thinking about working with us, inevitably, the question is, how do I monetize this? So, it's important to think that you don't monetize it directly or most of the time, you don't monetize it directly as to, "Oh, I want to grow it to a certain level so that I can sell ads so that I can get a sponsor so I can do all those things." And frankly, most doctors, they don't want to be peddling vitamins and multi-mineral concoctions, right?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         30:08                So, really, how do you monetize it, is building that platform so that number one, you can build your practice because you're putting herself out there. And number two, indirectly, as we said at the beginning, so, you're making yourself available for speaking engagements. You're making yourself noticed for book deals. You're making yourself noticed for interviews or podcasts like we're doing right now or web series, things like that. And eventually, you start hanging out with bigger people. You start becoming that known for person. And so, to answer your question. So, a good friend of mine, he's in LA and he works a lot with the Hispanic community.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         30:46                And he's been growing quite a bit. And we haven't even been doing a lot of work for him. It's helping him identify who his target audience is, who he wants to serve, how he wants to serve them. And then, the real, real, real difference is that, he's showing up consistently, day in, day out, he shows up, he's showing up on Instagram, he's showing up on LinkedIn, he's showing up on Facebook and he's grading all these posts. And he's getting to the point where he's been presented awards for his contributions to the Hispanic community.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         31:22                He's almost the spokesperson throughout the COVID pandemic for Hispanics and all of Southern California, which is not no small feat. And really, he's getting known. And he's actually employed, which is the funny thing. But it's just a matter of time when somebody comes in and offers them a book deal, when somebody comes in and offers him a spot on Hispanic news or anything like that because he has identified that he's been growing that. And it just yields results. Now, it's taken him 18 to 24 months to get to that point. That's the difficult part.

Shane Tenny:                31:53                And do we need to keep his name a secret or should we give him a shout out here?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         31:57                Oh, no. Absolutely. Absolutely. Ilan Shapiro.

Shane Tenny:                32:01                Ilan Shapiro. Excellent. All right. [crosstalk 00:32:03]-

Ernesto Gutierrez:         32:04                And I'll put you in touch with him as well so that you can have him here.

Shane Tenny:                32:07                That sounds great. Yeah. So, I guess as we get ready to wrap up, you've got great business focused on helping docs build a personal brand. I've mentioned it a couple times here, Practice Growth Formula. You've got the offshoot to help those that want to start a podcast. How can people track you down Dr. E?

Ernesto Gutierrez:         32:23                Well, they can connect with me on LinkedIn, funnily enough, that's where I'm most active. I'm on a lot of different one sites. It's on LinkedIn that I'm personally active on. If not, just go to pqformula.com. We regularly do free trainings on personal brand building for doctors. We also have a paid workshop that is four days straight with four sessions and they are live. So, you log in, I log in with a group of five to 10 other doctors on Zoom and we just work it out.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         32:52                Four days, we help you identify who you want to serve, how you want to serve them, create your brand persona and really just start working at it. So, you just go to pgformula.com and you can find all the info there. If you want to start a podcast, if you want to get in touch, you want to see all of our online programs. And it'll be my honor, because I am on a mission to return the business of healthcare into the hands of physicians.

Shane Tenny:                33:14                And noble mission, indeed. And in case you're listening to this and driving or couldn't write the website down, we'll link to it in the show notes below so you look at that later. Again, pgformula.com. Dr. Ernesto Gutierrez, thank you so much for your time today for being with us and just sharing your energy around helping doctors reclaim healthcare.

Ernesto Gutierrez:         33:34                Yeah. For sure. Thank you so much for the invitation Shane.

Shane Tenny:                33:36                Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. As always, we invite you to subscribe, that way you'll know about every episode coming out every other Monday. Also, welcome your feedback. You're welcome to email me directly, shane@whitecoatwell if you have any suggestions for guests, questions about this guest or comments about how we can serve you better. Thanks so much. We'll see you back here next time.

Outro:                          33:58                This episode of the Prosperous Doc Podcast is over. But you're not alone on your journey. Spaugh Dameron Tenny has been helping physicians and dentists prosper through financial planning for over 60 years. To connect with us, visit sdtplanning.com today and take your financial wellness to new levels. Join us on the next episode of the Prosperous Doc Podcast.