What’s up everybody. It’s Steve “The Hurricane” here. And with today’s episode of A Drink With “The Hurricane,” I want to remind you and urge you to right now, make sure you are registered for the virtual boot camp, “Embracing Change: From Pandemic To Profitability,” this September 17th and 18th, all new content on how you can scale and grow your home care business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Creating champions.
First thing is you gotta have the right person representing the company. All right? And so this is some stuff I actually pulled from Forbes Magazine over the years. And the first thing is you wanna have the alpha female, the alpha male, that leader of the pack that can overcome anything, loves a good challenge, and you tell them something can’t be done and they will die trying to prove that it can be done. That is the right person that you want marketing and representing your company.
If you want the A type personality, as an A type personality myself, I can tell you that the only weakness or the biggest weakness of an A type personality is we think that everybody else thinks the same way as we do. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. That’s the reason why an A type personality is called an A type personality, because they are not the norm. But you want an A type personality representing your company. You want a hunter mindset. If you think back to like primitive man, there were hunters and they were gatherers, right?
Gatherers wait for the crops to grow, wait for the harvest and then they gather it and then they eat and they store and they live in the abundance then. The hunter is somebody who literally leaves camp and they don’t come back until they’ve killed something. That could be an hour, that could be six hours, that could be several days later. But when they come back, they come back with the kill. And that is what we’re looking for.
The hunter who will go out and sit in a tree and wait for a deer and then shoot an arrow and kill the deer and bring it back. And then that’s our business growth. That’s the mindset that you’re looking for. And then again another thing moving forward, you want somebody with sales experience. That is huge because this is a sales position. Home health, hospice, and private duty at every level of the marketing rep, what is your job? To grow the census? How do you grow the census? By getting customers? How do you… Well, customers are patients, but it’s a sale. A sale is being made. You’re marketing to get referrals to people who need help. You need sales experience and sales know-how to do that. Now, the one caveat I will say is you don’t necessarily need healthcare experience though.
In my years of doing this, hiring hundreds of marketing representatives around the country and business owners that we’re working with too through our coaching programs, many of those individuals had no healthcare sales and experience, but they did very well. People who came from an industry that died because of the change of times. Like the newspaper and magazine industry, it’s still alive, but it’s hanging by a thread. It’s a dying industry.
So, you may have somebody who 20 years ago, was a champion in that industry. The industry is gone, so therefore they can’t really thrive anymore. And so, they’re looking for a chance to become a champion in a new industry. That is a great person to hire and bring on as a marketing person. Or if you happen to be an owner who has this kind of a background, you’re gonna be excellent out there marketing because you understand the sales and marketing.
All right? So, it doesn’t have to be healthcare when you’re having the right person. There’s always some health people do great with it. That’s why I’m not saying that they can’t. I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be a healthcare professional. It could be somebody outside the industry. Remember I sold milk, right? Dairy products. So, if I did it, I know you can too. And I’m training you how you could do it and become a champion.
You want like somebody who excels in front of a crowd. Clearly, I am not a shy guy, right? I think I was born and I came out of my mother’s womb with a microphone in my hand. So, I was destined to be on stage. When I was 12 years old, I was talking to my brother. We had bunk beds. He was nine. I’m a couple of years older. And we were talking about what we’re gonna do when we get older. And he’s like, “What are you gonna do, Steve?” And I said, “I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, but I wanna be like Tony Robbins. I wanna help like millions of people and improve their lives. And I don’t know how, but that’s what I’m gonna do.” And fast forward, I’m 39 years old today and that’s exactly what I do. So, I excel in front of a crowd.
As a marketing professional or a business owner who does the marketing, you’re gonna have to be in front of an audience. Think about what are the audiences that we have to be in front of. Well, there’s one-on-one with a patient or one-to-a-few with a patient and patient’s family, because that’s a sales situation. There is one-on-one speaking with a social worker, or one-on-one speaking with a director of nursing or a unit manager. There’s one-to-a-few, doing a lunch-and-learn for an administrator director of nursing, director of therapy, et cetera. Tomorrow the opening session is gonna be, Developing a Referral Source.
So, make sure you start on time, you go through this? I’m gonna teach you step-by-step how to develop a referral source. But if I’m doing lunch-and-learns, it’s gonna be a small audience that I’m gonna speak in front of. If I go to a networking event and I stand up and everybody does that elevator pitch, there’s 50, 60 people in the room and I gotta be able to speak for 30, 40 seconds intelligently and not stutter through my words. Yeah. That’s in front of a crowd. So, you’re gonna have to be able to find somebody or in yourself, call upon your inner Steve “The Hurricane,” and be able to do these things in front of a crowd.
The next one is somebody who’s competitive and self-motivated. What do I mean by that? Well, a competitive person is somebody who doesn’t let the grass grow beneath their feet. So, if I’m looking at an application or a resume, what jumps out? Extracurricular activities. Are they involved in their church? Are they involved in their community? Do they volunteer for a common goal? Are they the soccer mom who has the kids and everything, and they drive to everything and they bring their kids to it? Are they a busy body? Are they a physically active person? That doesn’t mean that somebody who’s not campy, but you want the people who are movers and shakers. You want the people who are always doing something. What are you doing after work? I’m going to the gym. What are you doing after work? I’m gonna go meet up with this. I’m doing that. Like you want that type of a person because that’s how they should be during their work.
I remember for one year, 2006 into ’07, I was actually single. And I remember with my friends, we would go out on Thursday night and Friday nights to the clubs and the bars and we’d have fun. And they’d be like, “Steve, you’re just the most social person.” Like my friends used to love going with me because I would go out and I would be me, right? And then like we’d have a whole crowd of people around us and then everybody kinda danced and had fun with the people that were… I would choose this lady and then this one and this one, and then we would have fun, right? And that was back in the day. And my friends were like, “Where did you learn? How do you… You’re just so personal.” I was like, “Well, Monday through Friday at work, this is what I do at work, and now I just go out and I have fun with you guys on Friday.”
So, it’s like Friday night was like game time and Monday through Friday during the day was practice, right? So, you want that social person, that competitive, that self-driven individual, because you don’t wanna be chasing this person out of the office. You don’t wanna be asking that marketing person, do you want them to, “Hey, come into the office. I need you to come back in here. I need you to come and… I gotta go. I gotta do something.” That’s the kinda person that you want representing your company.
You also want the lone wolf, which is kinda self-explanatory. You’re driving in your car all the time. They have to work independently of others. You’re kind of on an island, as a marketing rep, as a business owner, doing the marketing. And obviously, high energy. What I mean by high energy? I mean, somebody who you don’t have to be Hurricane, but you have to be energized. You have to be motivated.
A sale is a transfer of emotion and a transfer of energy. People remember who they know, like and trust. Well, they also remember who stands out. If everybody’s leaning to the left, but I lean to the right, I’m gonna stand out. They’re gonna remember the one person. There could be 50 people leaning in this way, but one part in the street line, but there’s a one person leaning that way, you don’t really notice the people leaning this way, but you see the one person leaning that way. That’s that high energy.
So, what I love about doing this is if it comes to hiring a marketing person, that’s who you want. When it comes to who is your marketing person, that’s who they should be. And then for yourself as an entrepreneur, for those of you out there, because like half of us, just like half of my clients who we work with, half of our clients do the marketing themselves.
If you’re the owner of your business, the very risk-taking nature and skills that you innately have, you have the ability to do most of this stuff. You may not enjoy it, but you’re a risk-taker. You can follow a proven path and a proven program and you could go out and execute it and have your successes. Like that is one thing that I had known from pretty much all of my clients. Even if you’re more introverted and you’re not the most outgoing person, having the system in place and understanding it, and this is what I have to do week in and week out, I can do that, and then all of a sudden, by default, you start doing the activities, you’re gonna get the business that you’re after. You’re gonna scale and grow your organization.
