Focus on What You Do Best, Let Professionals Handle the Rest

A message from Nick Jaworski:

When I need specialized, professional services, like accounting, HR, or a new CRM, I don’t hire staff for that. It’s too expensive and one is never enough.

Yet many of the treatment centers my company works with do this all the time. It’s still shocking to me how many treatment center owners aren’t using a CRM. Instead they’re using Excel, or, God forbid, paper tracking.

Do you know the sheer number of labor hours that go into using Excel for tracking of patients and potential admissions? Let’s say you’re paying a business development rep $20 an hour. They’ll easily spend 10 hours a week trying to do all their tracking and client follow-ups in Excel, and that’s if they even bother due to the unwieldy nature of a spreadsheet for that kind of work.

A cheap, but still very good, CRM like Zoho or Active Campaign cost less than $100 a month. So for $1,200 a year, you can have an amazing system that organizes contacts, automates follow-ups, sends task reminders, allows the whole team to organize and collaborate on tracking, and a host of other useful functions.

It should be a no brainer. The same goes for services such as HR, Accounting, Marketing, and Billing.

As the owner of a marketing agency, I’ll tell you what we don’t do – HR or Accounting. I have no one on the team that’s an expert in those areas and wouldn’t even know how to hire the right person if I did want to. That’s outside my wheelhouse.

Instead, I outsource those functions to trusted vendors. This gives me the HUGE advantage of having not just one, but an entire team of experts working on our accounts. While I have one main point of contact at our CPA firm, they have Quickbooks experts, small business tax experts, investment experts, etc.

For less than it would cost me to hire a single person, I get an entire team of experts to do our billing, taxes, and accounts receivable. The same goes for HR. I literally spend less than $2,000 a year on HR services, but they do all my tax filing, payroll calculations, government filings, and benefits management. I couldn’t even hire someone part-time for cheaper than that!

Focus on Core Competencies

One of the greatest advantages of outsourcing to expert partners, aside from the fact that I get an entire team of experts for less than the cost of a single hire, is that it allows us to focus.

I know marketing and operations. I’ve spent over a decade right-sizing failing businesses and helping them grow and scale. When I talk with one of my staff, I know exactly what they should be doing, what quality work looks like, where there are still gaps in their training, etc.

If I had to manage an HR person or an accountant, I wouldn’t know where to start. I’d probably spend more time trying to figure out what they were doing, which would also be a waste of their time.

And that would take precious time away from our ability to focus on clients, grow their brand equity, and drive admissions to their programs. After all, we’re a marketing and operations firm, not an HR or CPA firm. We focus on our core competencies so that we don’t waste time on things we aren’t experts at.

An Entire Team for the Price of One

So this is why it baffles me when smaller centers under 100 beds try to do billing or marketing internally. They don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know how to hire, and they don’t know how to oversee the work. Plus, they pay one person as much as they would pay an entire agency with 3 to 6 people working on their account, all who specialize in different areas.

For example, for our clients, each account has a dedicated copy writer, SEO specialist, graphics designer, web developer, and strategist. For a treatment center to hire all five of those roles would cost them $250,000 a year minimum, not counting hiring and management costs.

So when you can hire a marketing agency that specializes in the addiction treatment space for between $36,000 and $150,000 a year, it should be a no brainer.

A very important factor here is economies of scale. Our tech stack alone costs us $5,000 a month. While that’s a lot of money for a single center to take on to even try to do what we do, it works for us because that cost is spread out over all of our clients.

Billing is no different. Insurance is incredibly complex, unfortunately, and you need several people with preferable decades of combined experience. Trying to do that in-house is a monumental task that is unlikely to even end up saving the program money.

After all, if a billing company can get just 2 claims processed that a less skilled staff would have missed, they’ve already paid for themselves. The same goes for marketing. If we bring in just 10 additional admissions a year above and beyond what internal staff could do, which is super easy on our end, we’ve already more than paid for ourselves.

So if you’re sitting around and you’re hiring a single CMO or Social Media Manager or SEO Specialist, you’re already paying far too much for limited potential returns. Great marketing and great billing requires a lot of expertise in separate areas.

And you need to be focusing on what you do best, delivering quality care. The more you’re distracted from that core mission, the less you’re serving patients.

So focus on what you do best and find a great partner for the rest.

visit    www.circlesocialinc.com

Nick Jaworski is the CEO of Circle Social Inc. a strategic marketing and growth agency specializing in addiction treatment and behavioral health. When he’s not helping clients or advocating for recovery issues across the US, he can be found spending time with his favorite person in the world – his daughter.