DeepSpecialization_EP 109_Stewart Gandolf_Audio_Edited_V2
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[00:00:00] Stewart Gandolf: I think that's where AI is. It'll help you overcome that rat's nest and go straight to the solution. That's my opinion. I think that's, and that's where the wealth is, right? Finding those areas where you can skip over the morass of pain and go straight to a solution is much, much better.
[00:00:15] Corey Quinn: Welcome to the Deep Specialization Podcast, the show where we blend focus, strategy, and client intimacy in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our lives.
[00:00:25] Corey Quinn: I'm your host, Cory Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Welcome back to the Deep Specialization Podcast. Today I'm joined by a repeat visitor, Stuart Gandalf. Stuart is the CEO and founder of Healthcare Success, uh, a leading agency in the healthcare space. Today we're gonna talk all about what it's like to run an agency in the world of ai, this emergence of ai.
[00:00:47] Corey Quinn: So can't wait for us to jump into the conversation. Stuart, welcome back to the show.
[00:00:52] Stewart Gandolf: Corey. Good to be here again, my friend. This is gonna be fun. I just know it and I hope your listeners agree so we'll see. But I.
[00:01:00] Corey Quinn: So where should we jump off? I have a bunch of questions, but wanted to see, you know, what makes sense for you.
[00:01:04] Corey Quinn: Like maybe you could just share with us, you know, kind of state of the union as it relates to agency or the, the world of healthcare marketing and this emergence of ai. So what's, what's going on in your world?
[00:01:15] Stewart Gandolf: It's so much, Corey, that to give you an idea, in the last three phone calls I had prior to this were all about AI and innovation.
[00:01:23] Stewart Gandolf: All three calls were with different vendors, internal meetings. New solutions really. I don't know about every call today, but the last three calls, all of them meaty, all of them important. Were about AI in one form or another. So let me kind of sit the table a little bit and then we'll jump into whatever questions you have.
[00:01:39] Stewart Gandolf: So, you know, obviously ai, by the end of last year, we'd go to conferences and a lot of sessions were about AI and and marketers were. They had the right idea. They knew that this was an important topic and it was kind of like, how do you spell ai? Right? Like they're looking at the most basic, fundamental things and you know, I was among them too, right?
[00:01:57] Stewart Gandolf: Like, I always like being innovative. It's part of my shtick. You know, I was joking a minute ago before we started. I'm crappy a lot of things, but a couple things I'm good at and being innovative and being at these kinds of things, I think I'm probably a little bit better than average, but, um, terrible at basketball, but good at this.
[00:02:10] Stewart Gandolf: So. The, uh, I'd rather be good at basketball, but, okay. So, you know, at the most, most basic function, and a lot of people ask me about this, although it is not as big a deal as you would think, you would think the clients would say, what am I paying for? Now that your writing is all being done by AI or your art's all be, I don't get that at all.
[00:02:28] Stewart Gandolf: We probably have had that comment, but it's never made its way to me. But that is like the sort of level one to me of like, okay, we're gonna do copywriting with ai, kind of try to cheat clients, cheat those search engines. We never really had that philosophy ever and never will. But it's interesting. That doesn't mean AI's not a tool for those basic functions, right?
[00:02:46] Stewart Gandolf: So. With our writing team, we're like, you know, ideas generation. Awesome. You know, doing quick competitive reviews, you know, looking for content gap analysis with SEO. These are all things that AI can be applied to. So I guess my first bit of advice on the writing side, don't try to put Google and the LLMs by putting out a bunch of AI dribble because.
[00:03:05] Stewart Gandolf: That specifically won't work, and in some cases you can get penalized. It's interesting, only about maybe six, eight months ago, Google said, we don't mind ai. It basically said AI by content is not necessarily bad. It just has to be good. Then later they reversed that and they, they don't want AI content, so I think they wanted to kill the incentive for that.
[00:03:23] Stewart Gandolf: But, and then the funny thing is about reading content is you have the large language models reading other large language model ai. So it's like the fe this, the shark is eating itself, right? Like it's like, wait, there's no human here at all. It's got its own thing. So I think that that basic level though of, okay, can I use it for idea generation, use it for, you know, topics.
[00:03:44] Stewart Gandolf: That's all. Cool. Since I'm on this topic, I'm gonna drill on this just for a second. So like for example, Corey with my own podcast, once, you know, I like to write my own descriptions, my own bio, but when I have a guest that I'm not really sure where to start because I'm interviewing but I haven't met them, I'm not sure where I want to go.
[00:03:58] Stewart Gandolf: I'll just put, I'll ask my premium version of perplexity. This is as a reminder. This is my podcast. This is who I'm interviewing. This is a link to his book, gimme some sample questions for the interview and man, out of like the 20 or so, I'll get maybe six or seven. Would be ones that I would've thought of eventually and two or three that are really good that I may not have thought of.
[00:04:16] Stewart Gandolf: So like that's kind of a power of a tool. I'm not doing anything unethical. I'm just moving faster to get good content.
[00:04:23] Corey Quinn: I love it. I love it. So have you, have you tried? So I do a lot of interviewing and certainly AI has helped with being able to do great research at scale much faster for sure. Have you tried the Google Notebook LM tool?
[00:04:37] Stewart Gandolf: No, I, I've heard about that. I just haven't gotten to it yet. So it's on the list with everything else, but I've heard it's great for the listeners. Tell 'em what that is and remind me, because I know I've been told to do it.
[00:04:47] Corey Quinn: So what it is, if you, so I'll tell you what I, what I use it for and how I use it specifically, and then, and then, uh, can share with some other ideas.
[00:04:54] Corey Quinn: So when I'm researching, I interview a lot of business owners and in many cases, I'm not the first podcast they've ever been on. It's probably true that they've been on a couple other podcasts. Right. And so what I. I search for their name, podcast guest. So Stuart Gandalf, podcast guest and up will come previous episodes of podcasts where my future guest has been guest on someone else's podcast.
[00:05:20] Stewart Gandolf: That's brilliant.
[00:05:21] Corey Quinn: So what I do is I copy the URL for all of those videos, like three to four, not all of maybe, but like three to four. And then I drop 'em into Google lm, Google Notebook, lm. And of course what it can do is it can pull the whole transcript of all the videos, combine them all. And what I do is I, I say I'm gonna be interviewing Stewart on my podcast called Deep Specialization, and my target audience is agency founders who are looking to scale and specialize.
[00:05:47] Corey Quinn: And based on the sources provided, develop an intro as well as thought provoking questions I could ask Stuart that would really be beneficial to my audience.
[00:05:58] Stewart Gandolf: Yeah.
[00:06:00] Corey Quinn: Yeah, will do. It'll look through all those transcripts. You can also give it your web, you know, the websites and documents and anything else.
[00:06:06] Corey Quinn: Feed a bunch of good stuff in there, and then it comes out back with a lot of really good questions.
[00:06:10] Stewart Gandolf: I love it. So just two other ideas since we're on this topic. So we use Fathom when I'm recording, I usually use Zoom. I know you're using Riverside, which is probably better, but we use Zoom. And use that in no good way.
[00:06:21] Stewart Gandolf: Just make it as easy as possible in our guest. And so, but using Fathom with that gives the, uh, writer who's gonna summarize the meeting, at least a place to start now as a good cut, uh, host. You need to go back and check. 'cause sometimes, like she may miss the point if she's relying too heavily on that.
[00:06:36] Stewart Gandolf: And she's a great writer by the way. But like, if we had one with my friend Mark Tagger, and it was it, the machine picked up like a sidebar and made that into the topic, like, that's not what this is about. So we had to. But you know, to catch a lot of little stuff to organize it. Especially, you know, like, and for those of you that are, you know, thinking about doing more podcasts, having good questions really helps unless you've got really experienced guests.
[00:06:58] Stewart Gandolf: 'cause it gives you like kind of a beginning, middle, and end and a point. So it's really helpful for that. And the other part of it is. This is fun. So, you know, we're rewriting our podcast pages on our website and just for fun, I said, what is our editorial mission? And I put in our link. And Corey, it was amazing how close it was to our editorial mission based upon the kind of topics I'd covered in reviewing our PO previous podcast.
[00:07:20] Stewart Gandolf: It's insane. So anyway, the writing side is cool. The art side, you know, it's funny, I saw this funny, funny meme. Uh, if you need it, I can go back and find it on LinkedIn. It's like, how did you know this is being AI generated? It had like these little circles of like, what might be a clue, and then our hands were feet like, okay, maybe that's AI generated.
[00:07:37] Stewart Gandolf: So it was pretty funny. It's pretty funny. So the idea of the, we at least for our agency, have used it for little things like background dropouts and things like that, but not really in a very material way. I know there's per, there's other tools out there that are better. We do things very custom the way we're doing things, but like, where I see that being more valuable is just resizing, right?
[00:07:58] Stewart Gandolf: We come up with a good concept and resizing it for programmatic and all these other sites. It could be a, a helpful there. So it's probably used being used better in other categories. I should add that before I get to the crescendo here. The big stuff I think is more fun and we can take your questions is I have something called AI and Innovation Club.
[00:08:16] Stewart Gandolf: We do with our team every single month, and that is like the cool thing about that. We have about 40, you know, people on our team full-time and mostly employees and a few freelancers. And the, what I find is the ones that tend to be the most innovative, the most thought leading, they attend every time, right?
[00:08:32] Stewart Gandolf: The ones that, you know, they just show themselves by being interested in this. And so we call it AI and Innovation Club on purpose because it's about AI usually, but really it's more about innovation. So it doesn't have to be about ai. It could be anything innovative. And Corey, the, the conversation every time is completely different.
[00:08:47] Stewart Gandolf: It's not the same rehash of stuff every time. It's like, Ooh, I saw this. Ooh, I tried this. Ooh, this worked out. So that's something any company could do, and it's completely voluntary and it's certainly worth the 45 minutes. We invest in that every time. So if you like that idea, you can do it.
[00:09:01] Corey Quinn: Yeah. No, I like the idea.
[00:09:02] Corey Quinn: Can I ask a, a kind of a, a follow up question on that. So who is the right person in the organization to own that club? Let's just say that effort of, of kind of celebrating and, and exploring innovation within the organization?
[00:09:15] Stewart Gandolf: That's a great question. So. For good and Ill agencies often reflect their owner, right.
[00:09:20] Stewart Gandolf: Their strengths and weaknesses. So when we started, I've always been, I've always just, to me, change is fun. I, I jump off the roof and figure out how to fly on the way down. I just, that's my nerve. But that causes chaos in an agency. You know, like when you're little,
[00:09:31] Corey Quinn: I say, your employees love you.
[00:09:33] Stewart Gandolf: Yeah. When you're little, you can do that.
[00:09:34] Stewart Gandolf: Well, that's your whole shtick car. You're talking about specialization and you're right, right. All the way. Sadly you weren't around when I was learning how to do this. So I just figured out by failing over and over and over again what didn't work. So that doesn't work if you're scaling an agency. You need processes, you need systems or whatever.
[00:09:49] Stewart Gandolf: But I still love innovation and so I nominated myself to do that. I mean, there was, it was my idea to do the club, right? So by nature I do it. But if it's not the CEO of your business and maybe your CEO doesn't have time, I think this thing is somebody who's passionate about with learning and what's new.
[00:10:03] Stewart Gandolf: And like our head of digital services. Brandon, he's like that too. He and I are both in this sort of double secret agent club where we just like geek out over this stuff all the time and he's more technical than I am by far. And you can always invite him back for a meeting, some dime if you wanna go P with what's possible out there.
[00:10:19] Stewart Gandolf: But you know, we just have that nature. There's several people on our team that could do it. And if I ever stepped aside from this, I know I have other people, but I think it's that hunger, that thirst for doing things better. And you know, going back to what we could do differently. Like if we're doing a, if I'm critiquing our own AI innovation club, we could be spending more of our time innovating new systems.
[00:10:37] Stewart Gandolf: Right. Focusing on that versus just the sexy, bright, shiny objects that I've been known to focus in on that mundane stuff every day.
[00:10:44] Corey Quinn: Yeah. Well, and, and the world's changing so fast, there is value in talking about the shiny stuff. 'cause that could become the new, the new thing.
[00:10:51] Stewart Gandolf: So let's talk about that.
[00:10:53] Stewart Gandolf: Okay. So I don't usually wait so long to get to the, my main point, so I apologize for that. But we're having fun along the way. But here's my main point for if I was to give anybody a takeaway, and I've been doing this now for a couple decades, plus I've been doing this for a while, and I would say that the times I remember being really excited about, like what I do was like when I first learned what up end is up.
[00:11:15] Stewart Gandolf: That was fun. Paid search and SEO was amazing. Like we founded our company around 2006. We weren't, you know, bleeding edge, but we were doing content marketing before that term was commonly adopted. Right. We were doing all, you know, I've been doing that for years in, in the, in the analog world, so like.
[00:11:31] Stewart Gandolf: Figuring out SEO page search, that was so transformative. I think AI right now is at least as big. It's so huge because it empowers all these other things we've been doing. Now. It's a huge disruptor and I feel like the great news is, and the bad news is that, you know, not everybody's gonna survive. Like, it's not ideal.
[00:11:50] Stewart Gandolf: So I think it's really, really disruptive. And so we're talking about, you know, like I would recommend if you're an agency owner to be thinking about what does this mean for us long term? It's not a tactic. It's not like, okay, I can do my copy a little faster. It's like, how is that going to transform our whole business?
[00:12:06] Stewart Gandolf: And so that's a thing. And then I would also say for us, the two things we're most excited about Corey, number one is call tracking. So far in our world in, uh, the world of healthcare, we work with larger entities. We don't work with really individual doctors that we did years ago. We work with multi-locations, specialty practices.
[00:12:24] Stewart Gandolf: We work with, you know, health systems and hospitals. We work with SaaS, device pharma. Telehealth a lot, but generally anytime we're working with a provider, they're, how do I put this? Nicely, subpar at answering their phones usually. Uh, sometimes just they get an F. Oftentimes they get an F Once in a while we get A's and B's, but I can count them on one hand that I can remember.
[00:12:44] Stewart Gandolf: It's really rare. So the whole thing about if you could imagine is an eight. And some of your agency owners I'm sure can relate whatever their vertical. You send clients 700 calls a month and they claim none of them are good clients 'cause nobody converted. That's not what's really going on. So call tracking has been around for a long time, but AI assisted call tracking can prove that.
[00:13:04] Stewart Gandolf: Whether that was a new caller or repeat caller, whether that person made an appointment or not, whether that person was handled well by the front office, whether that person, you know individually, how is that office doing, how is that operator doing? That data is amazing and I believe Corey. That's gonna change our business fundamentally because it'll prove, you know, like we would before sample calls, we might take 50 or a hundred, and by the time we got back to the client with that weeks have passed and you know, it's a more of a difficult discussion and now you're reacting versus real time.
[00:13:36] Stewart Gandolf: When you first onboard a client, imagine telling 'em the first week, by the way, your phone suck. Let's triage that. Like that's amazing because I can't think of any client that listened to more than a handful of the thousands of calls we generated them. They just don't do it. So I think that's fantastic.
[00:13:51] Stewart Gandolf: So before I go on, I wonder if you have some comments or questions on that particular topic.
[00:13:55] Corey Quinn: So how I'm thinking about that, I mean it's, it's a classic dilemma around the agency space, especially when you're serving businesses that are, it's called service-based businesses that have some form of an intake where they're paying an agency.
[00:14:07] Corey Quinn: The agency is doing. What they believe is excellent work. They're sending in doing campaigns which are resulting in high quality leads, but then of course the client drops the ball for, you know, for whatever reason. Whether, you know, it's, it's, it's obviously good intent, but they're, they're not sophisticated.
[00:14:22] Corey Quinn: They don't have a system. They don't know how to track it, and that's just not their core competency. Of course, who's stuck holding the bag is the agency. 'cause that's where they're spending all the money with. So I love this and I love the fact that. You can use AI to take a hundred percent sample of the call to be able to basically take away the, any doubt of where the, let's call it the bottleneck is in the value chain.
[00:14:45] Corey Quinn: In other words, it's not the leads now. 'cause we've proven that out based on all the, the clear data here. But the opportunity to improve is one step deeper into the sales funnel. So does that mean then that agencies need to get into the intake business?
[00:15:01] Stewart Gandolf: I think so. I mean, so like this world is merging and so I'm gonna talk about another topic in a moment that's perhaps even bigger.
[00:15:08] Stewart Gandolf: But in the, just for that technology now, let's presume that you have to have calls answered by humans. So, you know, like there's really basically two different models in the, in our world, I. You have either a call center or they're being sent out to the individual offices. As you might imagine, the individual offices are even more scary 'cause it's really hard to control people what's happening at the phone.
[00:15:26] Stewart Gandolf: Right. And as a patient you've experienced that right. Doctor's office, please hold. They never come back, Corey. They never come back. So meanwhile, like healthcare has embraced consumerism last like probably did last. You know, like I, not very long ago, I tell doctors or administrators about. Patient experience, and I've spoken on this topic at major conferences, like patient experience, I don't care if they like me, I just get them better.
[00:15:53] Stewart Gandolf: Like the arrogance behind that con that comment is like pretty overwhelming, but, so it's come a long way since then, but still, you know, customer service and patient experience for most organizations, not all, is not like the even a, even a primary goal, let alone the primary goal. So usually it's really more set up around systems.
[00:16:11] Stewart Gandolf: So what's cool though is as patient experience in healthcare consumers and becomes more and more important, you'll see now, like for example, they, and there's also reimbursement issues associated with this. Uh, being able to raise their scores in their way. They handle calls, so that means that you care a lot more about reviews and what, what is the one, number one cause of bad reviews?
[00:16:30] Stewart Gandolf: Typically, from the research I've seen the phones and the signup process. So as, as you start improving this, not only is your marketing getting better, your customer service experience is getting better. So it's kinda like a win-win win. Everybody's happier. And then what's also happening, Corey, is like in our world, you have different categories of players.
[00:16:49] Stewart Gandolf: You have CRMs. You have people call them EHRs EMRs, but they're really practice management platforms. The EH, REMR is really about the medical records themselves. The practice management platform is all the other business stuff in the practice. So you've got a CRM or not. You've got a practice management platform or not.
[00:17:06] Stewart Gandolf: You've got a reputation management platform, or not a texting and patient communication portal to be able to text or SMS or whatever chat. Then you have online scheduling. Then you have fun, like all these different technologies, right? And so what's happening is everybody wants a piece of the pie. So there's a land rush to see what's this gonna shake out.
[00:17:27] Stewart Gandolf: The amazing thing is in our world is how like these practice management platforms are generally just average in any of these functions. So you have the sea of. Third party platforms that all have to sort of bolt on and play well with each other. So that's another part of this. So the, I would argue that in our industry and probably most industries, AI isn't directly changing the rules of game, but it's also forcing accelerating change in the related tech.
[00:17:53] Stewart Gandolf: That's another reason why it's such an exciting time. 'cause there it's gonna get better. I mean No, I'm just saying like scheduling a dam appointment online. Right. It's like you still have whole businesses that refuse to do that and every survey shows client patients want to do that step vastly. They don't want to.
[00:18:09] Corey Quinn: Yeah. UCA where I go doesn't do that. So, but given all this context, all these different platforms, is it then therefore the future of healthcare success, your agency as well as others that maybe are you evolving more into like a systems integrator?
[00:18:24] Stewart Gandolf: Yeah, so it's a great question. So this year I told our head of digital that this is a transformative year with us.
[00:18:31] Stewart Gandolf: We've always been good at tech, we've always been, you know, sort of. I dunno if we're a bleeding edge. We were always kind of good at it, but 'cause it's just our philosophy. But I felt at the beginning of this year, really at the end of last year, that this is gonna be transformative and it's difficult because what you know today will not be true anymore about that vendor in three to six months.
[00:18:49] Stewart Gandolf: It's a real challenge. The vendors are all changing and a lot of them are claiming stuff they can't actually do yet. So, you know, how do you pick the right horse when all the horses are evolving and growing in front of you and changing, and you can't watch 'em all? You can't have perfect knowledge. So I would say, you know, as are an agency, you know, like when we, you know, and.
[00:19:08] Stewart Gandolf: Fortunately we're of size big enough. There's no secret here. Corey, I've been called by, you know, private equity and strategic investors wanting to buy us since like mid two thousands, certainly around 2017 to 18. It really picked up and you know, like, so some of the people that are interested in partnering with us someday look at us as an agency.
[00:19:24] Stewart Gandolf: Other looked at us as a tech enabled healthcare services company, which I think is really intriguing. It's a whole different class and we can answer, check those boxes on both. So I think it's a, it's a com a company imperative. And this is challenging given your model and it's really challenging given our business to do that.
[00:19:42] Stewart Gandolf: Right? Like ideally, and I love your specialization audience and the principles, and I follow this stuff. You do. And you know, again, if only known you so many years ago, but it, this really does fit your philosophy too. Like we wanna have a best in class platform for call tracking for. Patient signups for all these things.
[00:20:00] Stewart Gandolf: That way when clients come to us, we'll have a credible case, why they should change, meaning that they'll be better served by our team. And we're not trying to learn a hundred different technologies, most of which don't work. So there's a lot of upfront work for us to do that because you know, we're vetting kind of everything that touches us and there's like, each of those platforms are different, but.
[00:20:21] Stewart Gandolf: Identifying it, you know, our preferred provider and maybe a backup provider for each of those, I think is really critical. And nobody wants to pay us for that, right? That's all part of an investment of being in a business. But if, if you don't do it, you're gonna be lost. And I think your former employer Scope Bian, was really prescient at this, right?
[00:20:37] Stewart Gandolf: They did that from the beginning. Everything was built to scale. And, you know, belatedly, we were going there, we're more integrated. So we have a different business model, but the more we can get towards scale the better. And so by mastering these technologies, having, you know, like, so for example, I won't name the call tracking platform, but a lot of people in this space come to us.
[00:20:55] Stewart Gandolf: Already with one that we're like, oh God, not that one again. So, you know, but our team just sucks it up. So now they're working with a platform they don't like, they don't know because the client insists we wanna be able to come back to them with a really well built out case. Why you should switch. And then we'll say, we support this platform, but not this one.
[00:21:12] Stewart Gandolf: Here's why. Hopefully that's helpful to you. I think that's in line though, with your philosophy.
[00:21:16] Corey Quinn: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. So I mean, in a way, this kind of redefines the definition of patient acquisition from just straight lead gen to providing a complete solution from, you know, sourcing them from the, you know, the, the ether, the web, the out there and bringing, you know, bringing them at to be actual real appointment in their calendar.
[00:21:36] Stewart Gandolf: Yeah, well, exactly, and so that's the sort of holy grail that's pretty achievable in other businesses, but not so much in healthcare broadly, at least not with providers. We do it with other businesses, but providers are tough. I do wanna pivot for a second and talk about something that is also exciting that we're also developing, which is AI phone agents, which just answer the calls altogether.
[00:21:55] Corey Quinn: Yeah. What your, what's your, what's your experience there?
[00:21:58] Stewart Gandolf: So that is developing really rapidly and a major player, Zocdoc just came out with their own phone agents, so that shows you there are, and we also have another company we're talking to at present and tele peer, which we like a lot. So there's players out there that are doing this.
[00:22:14] Stewart Gandolf: And we are also in the process of choosing who we wanna make as a sort of first provider. We're really excited about in Inteper as a potential partner. But you know, like again, we're doing the due diligence on all this stuff.
[00:22:26] Corey Quinn: Have you listened to these calls now? Are these calls any good? Like would you as a ones?
[00:22:29] Stewart Gandolf: I, okay, so this is funny, Corey, maybe, I don't know, November, October, this little Indian company with about probably five people called me and they played me sample calls. I'm like, that is shockingly good. I can't work with you. 'cause I asked 'em about hipaa, which in our industry is everything. And they barely knew about it.
[00:22:49] Stewart Gandolf: Like, yep, you're disqualified already. There's no, I can't, we can't work with you. So I saw them like four months later at a big dental conference and they're, they have already figured that out and they now have several big dental clients, like multi-location dental groups. So that was crazy how fast they grew and how they've adapted So.
[00:23:08] Stewart Gandolf: That's a challenge though, 'cause there's very little barrier to entry. What's, these companies are riding the rails of other, you know, they're not creating this stuff from scratch. They're riding the technologies that are already out there. So it's how do you, you know, know who's gonna be around in the long term?
[00:23:23] Stewart Gandolf: For us, it's a really a critical decision. I, like I said, I don't wanna reevaluate and change my software every year. And then for us too, we're considering creating proprietary versions of this. 'cause what we do is so specialized and so important that, you know, I'm not gonna go to those details, but, you know, having a proprietary sort of double version that's available and all this knowledge adds value.
[00:23:46] Stewart Gandolf: But, and, but I think eventually it's gonna be table stakes. So it's a little scary. Especially like, you know, if, you know, I remember being smaller when it was just me and my partner and Bookkeeper
[00:24:00] Corey Quinn: Corp. Was that, yeah, the riches are in the niches, but the wealth. Capital W Wealth are in the systems, right? And Scorpion did a great job of really building systems that removes a lot of the human variability and also dependency on the third party platforms. Like when I first got there, I dunno if you remember Marin Software, which is like used to be an old timey kind of PPC management.
[00:24:25] Corey Quinn: Thing they had just ripped it out and they said, you know what? We could do it better than Marin. And so we're gonna build our own PPC optimization algorithms and tools for our clients. Uh, custom built for our situation. That was, that was an exam. That's an example of a system that Scorpion built. And I think although expensive and complicated requires specialized knowledge to do that well, it does create much more of a significant moat around you from a valuation perspective as well as.
[00:24:53] Corey Quinn: One of the things I loved about Scorpion and just admired about what we built was that, you know, because it was all proprietary, it was custom made for the, for the actual situation that we were trying to solve. So,
[00:25:04] Stewart Gandolf: so I would agree. One thing, I think that's the better way to do it, obviously, but if you know anybody in the audience is panicking and like slapping their head in their head or their forehead, it is definitely better to do that.
[00:25:14] Stewart Gandolf: But at least having, integrating the stuff that's already out there is a step forward in valuation. It does matter. You know, like I told you, people like have continued to whisper in our ear and hopefully will forever until we're ready. But you know, they ask these people when they're having just sort of friendly conversations.
[00:25:33] Stewart Gandolf: One of the first things they ask about is, what's your recurring revenue model? What's your marketing systems? What's your tech stack? Who are your people? Those are the questions people ask. They scale,
[00:25:41] Corey Quinn: they want, they wanna understand. Yeah. What is human led versus systems led.
[00:25:45] Stewart Gandolf: Yeah, for sure. So that's all super important.
[00:25:48] Stewart Gandolf: So I, I just think it's, you know, to finish that thought and the other questions you have, but that was my main preamble, is I feel like it's an exciting time. Oh, another thing that we could talk about for a second is just how search or SEO is changing. So, you know, paid search is changing, but SEO is changing dramatically and they're trying to figure out and all agree on a new term that takes into account AI overviews and LLMs like chat GT and perplexity.
[00:26:10] Stewart Gandolf: I. So that's a whole new world. That whole product line needs to change. And you know, the best people in the industry are thinking about this, right? So I have two of the people that I'm working with very closely are both speaking at Pubcon this week in a couple days. And you know, we're going and participating in brighten, SEO.
[00:26:26] Stewart Gandolf: Like that's a moving target. Like how do we adapt to this new world? And that's some of the stuff we cover in more detail on our own podcast. So if your audience is interested, they can hear more about that there.
[00:26:36] Corey Quinn: Yeah. Ahead and plug it. What's the name? Your podcast?
[00:26:38] Stewart Gandolf: I've just go to healthcare success.com and navigate over to the podcast or just put in healthcare success.com/podcast.
[00:26:44] Stewart Gandolf: We cover these kinds of topics all the time, so not really in a pluggy way, but just 'cause if you're really interested in this kind of stuff. We talk about this a lot with various guests who actually are deeper in this than I am, right? I'm the CEOI can't, Corey, I wish I could get deep. I just can't. I don't have time.
[00:26:59] Stewart Gandolf: I've gotta run the business.
[00:27:01] Corey Quinn: Let's talk about specialization. Like what are your, what are your views or perspectives on the fact that, you know, if AI does its job of truly democratizing access to talent and tools, why does vertical specialization still matter?
[00:27:14] Stewart Gandolf: I think it always matters. I mean, again, like I picked a niche called healthcare, which is huge, right?
[00:27:19] Stewart Gandolf: So, you know, and you've had people on your show that do just dentist, and so that is a little scary if you have just one to me. But you know, the way that we evolved as a company and. Just to help your listeners know, I was so crazy to work with pretty much every medical specialty is because I spent about 10 years on the road teaching practices how to grow their business through marketing back in the nineties and early two thousands.
[00:27:39] Stewart Gandolf: So, you know, we knew nephrology and gastroenterology as well as ophthalmology and dermatology or whatever, so we could help anybody. So we limited to healthcare, but it is much harder to scale that way. We did it, but it's hard. So, you know, the niche thing is, is great. I love some of your philosophies. Like, you know, some of the things I've read, you read about in your book, which love your book, uh, is doing well.
[00:28:01] Stewart Gandolf: But, and also your blog, it's like, you know, having, okay, maybe thinking about things like the, what's the opportunity and are they used to spending money and is it deep enough and maybe having two or three, especially if you're getting into an industry like travel, which can be cyclical. So I think that's really smart.
[00:28:19] Stewart Gandolf: You know, it's. I talk about this a lot, Corey, I took prospective clients like our greatest strength is that, you know, we are integrated, we can help 'em with the whole thing. And our greatest weakness from a, from a selfish point of view is that 'cause you have to have all these expensive people, you have to manage all these expensive people, it's much harder to scale.
[00:28:38] Stewart Gandolf: That said, there is an audience that wants to come to us because we're integrated, right? So there are people that maybe on the show that are working with, you know, lots of say, I don't know, one given doctor or whatever. But then eventually the client wants more of a marketing partner. They can handle their brand, they can handle, you know, everything.
[00:28:55] Stewart Gandolf: And so that's like square in our sweet spot. So the good news is it's definitely a niche, right? We went a lot of business because of that, but the challenge is always managing it and scaling. It's hard. It just takes lots of really smart, expensive people. There's no way around it. It just does. Hopefully that's, that's as honest as I can be about that.
[00:29:12] Corey Quinn: Yeah. No. Is there, is there any nuance, let's call it, about healthcare or the work you do that you think AI will struggle with? What parts of the healthcare specialization will AI struggle with?
[00:29:25] Stewart Gandolf: I think it's really interesting. So I had lunch with a former writer who works in pharma right now, and part of his job is to quality control.
[00:29:34] Stewart Gandolf: 'cause the, the amount of regulatory stuff they have to do is insane. And so as a human, they did like, I forget, a hundred thousand pages of content and they discovered 200 errors and the client freaked out. So like that's a lot of quality that you need. So like that feels like an AI thing could be part of that solution, right?
[00:29:50] Stewart Gandolf: Helping take that human element of trying to review so much data, or at least as a first pass, like that's really, really important. I think AI will also like anything that's maintained, anything that's repetitive, you know, AI is clearly really good at, I feel like the areas you still need to trust, you still need to have people that are managing it.
[00:30:08] Stewart Gandolf: Remember I talked about that podcast where the AI just missed the point entirely. You can't just trust it. You still need a human. I think also like in our industry, there's tons of regulation. So there's regulation issues. So you've gotta make sure that you're doing that. And I think you also have to do your due diligence.
[00:30:24] Stewart Gandolf: 'cause people tell you they're like, for example, HIPAA compliant, but how do you really know? And that actually, sadly, for smaller businesses, it does tend to make me work with, wanna work with larger businesses because they have something to lose. Like the guys in India I told you about earlier is I love them, they're great and maybe they're big enough for us to work.
[00:30:39] Stewart Gandolf: But when they were independent like that, it was just too risky for me to work with. So I think that it really is a wild west. I think it will settle down everything else in the, you know, business history eventually settles down and eventually, you know, the winners are separated from the losers. And I would just say as a, you know, in healthcare specifically, maybe I'll leave it this thought.
[00:30:57] Stewart Gandolf: I think in healthcare there's so many problems that other industries have already solved that AI could help accelerate through growth. And I'll use another metaphor I use of my clients in different, in what I'm speaking to. So I remember reading about this years ago and back in the day. India, it turns out was, I have to go back and fact check this, but I remember this specifically, India was a relatively early adopter with cells and the reason is cell cell service and the reason is their legacy was so bad is such a rat's nest, so difficult to untangle.
[00:31:26] Stewart Gandolf: They just sort of skipped over fixing the wires. It went straight to cellular. So I think that's where AI is. It'll help you overcome that rat's nest and go straight to the solution. That's my. Opinion. I think that's, that's where the wealth is, right? Finding those areas where you can skip over the morass of pain and go straight to a solution is much, much better.
[00:31:45] Corey Quinn: You mentioned there will be winners and there will be losers. What separates the two?
[00:31:50] Stewart Gandolf: Obviously Corey, I hope that I'm on the winning side of that equation and, but you know, we've been able to weather 20 years now. We're at 19 years going on 20, so we've lived with change after change, both internal and external.
[00:32:02] Stewart Gandolf: Right? We've had internal changes and disruption and external changes. As you know, people leave and pandemics come and go and recessions and all these things. Technology changes. I think it still comes down to, you know, the old Wayne Gretzky metaphor, which every he talks about, which I hope you actually said about, you know, the players go to where the puck is.
[00:32:19] Stewart Gandolf: I go to where it's going. I think that's really vital and I think about that a lot. I think about, you know, really basic ideas. Sometimes I think about the Wayne Gretzky thing and I think about 80 20 Rule a lot. I remember learning about 80 20 my first. Class and marketing and the idea that 20% of the activity yields 80% of the result that I think about a lot.
[00:32:38] Stewart Gandolf: I love that because, you know, most people don't fully understand that idea. But you know, just in case somebody who does it on this, uh, podcast, not just that 20% yields 80% of the results, but within that top 20%, 20% of the 20% yields 80% of the 80%, and roughly about 1% of the cause agent will impact about half the results.
[00:32:57] Stewart Gandolf: So it's been shown in all kinds of life situations, hard science, human relationships. It's a powerful thought. So if, you know, I would encourage other agency owners to think about, okay, where's this puck going and what materially will impact your business? And then also what's realistic, because agency life is hard.
[00:33:15] Stewart Gandolf: Like, you know, and I meet somebody who just wants a certain age. It's like, are you sure? It's really, really, really, really hard. I mean, Corey, I knew it was gonna be hard. I didn't know it was gonna be this hard, and I know what I'm doing. I like to think at least.
[00:33:26] Corey Quinn: Yeah,
[00:33:26] Stewart Gandolf: if you knew. If you only knew. Yeah. But yeah, so like I said, because of my nature of just trying stuff, I did it the hard way.
[00:33:33] Stewart Gandolf: I, I highly recommend you read Corey's book and go to Corey's workshops and hire Corey. 'cause you can learn it my way over 20 years. Or you could hire Corey. I think I would recommend hiring Corey not to. It was, that was an unrequested plug, but I'm just telling you. No, I appreciate that.
[00:33:54] Corey Quinn: So couple of final questions before we wrap up here, because we're running short on time. If you were starting healthcare success from Scratch Today, like an AI native business from day one, what wouldn't exist in the business or in the org chart today? I
[00:34:08] Stewart Gandolf: think it would be the same functions, but they would be consolidated and restructured with different skill sets.
[00:34:14] Stewart Gandolf: Like I would say, like right now we have, you know, we always have, we're, we're large enough, we've got about 40 people. And which by the way, you know, like in the world of agencies, we're small compared to j Walter Thompson, but in the world of healthcare marketing agencies we're pretty big compared to most, at least as far as an independent right.
[00:34:28] Stewart Gandolf: So the, you know, we always have people turn over, you know, once in a while, right? We have enough people that's going to happen. So we have somebody we're changing now, every time we have a new player, we think, does that what, does that still make sense? That job description in our new world? And we're going through that right now.
[00:34:41] Stewart Gandolf: And do we wanna hire a car, carbon copy, the person's leaving? Probably not. So we love our employees and we're not just gonna go change everybody out, but as people will come and go. We like to rethink of like what's new and what can we do differently, whether we're doing it through AI or whether we're doing it through, we don't do a lot of outsourcing.
[00:35:00] Stewart Gandolf: We do some, sometimes we use outsourcing for scaling 'cause you know, work ebbs and flows for any agency. But you know, really rethinking the model. I think we would probably start, when you're starting with an empty page. It is, you know, as overwhelming as is start a new agency, it is an incredible opportunity at the same time.
[00:35:16] Stewart Gandolf: 'cause you don't have to worry about appeasing or offending any clients. You don't have to worry about or you know, keeping employees that you like that are no longer a fit. You know? So as challenging and as in some ways, in other ways, it's really liberating. So I would say that I would be thinking a lot about where it's going.
[00:35:29] Stewart Gandolf: I would say going back to, you know, the. SEO as that evolves, and I mentioned we'll talk about that in our own podcast, you know, probably in more detail in the coming weeks and months. I think that's really where the, the magic is for the digital stuff, right? Like everybody still wants to be seen. The short answer is be everywhere.
[00:35:48] Stewart Gandolf: Like, well, how do you do that? Right? So if you watch other thought leaders in this space. Be everywhere. That sounds great. How do you get the budget for that? You know, I'm struggling to get a client to spend 5,000 a month be everywhere is tough. So you have to think through, okay and what kind of clients do you want?
[00:36:02] Stewart Gandolf: So hopefully that answers your question. I would, you know, with zero based thinking and you know, actually now that you bring that up, that's probably wouldn't be a bad exercise to do anyway, even though it's not what I have. It may reveal some glaring problems and then another corollary of that. I'm just rolling here, but you know, my job, I don't wanna just like, you know, and we're not going to, unless my employees listen to this, we're not planning on firing people and just replacing everybody with ai.
[00:36:25] Stewart Gandolf: Not only would that not work, it's a terrible idea, but we probably will be more selective when we hire. Um, going forward, we'll think twice. We put out an ad for a position that, this is funny, Corey, you'll get this. I put it on LinkedIn and I forgot to switch it to make them apply directly rather than easy apply.
[00:36:43] Stewart Gandolf: So an hour and a half later it's like you have 80 resumes to look at. I'm like, so if you're an employer. Don't let easy apply. It's like, oh my God. The most just, no. So anyway, but 80 resumes, we found four candidates in an hour and a half that, you know, theoretically could fit that in an hour and a half.
[00:37:04] Stewart Gandolf: So we had to weed through a lot. That's crazy.
[00:37:06] Corey Quinn: Just you mentioned, you mentioned you're being more selective this time. In what ways are you being more selective? I
[00:37:12] Stewart Gandolf: think we've always, well, first of all, I've learned that I'm only an average interviewer. I told you I suck at a lot of things. Right?
[00:37:17] Stewart Gandolf: Interviewing isn't my thing as much, so I tend to, like, I get suckered by charisma easily. So just facts, right? And that's a, the other rumor around the, how the, the place is, Stewart falls in love with everybody at first. Like, okay, maybe that's true. So our team brings a more systematic way of hiring, which I think is absolutely essential.
[00:37:37] Stewart Gandolf: And that's like, so that's just a weakness of mine. So I rely on my team to create questions in advance. So we have a rule book. It's not, it's no longer shooting from the hip, Corey, like Stewart style. Oh, I like them. I'll talk about X. So we have, you know, eight or 10 imperative questions to ask. We're listening to carefully how they're answering specific questions.
[00:37:57] Stewart Gandolf: Oh, hotspot just did a series. They're in the middle of a series right now. If anybody cares, I can provide you a link to provide on your post on that one. It's really good. And he talks about how he hires in one of those episodes, like, damn it, I wish I'd known. That's tough. You know, like they're systemology.
[00:38:12] Stewart Gandolf: So I think we're always getting stronger, but that's really important. So I think our process is better now, but I also think what we're looking for we're, we're more clear. And I think that's also from growing up as an organization. And then, like I said though, I wouldn't just dust off that, that job description, I'd really think before you replace somebody, is that still the job we wanna hire for today?
[00:38:32] Stewart Gandolf: Is that really the skillset you need?
[00:38:34] Corey Quinn: The last question here as we wrap up. So in the world where clients can generate content and generate strategy briefs with a little bit of, uh, a little bit of talent using ai. Your agency or other agencies earn trust and margin in 2025 and beyond.
[00:38:50] Stewart Gandolf: So I think, you know, again, like I'm sure that's going to happen more.
[00:38:55] Stewart Gandolf: But we haven't experienced that yet to a big degree because the kind of clients that wanted to do that before, were doing that before anyway. You know, like we have clients, for example, I can think of one that just uses this for page search, but on SEO, they just, they've always believed in, you know, content farms to literally go off and hire $50 blogs by somebody who's not even a native speaker just to throw content out.
[00:39:18] Stewart Gandolf: So their religion hasn't changed, and now they're just using AI instead of content farms. So that wasn't really a good client for us. Anyway, so that said though, I think it's again, deep specialization. Corey, I don't know any other way to go, Corey, than to follow the, per the, your advice in terms of specialization and maybe my advice would be to be get people and get really, really, really good at what you do to where you can confidently say, we've got best in class people on our team.
[00:39:46] Stewart Gandolf: Just getting by with basic stuff you learned four years ago will not be, I don't think those companies will survive very well because it's too easy to replace them. They're not adding any value. But you know, all the stuff you talk about, Corey, and again, I'm not plugging you so much, it's just verifying your experience.
[00:40:02] Stewart Gandolf: All the stuff you talk about when you're a true, when we talk to a client in our niches, we really, really, really, really know what we're talking about. And that becomes variant in the first couple minutes. So then it's a lot less about, you know, justifying our right to breathe air. And it's more about are you a good, is this a good mutual fit?
[00:40:22] Stewart Gandolf: It's a different positioning entirely, and we really have an equal seat at the table, like we're not right for everybody. Not everybody's right for us. So I think the specialization is really, I mean the market's coming to you, Corey, I think honestly, because otherwise what? How do you defend it? How do you defend?
[00:40:37] Stewart Gandolf: Well, we do a shoe store, we do a bank, we do a massage person. Like how do you defend that in this age? I don't know how you can't.
[00:40:46] Corey Quinn: People, people wanna hire people who understand their specific problems and I think so. So demonstrate expertise. Yep. Stuart, thank you so much for coming on the show. You've been a fantastic guest.
[00:40:55] Corey Quinn: So much wisdom. I've taken a ton of notes here and I've learned a lot and I anticipate the audience has as well, so I hope
[00:41:02] Stewart Gandolf: so. This has been fun. I appreciate it, Gary. And, uh, we'll talk again soon. Thanks.
[00:41:07] Corey Quinn: Thanks for tuning in to the Deep Specialization Podcast. Are you ready to find out if your agency is built to scale?
[00:41:14] Corey Quinn: Take my free five minute agency growth score [email protected]. That's agency growth score.com, and get tailored insights across your positioning, marketing and sales systems. Also, be sure to subscribe for more episodes that help you specialize. And scale your sales with dream clients.
