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In this episode, Dr. Corey Malnikof discusses:
- Scaling from one clinic to 24 locations
- Building a patient-focused clinic culture
- Marketing strategies that work for doctors
- AI, SEO, and social media marketing
- Advice for growing a successful practice
Key Takeaways:
“Marketing works best when it comes from authenticity. If you truly love helping people, then marketing simply becomes sharing that passion with your community.” – Dr. Corey Malnikof
“Scaling a practice requires systems, leadership, and the willingness to step into uncertainty before growth happens.” – Dr. Corey Melnikov
“Doctors don’t always need bigger budgets to grow. Many of the best patient acquisition strategies are free and relationship-driven.” – Dr. Corey Malnikof
Connect with Corey Malnikof
Connect with Barbara Hales:
- 🐦 Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
📘 Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
🌐 Business Website: TheMedicalStrategist.com
📧 Email: info@TheMedicalStrategist.com ▶️ YouTube:@barbarahales 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/barbarahalesBooks:
TRANSCRIPTION (241)
Building a Patient-Focused Chiropractic Brand
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today, you’re in for a rare treat. We have Dr. Corey Malnikov here with us. He is the CEO of Palmer Care Group, a healthcare organization operating 24 chiropractic clinics across the whole United States. He is an entrepreneur, speaker, and leader known for building high performing teams, scalable systems, and world class patient experiences. Today we’re going to dive into what actually works when it comes to marketing for doctors, how to attract the right patients, grow your practice, and build something that truly scales. Welcome to the show.”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Thank you for the introduction. Always fun to hear all of that in 111 share. Thank you.”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“When you first started out, did you see patients at that time?”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Yeah, no, I was a.. I’ve been in practice for 21 years. I saw patients probably up to about seven or eight years ago, I had about 10 clinics at the time, and so I was a full-time guy. I loved seeing patients that they literally had to kind of rip it out of my hands for me to stop, but I kept cutting back. I kept.. I went from full-time to Monday, Wednesdays, and then just Mondays, and then I think I got to the point where I had a patient laying down, I was listening to what my doctors were saying, I was listening to the front desk, I was thinking about the other clinics, and I just felt bad for not being there 100% for the patients, and so, yeah, it’s been probably seven eight years, and I’ve been running the clinics instead of in it, but is there a long time?”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“What made your practice unique in compared to other chiropractic offices around? Did you have multiple streams of income? Where were there additional services that others didn’t provide? Were there products that you felt your patients could use? Like, what is it that made you different,”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“yeah. And I will say, you know, with 24 clinics, you know, when doctors are into different things, we do have all sorts of different techniques and instruments and things that we use on patients, but really, what makes us different is I always tried to create this atmosphere, you know, I was a big Starbucks junkie in the beginning, you know, and I was trying to open a practice, and you know, I thought I’d graduate, put a shingle up, you know, the Red Sea would part, patients would line up, I’d take care of them, and the reality, like most, most entrepreneurs find out, is you open up, and then you know nothing. So I studied a lot, I studied Amazon, I studied Nordstrom, I studied the Ritz, I studied Disney, and I studied Starbucks, and Starbucks talked about how Starbucks was meant to be the third home, right? You had home, you had work, and then Starbucks,”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“but no, I thought no drive-through, right?”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Right, exactly, no drive-thru, but I thought, you know, a chiropractic clinic, a wellness clinic, should be the third home, not Starbucks. And so I kind of wanted to create this atmosphere, and I was always really big into personal and professional development for my doctors, for my staff, and even for my patients. So we tried to build a place, and we always talked about when patients come into our place, if their anxiety is high, we’re going to lower their anxiety to peace, and if their energy is low, we’re going to bring their energy up. And so for us, it was all about the experience, the second you walked through the door, the way you were greeted, the way you were treated, the way your case was managed, and how we kind of had an impact on every aspect of your life, emotional, physical, chemical, and treatment. And so that was the goal, and for me, that’s what’s made us different. It’s just the culture and the place we created,”
Scaling From One Clinic to 24 Locations
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“that’s wonderful. Now, before you had your first offshoot, you must have been a little bit nervous about doing that. Would opening up another location divide my patients, or would I succeed? You know, walk me through that, and how, and how you did succeed.”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Yeah, I had no intentions of having 24 clinics. I had every intention of opening one clinic and trying to make it as successful as humanly possible, being a big part of the community and making that who I was. The reality was I opened a clinic, didn’t know what I was doing, figured out what I was doing, and then very fast grew it. I had been renting a room while I was waiting for my clinic to get built with from another chiropractor, and when he kind of saw how fast I built it, he said, “You know, my friend is selling a practice, I’ll go buy it, I just need you, you can be 5050 partners, no money, and you just fix it, and so that second clinic. Was just kind of like I couldn’t do anything else in my current clinic. My wife was about to join me, so we couldn’t, we couldn’t fit any more patients there. So the second clinic was like literally completely unpredicted, but man, it was fun.
You know, I got to drive down, I was about 45 minutes away, go to this clinic that was, you know, pretty much failing, and then take it from where it was and grow it up, and so, yes, it was scary, but I’ll tell you, the scarier step wasn’t that second one, because the first one was successful, the second one was just fixing, but I went from two clinics to four clinics in a blink, and the scary part of that was, you know, I had no money, and then I started to make a little bit of money. Then we got the second clinic, and then I started to make a little bit more money, and I got four clinics, and I have negative money. So that was where I learned about the scariness of expansion. You know, when you, when you want to expand and you want to scale, you just, you have to be willing to step into this world of fear, where you’re going to take a few steps backwards before you step forwards, and that’s kind of been not to go off subject, but that’s been the whole thing, right? I went from money to no money, and then from four clinics to 10 clinics, where I went way backwards, and then got caught up, and then from 10 clinics to 20 clinics, and every time we make a massive growth, now I have to expect that fear and expect that, and just be willing to make that jump and be prepared.”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“What’s really interesting is, I think many people hearing your story would think, well, by the time you got to the second or third one, you had, you had it down, and it was just going to be gravy after that.”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Yeah, yeah. No, you know, it changes, you know. Five clinics is you right? I can see patients full time and still have my fingers on everything, but it’s not me anymore, right? There has to be a C suite. There has to be an infrastructure that I built and pay for for people to run our systems and run our marketing and run our HR and to run our everything, so with every clinic you add, you are limiting your ability to accomplish the job that you would normally do, and now you have to replace yourself with somebody who is paid and trained by you, so it’s a learning curve, because none of us, you know, on this podcast, I think your listeners, the doctors, none of us are trained entrepreneurs, trained businessmen, trained business women, we just have to learn as we go and study as hard as we can, and all of it’s a learning curve, but it’s a fun ride if you take”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“it, when you started realizing that other people would be taking over the roles that you once were actively doing. Did you feel bad about it, or were you just so excited that it didn’t matter?”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“No, no, you know, you don’t want to let go of those. You grip them, death grip those. Not only do you not want to give them up, but then you know you have to learn very quickly that you can’t micromanage, right? So, like, I’m going to allow you to do second interviews and decide if this person has the ability to do the job, and I have to be able to, like, not give my approval on every employee that gets hired, and that is a very difficult thing to do, so no, every step along the way, every time you hand something off, you know, yes, you watch it a bit in the beginning, but you have to have the ability to not watch it if you want to grow, and that’s very difficult.”
Marketing Strategies That Actually Work for Doctors
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“So, what would you say to them about that?”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Yeah, so there’s so much, it’s never ending. I mean, you know this with all the people that are on this podcast, there’s just so much great stuff out there, but it really, for me, becomes very dependent on geography, because digital marketing is absolutely amazing, and it is so deep now. I mean, yes, you can do Instagram posts, Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, Twitter posts, YouTube posts, there’s Google post, there’s Google ads, and all that stuff works amazingly. You’ve got to learn all of that and use all of that, but there’s some geographies, like I have some geographies in Texas, that are, have such a congested digital footprint, like so many people in that congestion, that the ROI and the responses for that, you know there’s no way I could scale clinics there if that was what we did, so like in Northern Virginia, I’ll spend a lot of money on Google Local and Google Ads, and on boosts on some of our social media, so that would become very well known in the, in the neighborhoods, versus you know, in Texas, what works very well is being out in the community, meeting all the professionals that I can refer to, and that can refer to me, that are doing health screenings at different health fairs, that are doing lunch and learns in different companies, and so we use all kinds of tactics. Now, do I also do some digital marketing in Texas? Of course, but I don’t spend a lot, and do I also do all the other things in Northern Virginia? Yes, but I don’t push it a lot, you know. You’ve got to figure out what’s working. I think you know when I talk to people on the phone and they’re trying to get their marketing to work. I think part of the problem is they’ve got 15 different things going, and then these don’t work, so they try this and this doesn’t work, so they try this. You know, you got to focus in, and if, if, if somebody else can get this marketing to work in your area, so can you. So, instead of quitting it, dive into it, you know, learn why, why it’s not working, what you can do to make it work.”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“Absolutely, and you know people are, so you know, scrambling for AI in their practice, without realizing that some of the old school techniques really work the best, and that it’s not something that they should forget about. People, after all, want to have a relationship with you, they want to actually see you, talk to you and hear what your views are, so you know, getting out there and introducing yourselves to people, both you know, prospective patients, but also to physicians in the area that can refer to you.”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Yeah, doctors and professional referrals. I mean, we talked to this about our doctors all the time, if the only thing you did was have two lunches a week with referral partners, and you did that every week, you’d have 104 lunches a month, and if 10% of those people like you, that’d be 10 people sending you patients every month. So there’s professional referrals, is one of the most amazing things. I will say old school is kind of funny, because we just started doing some postcards again. Now that’s from like a decade ago. I’m going to tell you, the response, the response in some of our areas on like these postcards is insane. So, there is some old school stuff.”
AI, Social Media, and Modern Healthcare Marketing
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“And AI, I right now, by the way, also, I mean, I know everybody wants to dive into it, and I think they should. AI, right now, is the wild wild west, because there’s nobody knows for sure, but we do know that feeding it, and doing, you know, AI, oh, doing, doing the search engine optimization, which is now for AI, is absolutely amazing. I think if I can give one piece of advice on something like AI, and even, you know, social media marketing, and things like that, I think that doctors, because we were, we want to be doctors, and that we don’t want to be the professional marketer. Too many times, doctors will go out and find this is the best company to do AI marketing for me. This is the best company to do lead generation for me, and they like hand it off and forget it. So, the one thing I would say is you’ve got to learn it right, and it’s not that hard. You can jump on YouTube and say, you know, put in a video, teach me how to do AI SEO, you can go into Chat GPT and just say, “Tell me the top 100 things I need to know. You really have to learn how to do it. So, I always like lead generation AI. I learn how to do it to the point that I’m dangerous enough that I could do it, and then I don’t. And then I hire a company, because then I can watch what they’re doing, and I can make pivots, and I can give suggestions, and I don’t just take the results for what they are. So, so get into AI marketing, get into all this stuff, but for the love of God, know what you’re doing first.”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“Absolutely. How actively involved are you in creating videos for your patients on the sites”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“I I’m actively involved in, and by that I mean like maybe twice a month I get with our social media people, and they shoot videos with me, so that’s about as active as I am. And then they do all the editing and posting and everything for group, which is kind of the umbrella. The individual clinics is me giving them what I want them to record and do right, and then I have a separate crew that then edits and posts those, but at the end of the day I’m really just looking at how many posts are we doing, when are they going up, what are the statistics, what are the results. So I’m all KPI driven.”
Advice for Doctors Growing Their Practice
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“That’s great, so what advice would you give to our, you know, physicians and chiropractors that are listening today? You know, like two pieces of advice that they could implement right away.”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Yeah, well, number one, you know, when I talk to chiropractors and they’re like, I don’t have enough new patients, or I talked to functional medicine, I talked to any of these guys, and I don’t have enough new patients, right. And then it’s, I don’t have the budget for it, because there’s, there’s so much stuff that’s free. You can right now shoot videos and post it on six different platforms. You can right now go stop by an office and drop your cards and meet a professional. You can right now go bring bagels and coffee to a bank before they open. Introduce yourself and tell them about your clinic. There’s so many free things you can do right now. If you don’t have enough new patients, it is just because you are not trying hard enough. It exists. You just have to do it, and no one can make you do it. But you could post 50 posts on social media right now, if you wanted to, right, and talk about who you are, you know, talk about what you do, and your community will absolutely love it. And then, you know, the only other thing I would tell you is, you know, have a goal, like, okay, I don’t have enough new patients for the love, like, what is enough new patients, and why did you pick that number, like, and if that’s your number, give me the action steps of how you’re going to get it. So, there’s a million ways to get new patients, right? If you, if you’re stuck and your brain is like, I can’t come up with one, then go on Chat GPT, Chat GPT, and say, give me 25 ways to get new patients right now that cost me nothing, and then you can do it, but work towards a goal, right? Say, I want 27 new patients this month, and here’s the action steps I’m going to do. You do those two things. I just don’t know how you can’t have enough new patients.”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“Do you have a program yet on how to instruct physicians to follow in your footsteps?”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Yeah, that’s good question. No, right. So we have all the programs for all of our doctors and CAS, you know. For me, right now, it’s just that there’s so many people that reach out about what we’re doing. My thought process was, let me just give it out for free, let me answer any questions. There’s really nothing for me to gain from this, except for, hey, doctors are helping a whole lot of people. I want you to help a lot of people. I want you to do more, and if I can be of any help for you to do that, then do it. Use me.”
Dr. Barbara Hales:
“That’s wonderful. So, what else would you like to tell our listening audience that maybe I haven’t touched upon lately, you know? Yet,”
Dr. Corey Melnikov:
“Well, you know, your podcast is marketing. You know, the only, the only other thing I’ll say about. Marketing is this. I’ve always looked at marketing is, you know, if you love what you do, if you absolutely love what you do, then marketing is just your extension of your love for what you do out into the community. And how many different ways can you come up with doing that? And if that’s what you’re doing, if the only thing you’re really doing is sharing what you love with the community, because you know it will make an impact. Then all of the negative things that we think of when it comes to marketing, the sales process, the I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do that, all that goes away because the second you are locked in to all I want to do is help, then that’s all you’re ever doing, you’re just offering your value, and because it’s coming from such an authentic place, it works. It just works, you know. I used to go out to health screenings, and my goal was I wanted to meet one person that I could show them an alternative to maybe a surgery they were doing, and because the only thing I was doing, they were sitting there talking to people about health and wellness. I ended up with all these new patients. It just has to be authentic. You just have to figure out why this means so much to you, and then all you have to do is share that, and that’s all marketing is. It’s just you sharing who you are with the world.”
Dr. Barbara Hales
“That is wonderful advice. And with that, I would like to thank you for coming here. And listeners, this is, you know, a great guy, as you have seen and heard, and his company is called Palmer Care Group, and you can reach out to him at Palmer Care group.com We’ll also have that in the show notes, in case you don’t know how to spell it, or you probably forget it, as I have said it, but you know this guy has some great moves, and you need to see what he’s done and follow along. If you do that, you’re sure you’re sure there’ll be bumps, but you know what, you’re sure to meet with success. So, thank you so much for being on the show today with us, Corey”
Dr. Corey Melnikov
“Thanks for having me.”
Dr. Barbara Hales 22:10
“This has been another episode of Marketing Tips with the Doctors, with your host Dr. Barbara Hales and Dr. Corey Malnikof. Till next time,”
