I still test patients
Not as often as I used to. But I own a hearing practice in Wichita Falls, Texas, and I’m in it, and when the schedule is thin in February I feel it the same way you do.
That’s the whole reason this company exists, so it’s the first thing you should know about it.
I grew up in this
My mother, Kay Potter, was a nurse in an ENT practice when she earned her dispensing license. She went on to become a board certified hearing instrument specialist, and she was the person who trained me for my own licensure in 2001.
She taught me to fit hearing aids second. First she taught me to take care of the person wearing them, which is a different skill and not one most fitters are handed by a nurse.
She’s retired now. I still catch myself doing things the way she showed me.
Then I ran twenty-two of them
Twenty-two clinic locations, which teaches you things one office never will.
You find out that the practice with the best provider isn’t always the one with the full schedule. You find out how much revenue is sitting in a database nobody has time to work. And you find out that almost nothing that works in one town transfers cleanly to the next one without somebody measuring it.
Most of what the platform enforces now, I learned by getting it wrong across twenty-two P&Ls.
I hired the agencies
All of them, over the years. The ones with the nice decks and the ones that were cheap.
What I got was reports I couldn’t act on, change requests that took three weeks, and a recurring feeling that I was paying somebody to learn my industry on my money. Every one of them had to have hearing care explained to them, and every one of them eventually recommended something that made sense for a dentist.
Ear Level Marketing started because I wanted to buy this and nobody was selling it.
And then I built the rest of it
The tools the industry offered weren’t good enough either, so we built our own. amplifyCRM Pro runs the patient communication, and there’s an operations platform underneath it called amplifyOMS that I built for practices that need it.
That isn’t what I’m selling you on this website. I mention it because it tells you something about how this company solves problems. When the thing we needed didn’t exist, we built it rather than working around it for six years.
Everything here runs on my own clinics first
My practice runs on the same website platform, the same measurement, and the same follow-up you’d get.
That’s not a marketing line. It’s a constraint. It means I can’t recommend something to you that I’m not willing to run against my own schedule, and it means when something breaks, it breaks for me at the same time it breaks for you.
I won’t run a tactic on your practice that I wouldn’t run on my own.
A few things I believe, so you can decide if we’d get along
Most marketing advice in this industry is somebody’s taste with a confident delivery. If a person can’t tell you what happened the last forty times somebody did the thing they’re recommending, they’re guessing, and so are you.
The patients already in your database are worth more than the ones you’re buying, and almost nobody works them properly.
And I’d rather lose a sale than take on a practice I can’t help. I’ve done both and one of them costs a lot more.
If you want to check any of this
- Twenty-five years in hearing care, licensed in 2001
- Board certified in hearing instrument sciences
- Second generation hearing instrument specialist
- Currently running a multi-location practice in Wichita Falls, Texas
I chair the Texas advisory board for hearing instrument fitters and dispensers. Eleven years on the board of the Texas Hearing Aid Association, past president, and a past Dispenser of the Year.
Ear Level Marketing has served more than 450 clinics.
Most of the people reading this were referred by somebody who has worked with us. Ask them the parts I’d have no reason to tell you.