AI Clinic Software: Speed to Lead, Patient Retention and AI Employees with Podium

0:00Welcome to Inside Aesthetics, the world's leading podcast for cosmetic practitioners and business owners. Our podcasts are aimed at medical professionals and should not be used to make medical, legal, or financial decisions. You should get an appropriately tailored piece of advice from a professional in your country. To show your support and stay up to date with our latest episodes, click the follow button if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you're watching our episodes on YouTube, hit the subscribe button as well as the bell icon. If you're interested in joining our community, being a guest on the podcast, or would like to work with us, all of our contact details are in the show notes. And now, let's jump into today's episode Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Inside Aesthetics. Today we're talking about software. It's a very topical area at the moment in terms of how do you get a system that's gonna help support your business. We've obviously got regulatory implications as well, and as we move forward into 2027, I guess everyone's looking for an edge on how they can run their business better, how their CRM system can move from just being something that takes care of your note keeping and your calendar, and actually help you make the most of the leads that are coming to your business, answering inquiries when you're not open or when no one's responding to those emails that are coming through.

1:14So we're gonna unpack that today with Podium, who you guys may have heard of, whether you're in Australia or whether you're in the States. Yeah, and we're proudly joined by Shannon Blake, who is their director of aesthetic partnership. So welcome, Shannon. We'll introduce you in just a sec. Just a little announcement about our app, IA Community. We've done a big refresh recently. The navigation is a lot easier. Our content is easier to find. There's new business tools. David's created some awesome gross profit margin calculators and all that nerdy stuff. I've created some complication protocol tools to help you, both from a academic perspective, but even if you actually have a complication, you can walk through and use that to help you guide through that emergency. And also a toxin reconstitution calculator, so more nerdy stuff. Yeah. Plus, if you haven't heard, we've brought back the WhatsApp chats, which were hugely popular, and they're powering away at the moment, so there's lots of questions being asked and advice being given, and people sharing what's going on in their clinical practice and business side of things as well.

2:08So if you'd like to check that out, there's a 14-day free trial, no obligation. Come in, check it out. If it's for you, we'd love to have you as part of our community. Yeah. And final reminder, if you're watching on YouTube, please give us a like and subscribe. If you're on your favorite podcast app, Apple, Spotify, et cetera, just click follow and you'll get our latest episodes when they are available, every Friday. Yep. Perfect. All right. Shannon, you are joining us all the way in Utah in the United States. I haven't been there before. It's one of the, the one states I haven't been to yet, so I'll have to get there at some point and come and say hi to you guys. But as Jake said before we got started, you are the person with all of the know-how and expertise in this great piece of software called Podium, which I have had a good look at. I've been working with your Australian team here, because obviously our landscape's a little bit unique and different, so I've been helping your team get to know our industry a bit better. So we wanted to get you guys on and share what you guys do, how your platform works, and to really give people an insight into potentially how they can integrate something like this into their practice to help them do business better and take care of their patients better.

3:09Yes, and make more money. Make more money. The money comes when you get everything else right. I think if you run a great practice, you take care of your patients clinically, then the money's just there as a byproduct of getting all that stuff right. This is a big component, because business is getting tough, and how do you get a competitive edge? How can you exceed expectations of what patients are searching for? So I think where we're moving now with this AI- filled future, this is where we're going. Yeah. So Shannon, tell us about your background and how did you start with Podium? And of course, who are Podium? Yes. Oh, that's a loaded question. So first and foremost, thank you both so much for having us. We're thrilled to be new partners of Inside Aesthetics and just I've been able to get into the community that you guys have built inside the app, and it is, there's so much delicious, interesting content in there. So just thank you both for everything you're doing to bring everyone together and really help set everyone up for success.

3:59So yes, my name is Shannon Blake. I have been at Podium for the last six and a half years now, coming up on seven actually. Holy . Yeah. Pardon my language. I actually started in managing our retail relationships and partnerships here at Podium, and about two years in, I raised my hand to take over our healthcare partnerships because I feel like there was a really big missed opportunity in the aesthetics industry specifically, and just started doing a lot of research about where this industry was headed, how it was really disrupting traditional healthcare, and felt like our platform at the time would be a really good solution for aesthetic practices in solving some of the major problems, such as speed to lead. It was a very competitive time. COVID had just hit, and the industry just blew up in a good way. It started growing very quickly. There was more demand. And I thought, "Well, geez, one of the problems we could solve is speed to lead, and we could do that through building some AI employees," which I know we'll get into.

4:59And then pretty quickly after that, we started doing a little bit of research on some additional technology that we didn't feel like was modern enough for this modern industry. It was more old and antiquated. I'm speaking about EMRs. And we made a big bet on this industry to not only go and focus on it, but actually build some technology specifically for this industry. And we had big plans with AI, and we knew that we would have to be the one full solution, the all-in-one solution, in order to execute on the AI that we had in mind, which again, we'll dig into. But it's been a wild ride. We have the pleasure of working with about 2,500 practices today in the US, and I should know how many we're in with Australia. I wanna say it's around 500. Don't quote me on that. But it has been so much fun getting to just meet a ton of owners, understand the problems they have, and how we can help build some technology alongside of them. Yeah. And in addition to your interesting background, Podium itself has a sort of really interesting backstory.

6:02A- apparently, it started with a family tire shop. So how did we go from tires- ... to Botox and fillers dealing with our crazy industry? Very good question, David. So our CEO and founder, Eric Ray, his dad owned a tire shop, and he was struggling with reputation on Google. This was way back when Google reviews started being relevant and more people were searching for businesses on Google and really relying on the reputation to decide who they were going to engage with. So his son, Eric, our CEO, was like, "There's gotta be a better way to help local businesses collect Google reviews in a more modern way so that they could rank higher in search." So he created the software Podium back in 2014, and all it used to be able to do was it made the local business 2-way textable, and it made it easy to send a link that would take the clients or customers straight to the place where they leave a Google review, and it would instantly show up on Google, playing into the algorithm of where that local business is rated, and it took off like wildfire.

7:08Because before that, people were either just hoping people would leave a Google review, or they were sending Google review requests through email, which open rates on email are terrible. So anyway, it all started with Google reviews, and today we're still very proud of the fact that nobody puts more reviews on Google than Podium and Podium clients. So we're pretty proud of that, and we still do that for local businesses today. And I guess what's unique about what Podium are doing versus all the other, we call them CRM systems, you call them EMRs, is that you do cater for a lot of other industries and businesses. It's not just aesthetics. So which other industries do you cater for? So au- automotive is one of the industries that we are highly penetrated into, specifically on the dealership side, and then home services, specifically on the HVAC side. And then we have one additional core vertical, which we are here to talk to you about today, and that is aesthetics. And it was about three and a half, four years ago that we restructured Podium as a company, and a third of our company is all in on aesthetics.

8:08So we have an aesthetics cus- customer success team, an aesthetic product team. We have engineers that are just focused on aesthetics, a sales team. So it's like a mini startup inside of a bigger company, 'cause Podium has around 1,300 employees, so we're quite large as a company, but we get a third of those resources specific for aesthetics, which is fun. Right. And so what have been the biggest surprises or learnings for you when moving into the aesthetics industry? Oh man, where do I start? The first thing was, it was fascinating to me the technology that was available for such a modern industry. It was almost like the traditional healthcare EMRs or EHRs were what aesthetic practices had to choose from because they were the systems that existed from traditional healthcare. When I say traditional healthcare, I'm talking about, like, the hospitals, the family medicine doctors, the chiropractors, the dentists, things to that nature, and then just trying to make it work for an aesthetic practice, which is not a perfect fit. So I was really surprised by that, and the aesthetic owners were just kind of putting up with it.

9:15It was like the devil that they knew. Nobody liked the technology, but they just... It was what was available to them. No, that's still the case now. We still have this argument here in Australia. There's obviously newcomers and people are asking the same questions, but no one's really cracked it yet, or until maybe Podium. Yeah. There was always a sacrifice that you had to make, 'cause my background was owning clinics for many years, surgical, non-surgical, and you'd have a system that was great on the front end. It had a great booking system. It had a good interface in terms of how your team would navigate through it, but then it would fail on the notekeeping section, or it did those two things well and backend was horrible. The marketing options were non-existent. It wasn't collecting and giving you good data to actually make decisions on your business and run reports. So you always had to make a sacrifice and work out which feature you were willing to do without and what was most important to you. That was my experience.

10:06It was like you went for the system that you hated the least. Exactly. And honestly, like out of fairness to these older EMRs, they didn't have the technology that we have today. AI was not a thing at the level that it is today, and there's been a lot of advancements, which we feel very lucky that we were a modern enough tech solution that we could also build new AI capabilities on top of our platform. We didn't have to start over. So it's easier to build technology today for this industry, so we feel grateful for that. Hey guys, sorry to interrupt your podcast. Just a quick reminder about our app called IA Community. Now, whether you're an injector, nurse, doctor, clinic owner, you're non-clinical, you're a rep for a company, or even you work for a company, presumably you listen to our podcast to learn, to feel connected, and to grow.

10:56So why should people check out our app, David? Well, we've got a global community of like-minded professionals from all over the globe. You can dip into our WhatsApp chats, our clinical library. You can connect and meet people at conferences from all over the world. If you'd like to have a 14-day free trial, link to that is in the podcast description. Looking forward to seeing you there. Now, we've done episodes recently on consultation, building rapport with patients, all that kind of stuff. But the assumption with all of that is there's a patient actually in your clinic having a treatment. So what we want to lean into, and this is where Podium I think really is extremely strong, and I haven't seen a, a competitor like it, is you're getting the patient into the seat that otherwise would be lost to that clinic. So rebooking the patient before they leave or even getting their inquiry serviced when maybe it's nighttime and the receptionist isn't there, or someone's out on their lunch break, or someone's sick. So can you just explain how Podium is different to all the other CRMs or EMRs that came before it? Yeah, absolutely.

11:56So we built Avery. I'm gonna reference Avery throughout this conversation. She's our AI front desk client-facing AI employee, and we built her to solve the problem of consumer expectations because today, the world in which we live in, people want instant gratification. They need an answer to their question right away. If it's on their mind that they wanna book an appointment, they wanna be able to do it when it's on their mind and just get it off their to-do list. And so we built Avery, an AI employee that would work 24/7, 365 days a year, and this became especially important because in this industry, aesthetics is a luxury. It's not an absolute necessity, although some people feel like Botox is that, but it is a luxury treatment, an add-on. And so therefore, it's generally the end of the day after you either got home from work or maybe you've been with the kids all day, you've been running them around to soccer practice, whatever it is.

12:52The clients of these aesthetic practices have their selfish time, we'll call it, after the practice is closed. It's generally late hours into the evening. They're scrolling. They're interested in a treatment. They have questions. So we wanted to create a solution for this that was really good, where folks that are reaching out to these practices would not know they're talking to AI. So we knew that we had to build this AI employee off the backs of multiple different large language models, LLMs. I'm sure you guys know of some of the big ones, right? We've got OpenAI with ChatGPT. We've got Anthropic with Claude. But there's a lot of different LLMs that are good for different reasons, and so we wanted Avery to be really well-rounded. And so we built her so that she could meet those client expectations or lead expectations, which is an answer in under two minutes, period. And I think we've done a lot of secret shopping on, at least in the United States, to see what is the average response time during business hours on average, as well as after business hours for a new lead, and it's an hour and a half, which might surprise you, it's maybe better than what you would've thought.

13:58It's an hour and a half generally during business hours, and it's eight and a half hours if a lead is coming in after business hours. And when you compare that to the consumer expectation of two minutes, that's not good enough, right? So Avery is able to step in to every text message that's coming in, any social media DM, and she's able to answer any questions about your treatments or services, anything about a new member discount, your memberships you offer, pain tolerance information, like literally anything about your practice. And then the best part is she can also book the appointment. So we're really proud of the fact that with the way we built Podium, humans do not need to touch scheduling anymore. If it's during business hours, after business hours, humans do not need to deal with rescheduling, scheduling, canceling. AI employees can do that for them, which gives them a lot of time back. So that was a very long answer, but that is one of the big problems we solve is speed to lead and answering leads at all hours of the day. How is Avery defined as a female? How is it female? Oh, here we go. No, I'm just curious. No, no. Is there a picture? Yeah. Is, is it a voice? No. Do they hear Avery? Yeah, so it's funny.

15:05Some of our clients choose to keep Avery, and they actually love giving her a persona. With AI you can say, you can just describe in ChatGPT, "This is what I think she should look like." Okay. "These are characteristics." Yeah. And then they'll give her a face, and in some cases they'll even put it on the About Our Team page. Okay. And they're very open about it. "This is our AI employee." But a lot of people rename her. We've got Ava. I know of one practice that named theirs Jake, actually. Hey, there we go. Okay. Finally, some Ja- ... a Jake with a personality. Yeah. I always knew I needed a robot. But I will tell you, in automotive and in home services, they have an AI employee, but it's Jerry and Larry, and we were like, "That's not gonna fly in aesthetics. That would be a red flag if Jerry's getting back." Jerry. God. Okay, cool. Now I just want to double make sure, is there an actual voice that you can hear, or is it all text-based? It's all text-based right now. We actually did roll out voice, but if I'm being honest, AI voice is not ready. Yeah. It's not ready for this industry.

16:03We have some competitors that have put out... I know Boulevard put out Bo recently. It's not, it's just not there. Yeah. And so we are working really hard behind the scenes to get it there, but for a lot of different reasons, in aesthetics, it's quite difficult to get AI voice right, and it is a relationship industry, and the only reason the AI messaging works is people don't know it's AI, and so they're okay with it. But as soon as they know it's AI, I just don't know how well it's gonna be received. But we'll see. I could be wrong. Okay. Cool. Hmm. Now, so in terms of training Avery or whatever you decide to call him or her, or them, how do you actually get it to answer the questions the way that you want them answered? Because the way that I want my practice might be different to the way that someone else runs their practice, and then we've got regulations, 'cause potentially, like here in Australia, we can't talk about prices, for example, and we can't talk about Botox, and we can't use the word filler or anything like that.

16:53So how do you train it for your business, and how long does it take? Yeah. This has been an ever-evolving process. I will say when it first started, it was a little messy and it took a very long time. Fast-forward to today, we actually have a full form that you just walk through. It's kinda self-serve, and it asks you lots of things. It wants to know, tell me about your brand. What's your tone? Who's your clientele? Some people prefer fun and playful and casual, and then some people want the white glove. They wanna be like the Mercedes of the industry, where it's a lot more professional language. But it will literally, this form will walk through every tiny detail about your practice. Do you want Avery to talk about pricing or do you not? Do you want Avery to answer... Maybe you don't want her to even touch anything medical question related, have Avery escalate that to the team. We have this thing called AI Studio that you can think of it as Avery's brain, and you can upload playbooks.

17:54If you've got, like, processes that you've already have documented or any way you wanna handle, like, an escalation if somebody is concerned about a way that their treatment is showing up and, like, things like that, you can train her to know when to just raise her hand and pull a human in versus have her continue that conversation. I like to be very honest with this answer because I don't want it to feel like, "In an hour you'll have Avery up and running, and she'll know everything about your practice." I would say between training, like inputting the information, and then testing and tweaking, I would say you're probably putting in roughly 35 to 40 hours in total. Like, that's just over a period of time because the testing, you wanna turn her on for a couple hours, see how she's doing. You can give her real-life feedback right after she responds, and she never makes that same mistake again. So she'll self-heal and then update her AI Studio brain so that she knows in the future you want her to reply this way or with this information.

18:53So it's pretty cool. Yeah. And it seems like it's come a long way because I looked at the technology a few years ago and I thought, "Eh, it's not there yet." And I think a lot of people potentially have some reservations around going back down that path because, just like you said, voice isn't ready. I don't think the chatbot technology was quite ready a couple of years ago either, but it seems like that's accelerated quite a lot in the last little period of time. Even in the last year, honestly. Mm. We've actually ended up bringing in a full just AI team to focus specifically on Avery and how she's performing, and we have a lot of data at this point on all the feedback that all of our clients have given Avery, and just looking for common denominators and, like, what do we need to just install in her upfront to avoid the practice from ever having to give that type of feedback again. So it has come a very long way, for sure. She has been clocked in and answering questions for four years now, and she is a much better employee after four years than she was at year one. Can you walk us through a real-life example of this? I don't know, it's lunchtime and the patient calls the clinic, and for whatever reason, the receptionist doesn't make it to the phone on time.

20:02W- what happens then? When does Avery jump in? Can it take phone calls, or is it only for text and emails? Just text and emails and social media DMs, which is important. As you guys know, in this industry, social media is very important. So all your social media DMs flow nicely into the Podium inbox, and Avery replies to those DMs. So I'll answer your question. So Podium, because we're an all-in-one solution, that includes phones. So we have our own phone system that we ship to the practice if they sign up for Podium. Any missed call moves to an active open text conversation. So that missed caller would get a text immediately that just says, "I'm so sorry we missed your call. This is Avery. Is there anything I can answer with you over text? Otherwise, we'll give you a call back when we have availability." Most people prefer to text. Yeah. They just maybe didn't know the practice was textable, so they'll start texting back and forth with Avery. They have some questions, she answers them, and then her end goal, she's very goal-oriented, she wants to book an appointment.

21:04That's what she will always try to route the conversation back to, is, "When would be a good date and time to get you in for a consultation?" for example. So it's missed call, turn to text, Avery takes over, books the appointment. That's the ideal flow. Presumably you can change that tone so it doesn't feel hot and heavy and, "Yeah, you gotta book, you gotta book." Yeah. It might just be about, "Take your time to think about things, but these are our options, and these are our availability, and these are our open dates," and so on. Could you do that? Absolutely. You can give her a personality. If you're like, "I want you to be a go-getter. I want you to follow up. If they are not booking, I want you to follow up the next day within 12 hours and check in and work towards that," or, "I want you to be, Avery, I want you to be more consultative. I want you to ask more questions. How long have they been thinking about this treatment?" Yeah. "Have they searched other practices?" Like, it's all customizable. That's the beautiful thing about Avery. Yeah. I wanna ask you a question, actually. Mm-hmm. Do you feel like there's a difference culturally between how Americans want things- Of course

22:01and Aussies? Yeah. I feel like the go, go thing actually won't work. I feel like people are calling 'cause they're a bit anxious and nervous, and they're not sure if even our treatments are appropriate, and they want the questions answered before they book. What do you think? Yeah, definitely. There's cultural issues between all different countries. And if you go to Europe, more conservative again. Mm. So that's why it's important that you can customize Avery or whatever you choose to call her based on how you want people communicated with. What's the personality and brand of your business, your clinic, your patient demographic? You might have an older patient clientele. Yeah. Uh, a- and that's kinda not gonna work with them versus younger. So this is the beauty of having a system that you can customize based on understanding- How you want to communicate. And this all comes back to what I keep talking about, which is understanding who your patients are, mapping out your patient journey through all the different steps of how they book, what happens during that process of confirming, how you answer inquiries when your business is closed.

22:56These are all the things that people need to think about because going back to our conversation a few weeks ago around are you a commodity, there is so much competition everywhere in the world in this space. And if you don't embrace this sort of technology, even if you're a great service provider, you might get left behind because people just expect this type of service. You will, not you might. I'm sure of it. And to your point, Shannon, no one that I know wants to make a phone call. It's only the older generation. Yeah. In fact, the older generation are scared of text messaging, and they're certainly not on social media. But most of our patients don't want to call. And I can look at when people have made a booking with me on my booking system, and it's often after 9:00 PM, where I imagine they're scrolling in bed on Instagram- or wherever they are. So I totally agree, and it's awesome that your system pulls together Facebook, Instagram, and all these ways that people connect with us into one mailbox. I think that is one of the most confusing things for businesses. You just can't keep up with this stuff. Yeah. I maybe want to just take a step back and think about this.

23:57If I had to describe the system, and Shannon, step in at any point if you feel I'm going in the wrong direction. This is like an ecosystem. It's not an EMR or a, what do we, CRM here. It's basically a system that overlays your entire business and gives you the ability to streamline it, and as you said, speed to lead. I talk to clients all over the world, and a question that comes up all the time is, "What's going on with your marketing? How much money are you spending on Google Ads, Meta Ads?" People are shoving so much money in the top of the funnel with the hope that what's gonna come out the bottom is new patients and new sales and revenue for their business. But they're leaking patients and opportunities everywhere because they take two days to respond. They close on a Friday. They don't open till Monday. Someone's away at lunch, and they don't get back within two hours. And as you said, the way that Google, the way that search is happening now, like 71% of searches are happening when businesses are closed.

24:50AI's taking over. And it's why are you spending all this money on trying to get new people- new inquiries when you're actually losing the ones that you already have, or you're not managing your existing patient database effectively enough. It just doesn't make sense. So I think when people look at a system like this, which may be a little bit more expensive than what they were anticipating, you need to think of it as not just something that's managing your patient database. I was actually speaking on a webinar today with Terri Ross, and we were talking about, people were asking a lot about spending all the money that they're spending on these marketing channels. Because yes, like in this industry, I'm not telling you not to invest in like Google Ads, Facebook Ads for new client acquisition. But what we told people was, before you throw more marketing spend out there, you need to solve the problem of patient retention. And until you're at 70 or 80% patient retention, you're gonna keep leaking money. You can't just keep driving new clients in, treating them for one thing, and then they never come back.

25:51So that is why we built Operator actually, which I know we will get into. But we wanted an AI employee that could revenue mine for practices, because the reality is the front desk is usually in charge of getting back to leads and following up with leads, but they're the lowest paid employee, let's be honest. And they're not generally the owner, so they don't have as much skin in the game, so they're not as motivated to make sure that every single client gets followed up on. And they're all busy, right? It's very busy at the practices. And so we wanted to build an AI business manager that we call Operator that would help practices revenue mine and make sure, it essentially ensures that you do have your clients coming back. So for example, I would say most practices don't have a daily pulse on who left their practice that day and never rebooked. So very basic example, right? With Operator, you can literally ask it, think of how you're chatting with ChatGPT or with Claude. You can literally ask it, "Hey, Operator, will you send me a daily report?

26:59And I want it texted to me at the end of every day, letting me know and a recap of my day. How many of the clients did we see, and how many of them rebooked? And if somebody didn't rebook, I want you to send me a curated tailored text for each of those individuals, and I want to review them before the text goes out, and then I want you to have Avery send this out to those folks." That is one example, and you could do it on Monday for the previous week, whatever it is. But Operator will literally pull you a list, and there may be people on there that you're like, "Oh yeah, I know why they didn't book. That's a unique situation." But Operator will not only give you the insights of who didn't book, but it will write the text for each of them that's tailored to that person, have you quickly eyeball it, and then you just say, "Yep, go ahead and send it out." And then Avery sends out the text message, and it's back to square one where Avery's gonna answer questions, have an engaging conversation, very human-like conversation, and then get them on the books. So it's things like that. Or Operator, send me a list of individuals who were interested in BBL Moxie treatment but never ended up booking the treatment.

28:04Sends the list. Remember, operator has access to all the phone calls, the text messages, the social media DMs, the text marketing messages that have gone out, the, the AI charting. AI e- even has access to the information in the consultations. Like, it knows everything about your practice, which is the beauty of having just one system. So it can sift through all of those conversations and pull out who showed an interest and who has never had that treatment, and then again, curates some text messages and says, "Do you want me to send these out?" Sends them out. I could go on and on with examples, but that's what we call revenue mining. There's no world where a human has time to go and do all of that consistently. So now practices can ask operator to do something once, or do something every week on a Friday, or do something once a day. It's pretty brilliant. People listening in their car on the way to work will have listened to what you just said and wonder about security with their patients' notes, talking to AI, et cetera.

29:01So how do you secure the notes? How does that work? Podium has been in healthcare since 2014, so going on about 12 years now, and so we had to be a HIPAA-compliant platform. So, like, everything about our platform is fully HIPAA compliant. Perfect. And are your servers based in the States? Presumably it's an American company? It is, yeah. Yeah. Headquartered in good old, we'll say Salt Lake City, Utah. I feel like the Olympics put us on the map just a little bit. We're getting them again, the Winter Olympics, but yes. Okay, cool. Right. What's the difference between AI and chatbot or chatbots with a script? I think there's some confusion around what are the different iterations of AI when it comes to working within a system like this, and I guess for those that maybe are talking to other companies that use similar or claim similar technology. Oh, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of our competitors who are claiming they have AI in their platform, and what we see a lot of the times is they'll say they have AI, but really it's just, like, an automation. It's like a basic automation of if a client checks out, trigger a Google review to go out to this client, and they can call that AI, but it's really just automation set.

30:14We've had capabilities like that for many years. I would say, though, there are definitely other systems out there, and we love to see it because competition is good, that are also trying to build AI employees. Some of them are voice. Some are trying messaging. I would say the biggest difference is it's really hard to get an AI employee good. We've been doing this for four years, and there's companies that are just building them now, and so they may be great a couple years down the road, but it's gonna take them a while. So I would just caution anyone who's looking to bring on an AI employee to ask, how long has this AI employee been available? Is this AI employee self-training? Like, where I have access as the business owner to make adjustments. Like, if they're bringing on a new service or treatment, can they go in and add it themselves versus having to speak to a human at the EMR or the technology company to do that for them? Because they're gonna find that they need to make adjustments on the fly, and it's just gonna be more convenient if they can access it themselves.

31:14They're gonna wanna make sure that it's HIPAA compliant as well. It's just an interesting world we live in because there's more and more t- AI technology companies popping up everywhere, and if they aren't well-funded, they're gonna run out of money fairly quickly 'cause it's quite expensive to build a really good AI employee. So you just wanna make sure that they're a reputable business that's been around a long time, that's well-funded. Podium's been through four rounds of funding. We've raised 450 million. And I don't mean to brag about the number, but the point is you need a lot of money to build a very reliable product and one that the software company can continue to iterate and build off of, and that's expensive. So those are just a few things that I would caution people on, but just ask a lot of questions, understand how long they've been doing it. We always like to say Avery's been clocked in for four years, but these other AI employees are just clocking in, and they don't have the experience that she has, so just be cautious.

32:06Can you define what an AI employee is? Do you mean, like, an agent? And for people who don't even know what an agent is, how does that work in real life? Give us an example. Yeah, so an AI employee, think of it as like it is an extension of your team that has the capabilities of having a human-like conversation with your clients, answering questions, and can perform tasks. So maybe that task is scheduling an appointment, maybe that task is sending out a form once the appointment is scheduled, sending out those specific forms tied to that service. Maybe that task is sending out a Google review once they've checked out. It's things like that. I'm trying to think from our average listener's perspective, 'cause AI scares people, and when we start talking about AI employees, they're like, "Well, what do you mean? What are the capabilities? What are the boundaries? What can't they do?" That's actually a good question. What things can't Podium do? What have you struggled with AI? You said that the voice isn't really there yet. Anything else that you have encountered that you're not quite there yet? Here's what I'll say.

33:07AI can do tasks better and more consistently than humans, and much faster. AI employees cannot have a human connection in the consultation They cannot build the relationship with the client that keeps that client coming back. Like, the cool thing about this industry is what makes it really special is the relationships. And the exciting thing is up until now, these owners, these providers, they have to perform the outcomes, they have to do all of the patient treatments, and they have to run the business. They have to reply to all the messages, they have to get back to people, follow up with leads, send out text marketing campaigns. Like, there's a lot of business stuff and task stuff that they didn't get into this industry for. They got into it to create good patient outcomes, and to make people feel better about themselves, and build relationships with people. And so if you think about what AI can't do, it can't do the human stuff that makes this industry special, but it can do everything else.

34:11Yeah, I totally agree. I know that's a big statement. And we've done podcasts talking about the X factor. It's people are not coming for a miller filler, they're coming for you as the injector, or your beautiful clinic, or the things that you're providing, the experience. And AI, I can't imagine it ever serving that. Maybe I'm not thinking big enough. But I don't... I, I hope it doesn't serve that in the next 10 years, at least when I'm working. Have you seen X-Men enough? No. But really, like, that, the reason I really believe this industry will continue to disrupt traditional healthcare, 'cause we've already seen it with hormone replacement therapy, we've seen it with weight loss, with all the GLP-1 craze, it will continue to disrupt traditional healthcare, and I really believe it's because of the ambiance. They have nailed it, the smells, the sounds, the visuals, and then that relationship factor. You feel like you're part of the family when you walk in, almost... I don't know if you guys had Cheers in Australia, but, like, everyone knows your name. You walk in, and it's like you're there to see your friends. It's, that's what makes this industry so special, and that's what's gonna continue to allow it to grow, and continue to disrupt traditional healthcare.

35:17And AI's just gonna do everything else that the owners and the providers that run these businesses don't love doing. That's the least favorite part of this job. Yeah. David and I have been using AI for our podcast business, the admin, and all that kind of stuff, and it's revolutionized a lot of what we do. We're still learning. We're... Trust me, we're still amateurs, but it's helped a lot, hasn't it? Yeah. It's, it becomes like a tool or, like, having e- extra employees in your business that aren't gonna take sick days, that don't ask for a pay rise all the time. I've been smashing through the credits. Yeah. Tell you that. Yeah. But, but front desk should never be a place that's Just answering phone calls 24/7 or responding to inquiries. Front desk is meant to be a place of calmness. They're there to interact with people on a face-to-face level. It's not really supposed to be dealing with all of the administration. That's not where people are best served.

36:07As you said, it's all about how they can provide an experience for people and connect with them on a human level. So if you can take all the other manual repetitive tasks away from those people, then it allows them to do what actually makes us human. Yeah, 100% agree. Now, I want to ask about the clinical side of it just a bit. Mm-hmm. Note keeping, documentation, all those things. Before and after photos. Yeah, exactly. So what exactly is included with Podium for Australian and American audiences? Those are our biggest injector audiences. Yeah. So maybe I'll just share the pieces that is available in the US that's not quite there yet for Australia. So on the provider side, obviously Podium has all of the patient forms, which go out nicely right after an appointment's booked. If somebody hasn't filled out their forms, Avery sends them a polite reminder. It's all a very modern experience, easy to fill out, takes seconds to fill out the forms. And then, um, on the provider side, when somebody's actually in the location, you've got AI charting, so it's listening to the conversation and filling in the charts based on the information that's verbally shared in the appointment.

37:15Before and after photos. So we obviously support m- cell phones, so mobile devices, as well as iPads. Most of these practices don't have laptops with them in the treatment room, so we've got a mobile app for both iPads and cell phones. So that is the way in which they're taking the before photos. They've got the after photos and the side-by-sides that they can easily share with the patients, so they can do the fun little scroll and see how their skin has changed. So there's that piece as well. Charting. The actual treatment itself? Yes. So they have the ability... There's a couple different ways. We wanted it to be flexible. Some people prefer dot phrases. Some people prefer, like, to draw on the actual mockup of the face. So it can be off of a picture that they upload of that p- patient's actual face. It could be just, like, a general drawing of a face that they do the chart mockups on. So that's all included. It's really everything that your traditional EMR offers that you need to run your business as a provider is available inside the platform. I also wanna highlight a couple really cool things for the US, for your US listeners.

38:22We have an integration with Qualify, and for anyone who doesn't know what that company that is, they offer digital telehealth for good faith exams. So I believe, David, Jake, you guys in Australia call those? A telehealth consultation. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. We'll call them good faith exams, but they are telehealth consultations that they essentially connect your client or patient with an MD through a telehealth conversation, and that, all of the results from that good faith exam or telehealth, uh, evaluation automatically route into the profile of that individual within Podium's AI operating system. So you don't have to go into Qualify's platform to see the results of that. It notifies the practice when they got the green light from the MD and they're ready to move forward with performing whatever that treatment is. We are working on a solution for Australia for that piece. It is available in the US, not Australia yet.

39:19It's a little bit trickier there. But for now, you would just work through whether, I think Jake, David, you guys were talking about maybe doing those through FaceTime or whatever way you're doing those today. That would likely be outside of Podium in Australia, but we hope to be able to get there soon to offer that. Inventory management is in there, so every time you're checking somebody out, that's tied to the inventory, updates your inventory. You asked earlier what AI can't do. We would love AI to be able to recognize when there's a shortage and actually put in an order for the refill. We're not there yet, so unfortunately, owners or the operations manager does still need to put in the orders for the inventory, but we do fully manage the inventory for the practice on both sides. Memberships Likely most of your listeners have memberships. That's a really good way to retain patients. We manage all the memberships. You have different structures, whether you're doing piggy bank structure or there's just discount benefits you get from being members. We've got that. That's another really cool usage of Operator is being able to ask Operator, 'cause you guys know unrealized revenue, it's not good to have on your books.

40:26So you can ask Operator, "Send me a list of our members that have $500 or more sitting in their piggy bank, and I want you to curate a text for each of them. Make sure they know that they have that pending money, and talk through some treatments that they may be interested in to get them on the books." To talk about piggy bank, I think you're saying that the patient every, I don't know, month or week adds a small amount through a direct debit into a piggy bank in Podium. Do you have people like that in your clients doing that? Yeah. Yeah, sure. People are always looking at various ways to get people into that membership category, because it just keeps people in the system. Having credits on people's file, people hate losing money. If they're reminded that money's there and it potentially, I don't know if it's gonna expire at some point in time, but people wanna go and use it. So a lot of the time we just get busy, we forget that we've got that credit there. So I think that's a great tool. But yeah, everyone's looking for some kind of recurring revenue stream or way to keep people coming back to the practice, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And girls love it because it's a way to hide things from our husbands.

41:21Just a little bit of money that's put aside that when you go to get that BBL Moxy treatment, it feels free. It's really fun. But a couple other things I wanted to highlight. ePrescribe is available in the US as well, so you can order your prescriptions right with inside Podium. We have an integration with DoseSpot. Not available yet in Australia, but again, working on it. So that's another really cool feature. And then very important, lab integrations. Oh my gosh, did we get so many requests for this. Folks do not want to have a separate platform to get lab results from their clients. They want the results to flow right into the patient record, and so we have an integration through Optum, which then has hundreds of different lab companies that they integrate with. So it makes it really nice to bring all of that information also into Podium. Wanted to focus on the importance of inventory. It's, it sounds really boring, but just to give people a concept or an understanding of why this is so important. So your stock is moving in and out of your clinic all the time, and quite often you might do a bulk purchase because there's a deal that's on and you wanna get this stock at a certain price.

42:26So let's say for example, in November you buy $50,000 worth of stock, and then that'll last you for the next couple of months. So a lot of the time what's happening when I'm looking at people's profit and loss statements, their profit is moving all over the place because they're not what I would call normalizing how that stock is moving in and out of their business. So they might have spent $50,000 in October, but they may not purchase anything for the next two to three months. So October's gonna look not very profitable because that money's left the bank account, and then the next two months are gonna look artificially more profitable. And by having a system that automatically tracks inventory coming in and out of your business, when that report goes to your bookkeeper or your accountant, it's gonna actually show them what stock was actually used, so you actually are getting realistic profit figures when you run your reports. I'm seeing people run into this issue all the time. They have no idea how profitable they are from month to month because of the way that the stock is moving in and out is not being accounted for from an accounting perspective. Just wanted to throw that in. It's really important Yeah, David, going back to the initial question of what has shocked us the most, it is wild how many owners don't really know their numbers or track those details.

43:34They don't have MBAs, right? They come from a healthcare background. They're all about patient outcomes, and that's amazing. But I think that's what makes having something like Podium Operator even that much more valuable because it's your business partner that you can ask these operational questions to. Like, why is my revenue down 20% year over year? Or what is my revenue? Is it up? Is it down? Oh, it's down. Why is it down? Find for me what's happening in my business that is causing me to be down, and then I want you to give me some ideas of low-hanging fruit that I can execute on that would get me back to trending, things like that. So you finally, these owners have these business managers and a partner that they just maybe haven't had on the business side that makes them feel like they know their business better than they ever have, which is really fun. There you go. You can call on David, that robot. You don't need to have an MBA. I don't have an MBA. I studied business at university, but you just learn this stuff on the job. And as you said, people that are medically trained, they're not exposed to this side of the world at all, and so it's shocking for them as well as it's confronting. They don't know where to start with stuff.

44:37They don't want to feel silly by admitting that they don't know, but it's critical. So systems like this are just so important because we need all the help we can get really. Can you, um, give us some insight into what an onboarding looks like? If someone says, "Wow, this sounds awesome. I'm gonna give Podium a call," what does the migration look like? How long does it take to set up? And obviously, the key one, how easy is it to get the data from their old system into Podium? That part, Jake, is the easiest part. Getting the information from the system into Podium, with AI, it literally can be done in 24 to 48 hours. That's the easy part. There's obviously a lot of other stuff that goes into onboarding. For example, you've got your phone system. We need to rip out your old phone system, ship your new phones, make sure that's working. We need to get Avery trained and onboarded. There's a lot of training on the platform to make sure that everyone at your practice understands the parts of Podium that they'll be using and that they're comfortable with it.

45:33We say 60 days because practice owners are busy, their teams are busy. If they did nothing but onboard with Podium, and they just gave their full attention to it, it could be done in a couple weeks. But it's generally 60 days because practices have other stuff going on, and the trainings have to be, "Okay, we can do something on Friday and then maybe next Wednesday." And so it's all in how motivated they are to move quickly. We have a $1,000 onboarding fee that we actually implemented so we could say, "We will give this back to you if you make this a priority, and you get onboarded into Podium within 60 days. We'll give that money back." 'Cause we needed there to be some kind of motivator for the practice, 'cause that helps us too. We wanna quickly get you up and running and then move you to your client success manager longterm. But you do have a dedicated onboarding manager for 60 days, if you need it for 60 days. Hopefully, you onboard sooner. But that's another process that we have completely reevaluated, and we actually just launched a totally new process that is a little more self-serve.

46:39Instead of having to meet with an onboarding manager, we actually have this predetermined stuff that you can go through and just fill out about your business. And then through that information, we just get that set up in Podium for you automatically. So it's always changing. Right now, it's 60 days, but with this new process, it honestly is probably gonna be a couple weeks, as long as the practice has the time to dedicate to it. I think planning for this ahead, we're now almost in November. The next couple of months are gonna be mayhem for our industry. So if you are thinking about getting a new software system, hopefully it's something like Podium. Maybe you plan to do this in January, February, when your business is quiet, it's closed, or your patients are away, and you've got a bit of downtime. So just being a bit thoughtful about when you're going to look at these types of projects and looking at the seasonality of the industry as well. Definitely, 'cause you're gonna want somebody at your practice dedicated to this, because there's a lot of back and forth, and clarification, and whatnot. So if you've got somebody who can dedicate that time now during the busy season, amazing.

47:33Otherwise, realistically, January may be the best time to look at doing something like this. Great. Excellent. So what's next for Podium? If we had to fast-forward to, I don't know- 2030, what does Podium potentially look like, you know, in three to four years from now? We've got to figure out voice AI, I think. We'll keep working on that to get that out. But for us, it's actually expanding into some other verticals that make sense in aesthetics. So today, I think it's worth mentioning we are hyper, hyper-focused on medical spas and wellness centers, and then next year we will be working alongside some top plastic surgeons to build their dream product. There's a lot of similarities in how med spas are run with plastics, and a lot of them have medical spas and plastic clinics together. So it's really honestly not that far off. But with plastic surgeons, they are gonna need a little bit more robust quoting or estimate software. They've got some nuances with how they schedule consultations, so we've got to build some new scheduling stuff in.

48:32So we'll be focused on building for the plastic surgery, cosmetic plastic surgery, cash pay businesses next year. And then we'll see from there. I think dermatology's interesting. It's also coming to a head with medical spa services as well. Wellness, IV clinics, like they're all, it's just all blending together. So we have some additional industries that we wanna build for as well. Great. What's the biggest mistake that you see Podium making, be it with assumptions or costings or just how the technology is used? Our initial mistake was having our AI employees be managed by our client success managers. So if a practice needed to make any adjustments, they had to contact their client success manager. That was a nightmare. The turnaround time for that was way too long. Also, migration. When we launched this at the beginning of the year, I think we underestimated how hard and difficult it would be to migrate. We've learned so much and had to build AI agents ourselves to help with that migration process, because leaving it up to the EMR to be friendly and just pass over all the information It just was slowing us down tremendously, and so we've learned a lot on the migration process.

49:47Apologies to anyone that attempted this in January, February and March. We've made right by them, but it was a painful experience. Being the EMR is completely different. It's the main system. It's what runs their business, and so if there's any disruption, it's really painful for a practice, and I think we had to learn that the hard way, but it's loud and clear now. Before that, Podium was really like a luxury add-on. It wasn't, like, a critical component, but now that we're the whole system, the full all-in-one, people need it to be reliable, and they need us to show up and give quick answers and be there if anything's not working. And so it's been a work in process, but we're in a very good place now. So I guess the question that everyone wants the answer to is how much does a system like this cost? I've got a few clients that have made inquiries and are onboarding with Podium, but it is a lot more expensive than a basic dinosaur system that you may have just been using for your notekeeping and online calendar.

50:41So there is a little bit of a paradigm shift that people need to go through to understand that we're not comparing apples with apples. This is a completely different class of software system. Yeah, absolutely, and you nailed it, David. It is the difference of having an EMR that just stores data and then shifting to your mind to, this is an AI operating system that makes me money Doesn't just store data. It allows me to revenue mine and find where I'm leaking revenue and things like that. So you get to consolidate a lot of different platforms. So for our full platform, it's 1,600 a month, but it's consolidating so we're now your EMR, your CRM, if you're using something else to manage your leads, your text and email marketing, your phone system, and then everything else that comes with an EMR, like your memberships, your inventory management, your charting, photos, all of that, your scheduling, payments, the whole thing. So if you do the math on your tech stack today and what you're paying, you're probably still paying less than $1,600 a month. But I think the key difference is you're getting two AI employees, the front desk who's replying to your leads and converting leads, so paying for itself right there, and then you've got your AI business manager on the back end that's extracting revenue for you and giving you those insights and where you've lost revenue, and then taking action to go get those people back on your books.

51:55So $1,600 a month. I know for some people it might be like, "Ah, that's a lot more," but again, you've got to switch your mindset to traditional EMR. Is it making you money or is it just storing data? It starts to get really exciting when you think about how you can use a platform like this to actually drive up your revenue. And how much would a staff member cost you? 50 to 100,000 a year. Yeah. And they're gonna take all the sick days. Truly. They're gone for four weeks annual leave. And they're only working eight hours a day, not 24. Yeah. So I think it's about- Yeah ... just looking at it from that perspective as well. Yeah. We actually just had- Yeah a text from Podium whilst we were doing this podcast to say there is an offer. A special offer. Now, obviously I can't give an exact number, 'cause everyone's needs are different. Depends if you're a single practice, multi practice, et cetera. But if you mention that you listened to this podcast, Inside Aesthetics, during your demo, you will get a special offer. So just inquire about that when you're doing your- Yeah ... trial with Podium. And hopefully very soon we'll have your Australian team join us for a live event through our app, and we'll do a walkthrough of the actual Podium system. Now- Yeah, I wanna see, and I've seen it in actions, but it's always good to see it again, 'cause I'm sure there's been some updates since I last saw it.

52:57So if this is something that's interesting to you or you wanna find out more, download our app. It's free. You get access to our partner spaces. So when we record this live event with Podium, you can hop in and watch a live demo and make a decision, is this something that you would consider for your practice, can you see the value, and inquire further if you want to. Yeah. Now, obviously links for Podium will be down below in the podcast description. Links to sign up for our 14-day trial will be there. Shannon, thank you for joining us from Utah. We appreciate the background to Podium. It sounds fascinating, and we look forward to working with Rami, your local colleague, who's gonna walk through the Australian experience and maybe do this webinar as well. Yes, you will love him. He is a charismatic individual, and he loves the product, so it'll be a great event, I have no doubt. Great. Take care. Bye-bye. Hey guys, we hope you enjoyed that episode. Now to keep the conversation going, download our free app, IA Community, and let us know what you liked, learnt, or even disagreed with by commenting on the podcast in our IA Podcast library.

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