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  • Writer's pictureJeff Smith

The Problem Of Access And Why Content Creation Is The Solution


UMN 23 | Content Creation

There is currently a problem with access in the healthcare and MedTech space. It is getting harder to get products in front of the main customers—the physicians. The solution? Content creation. In this episode, Jeff Smith explains content marketing and why it’s the model that works and will work for years. With historical examples and parallels to different industries, Jeff illustrates why switching to creating content is necessary to reach your target market as physician entrepreneurs. There are a lot of valuable insights in this episode so tune in to learn all about them.


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Listen to the podcast here




The Problem Of Access And Why Content Creation Is The Solution

Before we get started, here are a couple of housekeeping items. The first is I want to thank everybody in advance for your patience. As with you all, I'm super busy. I’m a husband, a father, and a coach, and my job at Providence keeps me super busy. The information I'm trying to share in the show is stuff I record when I'm driving home from work. I do think there's a lot of information to be shared specifically so physician entrepreneurs can bring their visions to reality to help patients.


With that out of the way, the second bit of housekeeping, I refer to these episodes where there's no guest as office hours. I'm getting great feedback. What it's allowing me to do is cover an arc of the startup journey. I'm going to continue doing them. However, beginning in June 2022, we’ll have a guest once a month. We will integrate a guest because there are so many great people I want to have on the show. The way I will choose the guest is going to be to coincide with the office hours content.


For instance, the last episode was about Class 1, 2, and 3 regulatory. The guest episode could be someone from the FDA or a regulatory expert. That's how we’re going to the guest. What I want to do, because it's important to me that founders, whether they're physicians or not, is have a place where they can get some early feedback on their startup idea, or perhaps they have made some progress. They're looking for an audience to raise that first $250,000 or $500,000, or way down the road.


Founders like Ariel Katz we had from H1, who at the time when we interviewed Ariel, they raised a Series A. They’re already well on their way through. They were a Y Combinator company. Since then, they've raised like $60 million and are doing amazing things. Bringing entrepreneurs to the various stages of their company's development, often, there was a particular stage that they got to unlock the next milestone for financing. That could be around a clinical trial, a regulatory approval, or a new product launch. All those things are going to parallel nicely with this arc of the entrepreneur's journey. That's the quick bit of housekeeping. We will now proceed with the episode.


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This episode is a little bit meta in the sense that why am I sharing this content? What's the purpose of doing a show and LinkedIn posts? I want to address that head-on because I've been getting such good feedback, and so many people are reaching out through my website, JeffSmith.co, or hitting me up on LinkedIn, which is great. Usually, what happens is they ask about how do I get an audience? It's interesting because I'm always looking for patterns. Sometimes, it has to hit me over the head until I finally see the pattern.


The Hurdle At The Last Mile

If I think about my primary job where I spend 60 hours a week trying to lead Providence Medical Technology towards establishing a new standard of care for high-risk patients, so much of what we do at Providence is that last mile, which is where my career started as a sales representative. We're a commercial-stage company, greater than $25 million in sales, growing 25%, big direct Salesforce expansion that's underway.


A sales representative plays such a huge role because after all the years and millions of dollars in clinical trials and all the work that's gone into getting a product on the market, ultimately, that last mile is the sales representative who has to get access to the surgeon, treating physician, prescriber, healthcare provider, and that is the hardest part. It is the primary constraint in commercializing med tech. You don't see that growth, exponential, at least doubling every year. That is not the norm in med tech, whereas it tends to be in consumer tech enterprise software.


In those sales, there's a viral element to the consumer tech product, some app you download. You can share it with your whole social graph and start getting big traction quickly when it works. Most of the time, it doesn't take off, but you know that pretty quickly. In the case of Software as a Service, SaaS products, whether they're selling to the large enterprise or the small, medium-sized businesses, you're trying to access a decision-maker at the company to sign a PO and ultimately purchase your product.


This is a key point. One sale might yield an average of 100 users paying customers within the company. You get different growth curves in enterprise software. Software as a Service has the beautiful feature of monthly revenue contractually guaranteed for at least twelve months for most enterprise SaaS companies or small or medium-sized businesses. The point is med-tech, healthcare, biotech, pharma, the constraint, and if you look at where companies put most of their operating expenses, it's the last mile getting in front of the customer.

Pharmaceuticals were some of those early companies that employed a massive direct sales force in the thousands.

The theme of this episode is access. I want to use a few parallels. If they're annoying, I'll be quick. If you're selling a new type of shaving cream or a razor, that's been a big movement in consumer-packaged goods in the last several years, going after niche markets. Some products for very specific patient populations have emerged, creating tons of value for the consumer and, ultimately, the companies that bought them.


If that's your product, you have a consumer product, not easy to do, keep in mind, but if you sell Walmart or Target, you get some deal with Amazon, maybe Costco, if it's the right brand or Sam's Club. The point is it only requires a handful of yeses that scale massively. Please don't get me wrong. That doesn't make it that easy. Some of those contracts for those consumer package companies, the terms of those agreements to be stocked on the shelves with Target could mean some difficult things, tons of inventory, guaranteed supply chain. I'm not pretending that's somehow an easy business to commercialize.


The point is you sell to one distributor to one retailer, and with a single successful retail distributor partnership, you could have decades of growth. Whereas in med tech, you get your product, you do all the regulatory, the clinical data. You do everything to show that it's a good product to be legally allowed to sell, but you have to go and access every specific physician. That, to me, is exactly how it should be. I'm not arguing that it should be different, but it goes to show you why you're the largest company in healthcare or an up-and-coming startup. You have the same problem. This is not a new problem. By the way, pharmaceutical sales representatives set the standard.


Pharmaceuticals were some of those early companies that employed a massive direct sales force in the thousands. In fact, for two years, I worked at AstraZeneca, my first medical sales job, where I was selling some cool pharmaceutical products, primarily for cardiovascular disease. Through the ’90s and early 2000s, the pharmaceutical companies were engaged in a sales rep arms race. What that means is Pfizer, Merck, Bristol-Myers, Squibb, and AstraZeneca would have a drug that took a decade to get through the R&D process and clinical trials.


This was around the time that the concept of the blockbuster drug developed. A blockbuster drug meant that it would generate $1 billion in revenue in one year. It’s like a drug like Prilosec, which was the first proton pump inhibitor, hits the market. It is ten times better than the prior class of drugs for GERD, acid reflux, and heartburn. It's on patent, and you couldn't get samples to primary care physicians or gastroenterologists fast enough. It was the best drug.


UMN 23 | Content Creation
Content Creation: In med tech, healthcare, biotech, pharma, the constraint is the last mile—getting in front of the customer.

What happens, however, is all the other big pharma companies saw the massive potential. They developed different molecules, the same mechanism of action, same class of drugs. They set out on their long journey. Before you know it, there are multiple companies promoting a proton pump inhibitor.


Another good example would the erectile dysfunction drugs or the short-dosing antibiotics, the Z-Paks. There are statins. At one point, Lipitor, Pfizer's statin for hyperlipidemia. It did $4 billion one year in sales. The point here is the reason the pharmaceutical industry, and see if you’ll see the parallels for the med-tech audience, needed to hire increasingly larger direct sales forces, was number one, there are so many prescriptions being written by the primary care physician. That's the first line of healthcare, and there are a lot of primary care physicians.


These large pharmaceutical companies had more than one rep per primary care physician. Why did they do that? They needed to have constant access to the customer. Pharmaceuticals have a very symbiotic relationship when it comes to access and the physician, which is that they can show up legally. It's highly regulated. There are a lot of different things you have to comply with. A pharmaceutical rep can offer the potential prescribing physician free samples. It's a low-risk way for the prescribing physician to listen to the information the sales rep shares or what she heard at a meeting or read in a scientific journal.


Without having to ask the patient to pay for it, the drug rep gets to give away free samples. They show up. The free samples require a signature. That's often a very brief interaction, mind you, as a former drug rep. There is a reason to show up. I'm here wanting to see if the doctor needed any more samples of my medication. The internal medicine physicians want to keep the samples because there are many applications often for indigent patients or patients that don't have health insurance.


As a result of that, the men rep is coming in. They're asking for some portion of the physician's valuable time, but in exchange for that, they're able to give some reciprocal value, which is the ability to offer samples to the patient. This is a good relationship. Initially, it was such a good value proposition for the prescribing physician that the target physicians would give the reps quite a bit of time. You could come in, have lunch and 20 or 30 minutes sitting down at the doctor's desk.

There's typically a period where you lose money until you make money.

That was such an amazing opportunity for the drug companies. Everybody started getting hired, thousands and thousands of reps. My data's not perfect here, but it was 2002 was the last year I was a drug rep. I can remember we launched Crestor, this great statin. I was part of a cardiovascular team, but I would go to call on a primary care physician. There would be more drug reps like me in the physician's office or waiting room than there were patients.


It was odd for the patients because you have all these like sales reps in suits clearly there to do business and a handful of patients. More importantly, it became an intrusion. It was negatively affecting the physician's ability to get through her clinic because there were too many drug reps. As most areas of investment follow a curve, the pharma companies continue to invest the marginal dollar to get that next bit of marginal access.


It quickly led to a diminishing return to the point where the pharma companies realized they had over-indexed on salesforce expansion, possibly at the expense of acquisitions or even internal R&D and clinical trial development. The number of drug reps plateaued and declined. The parallel that I'm trying to show is there's an access problem when you're trying to transform health care, to access a physician who fundamentally at every level is paid for their time, whether it's in the form of CPT codes, which are relative value units of that include time and skill, or it's simple as primary care clinic where you make a certain amount per insured patient.


In order for the practice to be viable, you have to see a lot of patients. There's certainly some great push behind this to change it, but you're getting paid for your time and fee for service. There's an incentive for a higher volume of service. In all those models, there's no reimbursement or payment to sit down with a medical rep. We've seen that it's harder to access treating surgeons and prescribing physicians for the reasons I described.


What we're left with is there are a lot of great med-tech products that require the surgeon to have a conversation. Review clinical data and make sure you review FDA-cleared labeling and indications for use, and there's no time for it. What happens is whether you're the largest company in healthcare or the smallest, your choke point, the main constraint on expansion, comes down to can your sales team access the customer, and it's difficult.


UMN 23 | Content Creation
Content Creation: The main constraint on expansion comes down to, can your sales team access the customer? The things that used to work continue to have less of an effect.

The things that used to work continue to have less of an effect. When I broke into med-tech, it was the first time I learned about trying to detail or give a sales pitch to a surgeon when that surgeon was scrubbing for the case they were walking into. It's like the scrubs sink detail. That was like one of the old tricks. In order to do that, you have to show up at the hospital in scrubs.


There were no rep tracks and telecentrics. There's no gate around it. You didn't have to put on red scrubs and a goofy bouffant. It's signaled that you were industry. You knew the OR director and the circulating nurses because you were there often. You'd pop in scrubs with a mask. You basically detail the physician when the physician had downtime.


There was the surgeon break room where all the clinicians in the case would grab a cup of coffee and something to eat. You could offer to bring some refreshments in-between cases. The other thing you could do was schedule services. There's still a bit of it that's done. It's a good opportunity, but all those OR-or hospital-selling activities were made much more difficult when the credentialing software companies came in.


The first one I'm aware of is RepTrak, but many followed, and ultimately, they all consolidated. The problem is if you don't have a reason to be at the hospital, and that's usually the case, you can't get into a hospital by following the rules way. I know folks do. Maybe you had to be hanging out in the cafeteria. That’s a lower yield. There's tightened security even for patients. That became more difficult, so that stopped working.


The other thing that was always a big driver of utilization and new user growth was the surgeon cadaver lab. This is where the industry would either have their own or rent out a great facility, bringing surgeon faculty that they paid so that they could facilitate peer-to-peer selling. When there were fewer med-tech products and a handful of companies in each therapeutic area, it was a great return on the physician's time. They'd go to a Saturday course and listen to a peer and another surgeon faculty member talks about clinical evidence or strategies for a disease state.

What an agent does is represent a product. The agent's role is simply facilitating a sale in exchange for which they receive a commission or a sales commission.

After they had gotten this great information, they'd go into a cadaver lab and get hands-on, which is a great way to train potential new users. However, there are so many companies now. In the 2010s is when I started seeing at various companies that it’s harder to fill cadaver labs. You put on these expensive events, all these people there, and a handful of surgeons would show up.


That problem is what gave way to all these exciting new ways to train on simulators, virtual reality, and some form of augmented reality where you've got a video proctor who's remote. That's the system we’re in now. However, with all those virtual training platforms, you can't get a physician to attend one of them if you can't first access the physician.


The Interim Step For Smaller Businesses: Distributor and Agency Model

We're back to this problem of access. Before I would get into the meat of what I want to talk about, the core theme, there is another very important stop in this non-exhaustive history. These are the things that I remember while I'm driving home from work, but the alternative for the smaller business or the profit-conscious business to building a direct sales force which it's an investment and people costs.


There's typically a period where you lose money until you make money. For businesses that are running their cashflow positively or smaller businesses that have less resources to invest, the interim step between a direct salesforce but still being able to get in front of the physician. That step was the local distributor.


This model still exists, and when it works, it doesn't get any better. The local distributor is typically a small to medium-sized business where a number of sales reps all work for one company. It's usually a distributor principal or a group of distributor partners that worked in the local market for a number of years. Through their hard work and reliability, they developed trust and relationships with all the key physicians for the things they sell. They already have the access.


UMN 23 | Content Creation
Content Creation: The agency model is a wonderful one. It's profitable. It serves a key need in getting the best technology into the patient and incredibly capital efficient to start.

The model was we'll make a great product. We will sell distributors. This is a little bit back to like Target and Walmart. If this local distributor is the key distributor in this particular market, we want to enter. If the distributor agrees to carry our line, we're going to have access to the physician and that worked well. In fact, the term distributor, which is still used and a bit of a misnomer, in my opinion, goes back to the days when the local distributor would purchase inventory from the manufacturer.


Think of it like a DePuy Hip, they buy 50 hips for X dollars. They're the entity that sells to the hospital where their surgeon customer does the case. They charge a markup. Instead of X, it's probably 150% of X or something like that. For the manufacturer, you move products and recognize revenue. You don't collect from a hospital or assume the risk of bad credit. You simply sell it to the distributor. I use the word distributor because that's what happens when you effectively buy things that cost or a wholesale price, like a Costco or Sam's Club. You carry that inventory in your balance sheet at your own risk.


If it doesn't sell, you're the one that's writing it off. That model almost doesn't exist at all anymore. What transitioned is that as more companies entered the marketplace, more competition created an incentive for new distributors to be developed. Much of the value of the local distributor is the relationships, access, trust, and customer service capability to the surgeon or the treating physician. What happened is companies that were newer market entrance, they would go to maybe a distributor rep, the sales rep in the cases now.


At this point, the distributor principal's running a decent-sized business, and they're not in the OR as much. They have other things that they have to do to keep the business running. They would recruit the distributor rep and say, “You'd be our distributor.” The rep would say, “That's great. I don't have the cash to keep buying inventory. I'm not liquid like that.” That gave way to what is the most common model now, which is the agent. What an agent does is represent a product. When the product is used, the manufacturer fulfills the product, bills for the product, handles any complaints, reportable events, invoices the hospital, and attempts to collect.


The agent's role is simply facilitating a sale in exchange for which they receive a commission or a sales commission. Sales commission agents is most common in med tech in the United States. There's a very low barrier to entry to become a “distributor” or agent. What we have is most products that are newer to the market are sold by ultimate contractors, sales commission paid agents. It can be a single sales rep or three people. Oftentimes, these entities, which are incredibly successful, serve a huge purpose and are very valuable. I want to make that clear.

When you create content online, the distribution is more efficient.

The agency model is a wonderful one. It's profitable. It serves a key need in getting the best technology into the patient. It’s also incredibly capital efficient to start. You almost need no money. As the sales agent model proliferates in med tech, it's right back to all these reps competing for a finite number of hours in a day and of physicians. That's where we are now. Most companies that reach a certain scale attempt to build a direct sales force so that they have a direct relationship with their customer, which is the most valuable resource they have.


Many of these companies are 1 or 2 product companies. You have sales reps focused on one product, which is great, but they have extra capacity. This is my perspective. I see too many sales reps carrying too many products or only one product. We're approaching, and if we not have approached already, the pharmaceutical was too many reps. I want to be super clear. My healthcare career started as a pharmaceutical sales rep. I was super fortunate to even get that job. I love doing that work. I do. The pharmaceutical companies, the way they change healthcare, is amazing.


I became a med-tech rep selling needles and biopsy devices and eventually got into the spine. I became a sales manager and hired sales reps. I am all about in the OR, procedural selling, offering value by building trust and solving problems for our customers. Like that is, to me, the best way to get stuff to physicians. I wish it weren’t the way it is now. It's too crowded. There are too many sales reps. You end up with a sales rep that might cover ten cases a month, which is a fair amount for some specialties.


They have eleven days a month where, if they're not in the OR, what can they do? They're trying to access doctors. For so many reasons, the number one, in my opinion, is we got to make that last mile shorter and more efficient as far as how long it takes capital efficient. The big problem in med tech getting the best new products to the patients is this constraint on access with ultimately the physician who makes the decision.


Content Creation As A Solution

Content creation, I always thought, was corny. I'm not looking for attention. I don't want people to like my TikTok dance, so to speak. I get that. I'm not disparaging it, but it's not my why if you will. When I look at, as a healthcare entrepreneur, what I would love the most is the ability to access, whether it's four seconds at a time through the form of a podcast, which can be a long-form or interviewing people that I'm interested in, or a newsletter, a blog, all the things that happen. When you create content online, the distribution is more efficient.


UMN 23 | Content Creation
Content Creation: The big problem in MedTech getting the best new products to the patients is this constraint on access with the physician who makes the decision.

This show, whether you're hearing it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or directly from my breed Buzzsprout feed, you could be accessing this from LinkedIn, some snippet of it, Twitter, you name it, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, an awesome distribution platform. All those distribution platforms are free. If I have something that's of value, the cost for me to get it to people is almost zero. Whereas if I were taping cassettes of this show and paying door-to-door salespeople to give out samples, I would be broke.


It is not a viable model for business-like podcasting or selling thing. However, with all this free distribution primarily consumed on the device that has sadly or not captured most people's attention, the mobile phone, the mobile device, the customer, the audience, whoever that is, can access the information whenever they want.


You can stop this show, go home, eat dinner, and get on with your life. On the way to the grocery store, maybe listen to four minutes, but it's on your schedule. Similarly, video or podcasts are not like a sales call, which is very ephemeral. It happened, and it's over. It's not recorded. I know all of us salespeople immediately enter detailed notes into our CRM. I'm being sarcastic. A sales call happens, and it's over. You can't share it with your colleague, show it to your manager and request feedback and coaching.


I'll never forget. This is a funny aside, but when I was a drug rep, it was back in the days of pay phones voicemail. You'd have like an AUDIX, which was a brand of voicemail. You'd get out of a sales call. I remember being strongly encouraged by my manager. You would do content creation. It was hilarious. To me, it felt so contrived. Initially, I didn't like it, but it'd be like, “Manager, it's Jeff. I got out of a great sales call with Dr. Cardiologist. We reviewed the heart failure data of Metoprolol XL versus Carvedilol. His objection was a concern about a low dose indication.


We discussed Toprol XL's new 25-milligram dosage. I asked him if that addressed his concern. It did. I closed him for a prescription. I’m excited about this call and highly encourage our colleagues to use the Lancet paper to talk about 25-milligram Toprol XL.” You'd end record and send that to your manager, who would then forward it on to a bunch of people. They would layer their comments on top of it. I laughed because you would get these voicemails that were performance art. It will go all the way up.

There's no shortage of opportunities to innovate and transform healthcare.

These are big complicated sales organizations. It'd be like the regional vice president of cardiovascular would send this voicemail to a whole company, cascading everyone's comments. It was ridiculous. As a recipient, you'd be like, “I can't believe I have to listen to this.” The point is with social media blogs, mediums, and sub-stacked newsletters. It’s free.


You can create content from your phone. You can post it to a podcast which is not a technological hurdle. It's not difficult. Any number of services distribute your podcast to all the players that people use, and suddenly you can deliver to an audience.


Why Am I Doing This?

Why am I doing this? One, I get so excited when I see physician entrepreneurs get inspired, come up with an idea, partner up with a handful of people and make a run at it. To me, it's an awesome journey. I can't think of a better cause than helping people's health and improving inefficiencies in our US healthcare system. I've said on many episodes that I lean towards solutions built on exciting and exponential technology and things that keep getting better because that fascinates me.


From a career perspective, my whole career has been in med tech or healthcare at large, and that's where I plan on being. I'm fully committed to being disciplined and consistently over time with relatively low effort. I'm not saying that to devalue what I'm doing, but it's not like I'm writing a book, which would take a lot of concentrated effort. I can share things and try to do it in an organized way so that it can be of value. I don't mind doing that for 5 or 10 years. It's okay because all along the way, what I'm developing is an audience of people that see value in the information I'm sharing because it's relevant to their life.


Maybe they think that it can help them on their journey. If nothing else, it gives them something to think about. When I started Providence Medical Technology, you couldn't find this information. It's very difficult. You're always counting on a consultant that you have to pay. It was harder, but this information is available now. I'm not the only person sharing it, by the way, nor do I want to be. I love as many healthcare entrepreneurs to share this information as possible. There's no shortage of opportunities to innovate and transform healthcare.


UMN 23 | Content Creation
Content Creation: One of the most valuable things an aspiring or a healthcare startup entrepreneur, particularly a physician, can do is share content.

My point in that is I'm going to keep doing this. I do want to say maybe this is the part of me that is a little embarrassed to share content. I do get self-conscious. I don't want to put out a hacky product. I don't want to say something like I'm an expert when I'm not. Most of all, I'm certainly not an expert in creating content in digital media or sound engineering. I love all those things, the hobby. If there are parts of this episode the sound quality falls out, I'm sorry. I'm not a pro. I'm doing this in the car.


If I get something wrong, please tell me. A lot of times, I'm saying this stuff off the cuff. I'll get things wrong occasionally. I love to be corrected and always welcome feedback as a gift. In summary, I'll end this by saying, “One of the most valuable things an aspiring or a healthcare startup entrepreneur, particularly a physician, can do is share content.


The content I tend to engage with and love the most is not some perfectly planned out and scripted work of art. It's a person I think is interesting, admire or want to get to know, sharing what's going on. What they did that they thought was great, can't believe they made that mistake, their trials and tribulations, their successes. I like to hear the whole thing. It’s like a reality show because that's where I believe a lot of the truth is.


The physician entrepreneur has the advantage over other content creators. There are tens of thousands of sales representatives vying for their attention and will likely be very engaged with their content. If you're a sales representative reading this and not doing that, I’d ask you to consider it because if there's a physician, you're trying to get in front of, and that surgeon has taken the time to create content, whether it takes her five minutes or five hours it's effort. It always feels good if somebody engages. It's like, you wonder, is anyone listening?


Physician entrepreneurs that are also content creators have an easier time scaling their audience, which is great, and getting engagement which begets more engagement and grows the audience. Physician entrepreneurs, whether you're working out or your idea has legs, or you're still trying to figure out, is this what I'm truly passionate about? Am I obsessed with this problem to solve? You're recruiting a co-founder or looking for legal, regulatory IP advice to incorporate your Delaware C Corp, do your convertible note, safe note financing. You get the picture if you've been reading for a little while.


UMN 23 | Content Creation
Content Creation: Physician entrepreneurs that are also content creators have an easier time scaling their audience and getting engagement which begets more engagement and grows the audience.

All the things I'm describing that you will do as part of this journey are have a distribution platform where you can share your ideas, get feedback, and recruit people to join your mission. All those things are made easier by creating content that has value, building an audience, and the reward for delivering that value and building an audience and it's a job every day. You have to continue to deliver quality content, but should a person be able to do that? Entrepreneurs have almost a never-ending well of information they can share because it's what they did that day. It's a new problem, the near-death experience, the investor pitch that was a home run, or the one that was a total disaster.


There are so much content ideas to share, physician entrepreneurs, sales representatives, and big company executives. One of the people I look up to the most in healthcare is Geoff Martha, the CEO of Medtronic. When I look at the content he's putting out on, I’m like, “He probably has a team because he's so busy,” but it's so on point. Here you have one of the largest companies in healthcare, and they have a massive direct salesforce across every therapeutic area they participate in. Yet, they still invest in content creation because, like Medtronic or the startup, NewCo, we have the same problem, hard to access the target physician. It's going to get harder.


Content creation distributed freely through these platforms is a viable model. It's cost-effective. I doubt it will be like that forever because eventually, like a direct salesforce in pharma scrub sink details, break room refreshments, cadaver labs, the list goes on and on, email marketing, eventually other competitors realize this is effective.


The more people that come into the space, it becomes saturated and no longer effective, but that's not this moment. We have probably years to build this audience. The wonderful thing about building an audience is, as a physician entrepreneur, let's say a company buys your company. They don't buy your LinkedIn audience. For your next business, that group of people you've developed, that audience, and that network are still your audience. As long as you continue sharing content that they find valuable, it's going to help you in your next company.


The name of the game here is as embarrassing as I feel sometimes sharing stuff and photos and hearing my voice go on and on and on. The reason to do it is you want to have my why inspiring people's growth so together we can transform healthcare. The best way to transform healthcare, in my opinion, one of the best ways, is to get the best ideas from the prepared mind, which is the physician entrepreneur. The next step of that is to be a part of the entrepreneur healthcare startup journey and assist those entrepreneurs.


For me, content creation is not something that I'm considering doing. I'm 100% committed to learning it and highly encourage anybody reading this to do the same. That's my opinion. Make a decision for yourself. In the meantime, I'll keep trying my best. Hopefully, it'll get better. As always, thank you for reading this episode. I look forward to hearing you on a future episode.


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Thanks for reading. This episode was me going on and on about content marketing. I wove in there some historical examples of why content delivery on internet web-based platforms is the current model. It has the highest return on investment. What I tried to do is explain why physician entrepreneurs and all healthcare entrepreneurs, it is not a distraction or something that's taking you away from your business. If you can invest 30 to 45 minutes a day, even one hour a week initially, in creating content that is of value, it will help you along your journey at every stage, especially if you make it to the commercialization stage. Good luck out there. As always, you can reach me at JeffSmith.co or find me on LinkedIn.


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