Episode Highlights:

Joe Sanok: “The thing is about podcasts is you can go so hyper-niche in an area that maybe you’re even new to. Within 50 episodes, you’re going to be one of the leading experts in whatever new niche you’re in.”
Episode Overview
In this engaging Ignite podcast episode, Alex Membrillo dives into the often-overlooked aspects of scaling and managing practices with guest Joe Sanok, founder of Practice of the Practice and author of Thursday is the New Friday. The conversation shifts from typical marketing strategies to the importance of simplifying operations, overcoming limiting mindsets, and designing a practice you love.
Joe shares his journey from starting a counseling practice to building a consulting business that supports private practices. His insights emphasize how therapists and business owners often limit growth by holding on to too many responsibilities. From hiring virtual assistants to focusing on areas of passion, he outlines actionable steps to scale sustainably. Joe encourages outsourcing tasks you dislike and highlights the value of identifying your unique superpowers to align them with business goals.
The discussion also explores the neuroscience behind creativity, emphasizing the importance of rest and breaks. Joe explains how stepping away from the grind—whether for a walk, meditation, or even a sabbatical—can unlock breakthrough ideas. Alex relates this to his own experiences, agreeing that today’s overscheduled culture stifles creativity.
Shifting gears, Joe underscores the potential of podcasting for businesses, including B2C providers. With over 1,100 episodes of his podcast, he shares tips for hyper-niche content creation, guest strategies, and the long-term ROI of podcasts as networking and learning tools. He dismantles the myth that podcasts are exclusively for B2B, citing examples of therapists live-streaming therapy sessions and niche creators turning small audiences into profitable opportunities.
Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.
Alex Membrillo: Guys, this is going to be a different podcast and an important one because as marketers, all we think about is running more ads and getting more leads every day and that’s not always enough. What you guys have heard is scaling up and through a variety of our content and our expert speakers is getting more leads is not the only battle, it’s just the first one. Then converting them and running a really great practice is the most important one.
We’ve got Joe Sanok on this podcast, on Ignite with us here for the next 15 minutes. The dude knows the business of the business really well. Joe, welcome to Ignite.
Joe Sanok: Oh, Alex, I’m so excited to be here.
Alex: Yes, thanks for faking it. Joe, tell them about where you come from and a little bit about your business.
Joe: I’m up here in Traverse City, Michigan, and I started a counseling practice just as a side gig way to pay off student loan debt. Slowly built that into for our community, which is a larger practice. 13 practitioners, all private pay, ended up selling it to one of my practitioners there in 2019. I concurrently started Practice of the Practice in 2012, and that was a podcast and also a website, really for me to just document my learning.
Learning about SEO, I didn’t want to pay a consultant so I’d just reach out to someone that knows SEO and interview them and ask all my questions. If I wanted to update my WordPress website, I’d find a guy or gal that could help with that. I’d interview them for the podcast and we’d work on my website. Really, it was just I didn’t know this stuff and I just started a podcast to be able to interview people I should probably be paying. Over time, now we’re over 1100 episodes. I think you were Episode 1171 if my memory serves me. That’s now all I do. I get to interview really interesting people. In your case, somewhat interesting people.
Alex: Marginally useful.
Joe: Marginally useful people, and do some consulting. We have some consultants and then we’ve got a membership community that helps therapists and private practice to thrive, but not just thrive to make a practice they absolutely love.
Alex: I love it. You built the business and you saw all of the hiccups and issues through building it. Now you’re helping others avoid some of those and building a network community so they can get together. You have a number of events I see that you’re throwing and stuff like that. You get people together. I love that we’re not just going to talk marketing on this one. That’s good. It gives my mind a break for a little bit. What have you seen most effective in scaling from a few locations and clinicians beyond that? What are the keys that you preach to your practice clients?
Joe: From the very beginning, we just talked about really simplifying the business because most therapists went into therapy to help people and not to run a business. If we could just simplify what’s going on, I think that just makes it easier. It seems less complex and scary for them. Really, in a practice, there’s three major things. There’s the operations, there’s the clinical, and then there’s the marketing. If we just say, okay, what are you doing to scale in each of those areas and how do we continue to scale beyond yourself?
To get to that 100k when they first start out, you’re wearing a million hats. You’re the bookkeeper, you’re the accountant, you’re doing often the billing.
Then we want to slowly over time just say, what do I hate doing? Okay, I hate answering the phone or I’m missing the phone calls and people aren’t getting scheduled in because I’m in the way of that. Well, let’s hire a part-time virtual assistant. Then over time, it’s like, let’s hire a full-time person. Let’s add a couple of clinicians. Really helping them overcome that mindset of only I can do it as well as I can do it instead of, yes, you can do it best now, but that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t do it better than you at some point.
Once we start to overcome some of those mindsets, to me, that’s when people start to realize, oh, I really like this aspect of the business. Maybe I don’t like doing clinical anymore and I like the marketing, but I don’t like the operations. Okay, let’s put you in that area and figure out where your time is best served.
Alex: Do you find that every practice owner has their own superpower and you’re like, oh, they actually are really good at marketing I’ve got to get them replaced on the upside first. Is it a general playbook everybody runs?
Joe: Yes, I think a lot of people have areas that they have preference. We’ll take some of my clients, their former IT people that turned into counselors. They love the website stuff. They dork out on that. Now, the problem is we have to think about is that getting in the way of your growth? I love art. I love design. I love color schemes and marketing and all that. I used to with my podcast, do every single show notes, all of the editing, and made beautiful graphics for social media for every episode so every half-hour interview took three hours of my time.
Now, I eventually outsourced that. Now I just go do art. I just go paint downstairs. I go do watercolors. Realizing just because that’s scratching that itch for you doesn’t mean it has to be in your business. You can outsource that and just say, I’m just going to do this for fun.
Alex: That applies to any marketer out there. I know you love doing the SEO optimizations yourself, but it doesn’t mean you should because your practice is growing too fast and go do some watercolor downstairs or something like there to something like that to scratch the itch.
Joe: The neuroscience also supports that. When you think about when your best, most creative ideas happen, it’s when you’re in the shower. It’s when you’re out for a hike. It’s when you’re driving with the podcast off and you let your brain just go past that default mode network and get into a deeper flow state. That’s when we have our best ideas. Even yesterday, I had a podcaster cancel last minute so I had an hour to just go do something. I decided to go meditate and to go paint instead of jumping into my email and doing all the things I probably should have been doing. I restructured. We’ve been working on restructuring our membership community. It all just dumped out of me after that time. The neuroscience supports that slowing down actually helps us get more creative and stronger worth things done.
Alex: I could not be more on board. I’ve already walked like, I think, 3 miles today. Walking is my therapy in a way, I think. It absolutely is critical to get away from this computer and just go think. Even if there’s that thing that you like doing, got to take a break and I promise you will solve all of your problems by taking more breaks. We are overscheduled. As a society, we are way overscheduled.
The Zoom thing through COVID, actually, this has nothing to do with this podcast. Side note, the Zoom thing through COVID was one of the best, worst things that ever happened because now we just load everybody up with Zoom, and the work, I’m sure, is getting less creative because everyone’s just staring at the screen all day. Anywho, with your larger practices that you’re working with, Joe, what are some of the unlocks that you’ve seen really help them scale up? What do the big practices do better than the small practices?
Joe: Yes, the owners take trips. I just talked to this lady on the podcast. She has a huge practice. She’s been in Europe with her husband for four weeks. They’re like, you know what? Let’s go to Paris for an extra couple of weeks. If you can’t leave your business for four to six weeks, then you are too connected to your business. You’ve given yourself a job. Employees only get a week or two off because they are essential. The owner of the business needs to move towards being able to take four to six weeks off without things falling apart.
Alex: That means my business sucks, Joe.
[laughter]
Alex: I was talking to my wife the other day. I said, I need another. I took a three-week sabbatical a couple of years ago. Joe, I did the best thinking of my life. I felt we really moved the thing forward. Then it’s like, I guess that worked. Now I’m caught on the hamster wheel and can’t get off and take a day off or a week off seems just totally crazy. By the way, Joe works three days a week, guys. Joe, you preached on a four-day workweek. Tell us more about that.
Joe: Yes, I wrote this book called Thursday is the New Friday. Harper Collins stood behind it, which was awesome. When we look at the research around the four-day workweek, 32 hours a week is about the break point where productivity ends. When you look at anything beyond that, you’re usually doing things that later you have to undo or it’s subpar work. When we look at the research studies, if you just look in Google Scholar for four-day workweek and say, in the last two years, how many studies, there’s thousands of studies now that have been done on the point to this.
You even look at a place like Golden, Colorado. CNN did a huge story about how they as a city switched to the four-day workweek. Now we’re talking fire. We’re talking ambulance services. We’re talking police. They obviously weren’t just working Monday through Thursday and then saying, sorry, no ambulances for the weekend. People were working 32-hour workweeks over four days. They found they had less overtime. They found that they had better quality services and they actually saved money by doing this across the board. What we find is then your brain can rest. It can slow down. We can look internally as to what’s going on. Then we can use the neuroscience to actually get more done because we’re rested and prepared for the week.
Alex: I bet it’s going to be even more paramount to work shorter weeks or fewer hours now that a lot of work is becoming so, I was going to say mental. It’s like you’ve got so much computer work, let’s just say thinking type work. We’re like not in farms doing– I feel like that’s probably where it comes from is we all had to be in the field and there’s no replacement for pulling the corn. Now that we have to use our brain so much and we can accomplish so much so quickly, it really seems outdated. We give our teams off half of every Friday, almost all year. Also, we don’t track when they’re online and stuff. I hope that they are taking time off. I agree. I saw those studies also in Europe. They’ve done plenty of studies. Spain loves to not work. My family’s from Spain. They love not working. The study proved out [crosstalk] really the best thing.
Joe: Eating dinner at eleven o’clock at night and then just like taking time off in the middle of the day to go just like nap, I love it.
Alex: Yes. Yes. It’s awesome. It gets so hot like you have to. My family’s all getting together next week and we’re going to cook Spanish food nonstop. The four-day work week, it makes a ton of sense. If we could get our clients on board, we’d be doing that. Let’s shift gears to the podcast. You have the most famous podcast I’ve ever seen. You and Joe Rogan, number one and two. With 11– guys, I was 1157 or something like that.
Joe: 71.
Alex: Oh my God. Talk about not feeling special. I wish he never told me that number. It is that awesome of a podcast. Joe has seen what has worked for a lot of practice groups. They say, well, we don’t need a podcast, it’s a B2B thing. Joe, that’s not true, right?
Joe: No, I saw a guy who started a podcast and I think he had about 200 followers per episode and he was making half a million dollars a year off of it. The niche was how to sell your eight-figure business. Who is attracted to listening to that podcast? People that want to sell eight-figure businesses. What’s this guy learning in the process of that? How to sell eight-figure businesses. He positioned himself as a consultant to people that were selling eight-figure businesses. He read a bunch of negotiation books, and then he took a percentage of every sale, negotiated it up like crazy. He only needed a couple of people a year to make the money he wanted to make. The thing is about podcasts is you can go so hyper-niche in an area that maybe you’re even new to. Within 50 episodes, you’re going to be one of the leading experts in whatever new niche you’re in.
The people that are listening to your show, they’re into marketing. Okay, great, a lot of people are into marketing. What’s that next layer that we can add to it? What’s the next layer of attracting the ideal clients? You can use a podcast to get your ideal clients as your guests, okay? One of our strategies is to have people come onto our show that we think would be good sponsors for our show, create those connections, and then just say, okay, would they be a good sponsor? I don’t remember how, Alex, you got booked on the show, but the level that your business plays in regards to people with 500 locations, like you wouldn’t get the ROI on being a sponsor on our show.
It’s like, it’s great to meet you. It’s cool that we have these connections. You’re playing in a different market than a lot of our listeners are playing in, but if there’s someone that’s like, yes, I’m an accountant for private practices, that’s someone that would offer good quality content on the show, but then also might be a sponsor. If you think about a podcast as, am I attracting my ideal client, my ideal listener? Am I attracting different ways that I can learn to surround myself with influencers? Now I have 1100 people I’ve interviewed that if someone says, hey, do someone that does fill in the blank? I have 5 to 10 people that I easily can refer to, which then builds that social capital.
Alex: Yes, social capital. That’s a good word for it. It helps everybody in your potential network that could become a client and you were telling me on ours that you had a therapist that was live streaming on the podcast therapy sessions.
Joe: Yes, so Esther Perel, she’s a pretty famous sex therapist. She wrote Mating in Captivity. She has one of the top TED talks. She launched a podcast a couple of years ago. I think it was during the pandemic where she does live therapy with couples and gets into some crazy stuff with them. They sign disclosures, they do all sorts of stuff. It positions herself as a therapist, but also positions her as one of the experts in really unique couples work.
Alex: All of my B2C provider groups, podcasting’s not just for B2B. It’s not just to meet potential consulting clients and stuff like that. It works on the B2C side. It is part of the influencer game. You can present a really unique angle for your provider group. Obviously, you’re going to have to get a number of people involved and on board, but I’ve heard health systems are doing it, like you can hear from patients on complicated procedure recovery. The podcasting thing works. Joe, you know what I heard? I was watching CNN last night and they went to a Trump rally and they asked the Trump supporters and they were like, how do you get your news? They said, we know it’s not CNN.
So they said, how do you get your news? They said, Joe Rogan. They named like five different [unintelligible 00:12:42]. Podcasts is the new news source. It’s where every– Joe, another thing, call me crazy if this is not true. I also heard that people are watching podcasts on YouTube. They are watching live podcasts on YouTube, like saying they’re watching– it’s like the newest old medium of the last 10 years. This is really blowing up.
Joe: Absolutely. What’s interesting is that there’s still not that many people doing it. When you look at compared to starting a blog, compared to being active on LinkedIn, compared to even a YouTube channel, it’s the best ROI for the audience size compared to the people that are content creating. To know how to launch a podcast is so essential. We have free tools over at PodcastLaunchSchool.com that just walk people through, how do you do the basics of a podcast? How do you position yourself? How do you get sponsors? We do multi-six figures in just sponsorships. How do you find those people? How do you make sure that you’re offering value and going beyond that? Those are all parts of the equation to get to that next level as a podcaster.
Alex: Man, we get multiple one figures in sponsorships so you guys are killing it. Let’s talk about the foundation of the podcast. What is the motion? I want to spin up a podcast. What are the core things someone would need to know how to do?
Joe: We want to look at just the technical side, having a decent mic. There’s so many just easy mics out there. I think even before we get there, when we’re working with our consulting clients, we have done for you podcast launches that we do for people. We talk through where do you already have an audience and where’s that audience overlapping with what you’re just crazy passionate about?
There’s no point in my opinion to starting something to make money that you don’t love doing. There’s tons of ways to make money. Don’t do it in a way that you hate. Starting with, for you, Alex, if you didn’t have this podcast and we’re starting from scratch, to think about, okay, you like marketing. You represent this business. You’re doing really big marketing stuff, but what in that could you talk to friends about over beers for hours and you would love it? So really digging into the things that you absolutely love.
That’s why every single guest, before we start rolling, I say, are you really passionate about talking about right now and what are you sick of talking about? Over and over, people are like, you know what? I’m known for this and I’m sick of talking about fill-in-the-blank. You know what I’m really been dorking out on lately? Is like AI for charades with my daughter, not for anything other than that. It’s like, well, let’s start there. Let’s start with the things, maybe we’ll find how that overlaps with what you’re into.
Finding that, then working in– The formula we use for people that are just starting is to do five solo shows. We’re like the five pillars of what you’re talking about. Say we’re talking about email marketing is like the whole thing that you’re going to focus the whole podcast on. What are the five pillars of email marketing? Then we want to have five episodes that are with experts that are way better known than you are. You’re positioning yourself as an equal with these experts. That’s immediately then giving social proof and then doing five episodes with your ideal clients.
Doing live case studies on walking through someone’s email marketing, for example. Then we have 15 episodes. At the end of that, you can say, you know what? Doing those solo shows was really hard. For me, solo shows are really difficult. Interview shows, I’m a therapist. Every one of my report cards said, Joey talks too much to his neighbors and now I get paid to talk. I know that I can just show up, like tomorrow I have three podcast interviews in a row, super easy. Then we know what of those 15 episodes are easy for you, then let’s do more of that if they resonate with the audience also.
Alex: That’s a good way to put it, Joey talks too much to us. He still remembers that Mrs. Goldberg, Mrs. Britton, Mrs. Hammers. Oh my God, I should show you a video right now. I have a giant terracotta warrior in my house because Mrs. Goldberg said I would do really [sound cut] on a trip to China thing in seventh grade. I went to China and bought a life-size terracotta warrior to say to Mrs. Goldberg–
Joe: Oh my gosh.
Alex: You’re absolutely right. What is the thing you’re passionate about? That is going to be the thing because you will get drained of this after a few months of interviews that you can’t stand where you have to activate your brain too much. What are you passionate about? What are they passionate about? Just go and intersect there. Like Joe said, the podcast thing is not super difficult. You can get it done for you by a company like Joe’s or they can guide you and you can build your own flywheel. When you start spinning it up like Joe has, yes, it takes like an army to book enough people to do the audiovisual, to promote on LinkedIn, to get the content, to get it on the website.
You can start small and it’s a great way to differentiate a practice. Joe, we talked about on your podcast, differentiation is the name of the game. Tons of therapy groups out there now. You can throw a stone if you’re in a city and hit five different practices, independent and the big MSOs. You must differentiate the podcast, showing something different, a different side of your group. It’s so critical and it’s one angle that will help you stand out. I love it. Going into 2025, Joe, what are you harping on with your clients? Hey, this is going to be the main thing I want you guys to focus on to grow faster.
Joe: When we’re looking at growth, I think understanding AI as a tool, but not the end all. I think too many people that are into AI are relying on it from copy. I view that as being able to have an initial consultant join you to think through things. For example, two months ago, I asked ChatGPT to do a SWOT analysis of my five competitors. Strength, weakness, opportunities, threats, and then to do one of myself and then find those areas where my competitors were doing better than I was and to point out to me, what could I improve on. The biggest opportunity that it showed me that we knew, we felt it, we didn’t put our finger on it though, was we had way too many offerings. We do so many different things for people because therapists have a lot of nuanced things, but we didn’t have a flagship product. Then I just had it walk me through like of what you see. What’s a flagship product that you see that’s an opportunity?
So we had all these different memberships based on people’s phase of practice. It helped me say, why don’t you just put them all together under one umbrella and just call it one thing and have it be the membership’s all-inclusive and just has different tracks. It can help you start to think differently about the strengths, the weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business. Then that’s where your team needs to be doing those next phase things. You can’t just fully rely on it. I think that’s to me where we can bring in someone to say, okay, I did ChatGPT, here’s what it said around a marketing analysis. It’s a starting point, but now let’s bring the humans in to poke holes in it and to do some of the application.
Alex: I’m about to go ask you to do a SWOT analysis on my company. That is actually really smart. I’ve got my offsite with the leadership team for playing for an extra two weeks. That was one of my, oh, I was just going to [unintelligible 00:18:51] ChatGPT. That’s really smart. It can call out things that you’re like, oh, that was kind of obvious.
It is like Joe said, it’s a tool. It’s not the end all be all. Eventually, it will and we’re all out of jobs, let’s be honest. Joe will have a job because therapy, human to human, that’s all we’re going to do because we won’t have any other white collar job. We’ll just go and sit and talk to Joe about how AI’s taking over. It’s a good tool, but it’s not the end all be all. I think that’s good.
We’re not going to be replaced entirely by the robots, but we will be replaced by the humans that understand how to use the robots here over the next few years. Go use the robots. I think Joe’s example is super good. Hopefully, the new membership consolidation works. Joe, thank you for joining us on Ignite. It was fun to not just talk about marketing stuff, but the business of the business of healthcare. That was very fun. We hope that all of these marketers listening will remember, get out of the marketing stuff, go do some watercolor and you’ll be better off next year. Thank you, Joe.
Joe: Thanks so much, Alex.
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