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Building Trust Early in Practice with Dr. Joseph Kelling · The Digital Handshake

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Digital Handshake. I'm your host, Scott Jorgensen, and we're pleased to be here with our guest, Doctor. Joe Kehling, here in Dallas. Put it there.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me, Scott.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, pleasure. Well, we were just chatting and talking about the sort of purpose and the vision of our podcast here around, you know, creating that best impression online and how do we make that sort of first digital impression our strongest asset.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: And I know that, you know, you're relatively new in practice in terms of, you know, as plastic surgeon. How many years now do you have under your belt as a plastic surgeon?
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I mean, my training was six years long. Right. So now I'm in my third year of practice on my own. So nine years, I guess, as a plastic surgeon, which is pretty wild to think about.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Well, here's the exciting part is, you know, you got a long career in front of
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: you. Yeah.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: You have done amazing work so far. You know, all of us here in Dallas are very well aware of you and your reputation. And you're doing a great job, honestly, of curating that experience of, you know, really delivering, you know, some of the best work here in town. And, you know, that doesn't happen by, you know, happenstance, right? It'd be great for our audience to learn, like, you know, obviously being a young emerging star within plastic surgery, but
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: what are you
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: doing proactively to establish that presence, that sort of footprint online to, you know, in hopes of attracting patients?
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's tough to do it because everybody gets these micro snippets of you and you don't get the time really. Obviously, we're in a podcast form right now. This is the longer time frame. If somebody's going to sit down and listen to me, this is the longest they're probably going to listen to me. But online, you know, you're getting thirty minutes snippets here and there.
• 1:51
  And I'm very lucky to have a mentor that I joined in practice. And our whole practice is really built on relationships. And that's why I love plastic surgery. I want to know who you are as a person before I operate on you. I want to know about what you like to do, what you do as a job, what you do for your hobbies so that we can connect on one of those planes before you, you know, we commit to doing something like surgery because you have to have inherent trust in me as a human being and trust that I'm going to take good care of you.
• 2:25
  I know I've got the best training in the world for plastic surgery. I can do that any day of the week, but I need to develop that level of trust with the patients. And honestly, I enjoy getting to know you and knowing that, you know, turning you as a patient into a friend, you know, it's like you said, it's this is I'm going be a plastic surgeon for another thirty, forty years. You know, it's like every person I interact with, want to see them as a friend at the end of the day. You know,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: well, let's take this opportunity to get to know Doctor. Joe better. You know, share with us, like, you know, when you're not operating, when you're not working, you know, what are you spending your time? Like, give us a little bit of sort of a peek into the personal life of Joe.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you know, as you age, you start, you know, you find the person that you love, you marry that person. Perfect. And you grow a family with them. So right now I'm in that very early stage of our family growth period.
• 3:22
  I've got a three and a half year old, a two year old and a seven month old. So outside of plastic surgery, Scott, to be honest with you, I'm not doing a whole lot of raising children, but I love it. It's awesome. It's great. You know, so I but I'm able to connect with a lot of my patients on that plane.
• 3:39
  You know, a lot of my patients in plastic surgery are women. Yeah. And a lot of these women have had kids and they're looking to find themselves and the body that they had prior to having those kids. So it's like I get to connect with you about how much fun it is to have little kids. Right.
• 3:53
  And a lot of these women, have young kids, they've got old kids. Right. It's easy to talk about your kids and be excited about that and be optimistic about it. And And then from there we can talk about, okay, well, how do we make you feel better about yourself or more active or more confident in the way that you're appearing? So that's what I'm doing outside of plastic surgery is really raising these kids.
• 4:13
  Also, I love to play golf. I grew up you know, in sports. I played basketball in college. You know, I'm a very active individual, so I'm usually exercising in one way or the other. But, know, like as you get older and you have kids, you probably remember this.
• 4:28
  Your hobbies become much narrower in scope. You got to pick the ones you really like and commit to those because you don't have time for too many of them.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Well, being a father of four children myself and, you kind have been there, done that, right? Where you're at the thick of it with like the diaper bags and the car seats and the diaper changes and, you know, 15 strollers and, you know, I'm
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: a dirty diaper specialist. Exactly. So,
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: I hear you. You know, but I gotta tell you, sometimes my kids just wanna they wanna, you know, they pull my hair out, right, because of just the crazy things they do or what have you. And I gotta imagine you probably have had a patient, right, that you just wanna pull your hair out. And they may get in front of that keyboard and type something about you and say something. One, has that happened to you?
• 5:15
  And what are you doing out there to manage your reputation online?
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I'm very proactive in patient education. Okay. I think that's really critical. And especially as a board certified plastic surgeon, I think one of the major emphasis of our practice is patient safety and then good outcomes.
• 5:36
  So like from a patient education standpoint, I go over what postoperatively, what are we going to be dealing with? What are we going to be seeing? Because what happens immediately after surgery and what they're seeing immediately after surgery in their head, you know, they see what that long term image looks like. They don't see what the short term looks like and what barriers they have to overcome to get to those. So I feel like most of the time if I'm butting heads with somebody, it's usually because they didn't listen to me when I was talking to them about it like, hey, you're going to be swollen, you're going to be bruised.
• 6:05
  It's going to be ugly for a little bit before we get to that really beautiful result that you're looking for. Right. And a lot of times it's just like, just have to educate them, you know, and go back to the education and be like, please, please be patient with me. This is going to be okay. We're going to get through this.
• 6:21
  And if it's not, I'm going to be the person that's here for you and I'll make sure it gets right at the end of the day before you, before they get onto the keyboard, it's just making sure you connect with them as a human being and see it from their perspective. Like, Hey, I understand this is really hard what you're going through. Let me help you. Because when you came in initially, I took the time to build that trust with the patient and make sure they knew that I was going be there to help them at the end through the good things and through the bad. You know, it's not a marriage, but in a way it is.
• 6:50
  There's a lot of trust you're making and developing really quickly and have commit to that. So,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: yeah, I think that's I love that word trust. And I feel like that's if I could pick one word to describe the podcast series here at the Digital Handshake, it's about how are we creating and instilling trust. It's just that whole of act of shaking hands. What have you found from your experience in marketing your practice? I mean, we're plastic surgeons, we're doing retail medicine.
• 7:19
  I mean, at the end of the day, we need new patients to feed the practice. What are you doing online now to really help deliver that sense of trust for patients?
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I kind of already talked about it, but I think patient education is really important in demonstrating that you're an expert in the field so that when they come see you for a consultation, they know that you've taken the time to truly understand a topic that you're discussing with them. The patients are coming in more educated.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Are you using videos for that? What you using like tactically to like actually create that for them?
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think videos are the multimedia that people really heavily rely on. You can see how big YouTube is becoming. Everybody basically has their own channel in some way. So patients are finding experts that way. My favorite patients are typically patients that find me via word-of-mouth because I know that I've made somebody happy and they've told their friend about it.
• 8:21
  And so the expectations are already, I think appropriate. They've seen somebody go through the surgery already. So those patients are always, I feel like the best. I think capturing people online is difficult because they come in with different ideas and different plastic surgeons have different ideas on what's the right way to do something. And I think sometimes as a consumer, they can get really attached to some celebrity plastic surgeon's ideas about what's the right way to do it.
• 8:48
  In a plastic surgery, there's a lot of right ways to do something. So that's where it comes back to, okay, do I trust the person that I'm talking to about this?
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: You know, another form that's obviously very, very popular is social media. And here at Media PSC, we offer a whole suite of services, but one that's become very, very popular is having a partner to help with social media, social media management and what have you. I'd love to hear, for our audience, for your practice in particular, what are you doing to do to leverage social media for creating that trust with patients?
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think this is important. I think the two ways, you know, patients used to find your office, they walk into the waiting room, and we're talking about digital handshake. I kind of think of now you're, you have two online presence as your website is kind of like your waiting room and so are your social media platforms. So I like to make sure I have really high quality before and after content, as well as the videos that you guys have helped me produce to kind of demonstrate my expertise that way and make sure it's all very, very classy. I think, I mean, I know I look young, so I think making sure that everything I do is done at a very high level and it's well maintained.
• 10:11
  That's what I'm trying to create through my social media platform.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Has there been any post or anything that you've done, whether it's on your website or your social media or some videos we filmed here where it surprised you, the reaction that you've gotten from patients? Not really. Nothing's stuck out.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: Nothing's really stuck out to me. I think globally everything's very, very well received. And again, it's just making sure that I'm not trying to be controversial about anything, right? Like I'm just trying to show who I am as a surgeon and who I am as a person and a character. So, yeah, everything has been well received, nothing's really stood out to me.
• 10:48
  Like, I'm like, oh, I didn't realize people would react to it that way.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess that's good. No news is good news. I guess, kind of wrapping up here, one question is, if you were able to find a couple extra thousand dollars in your marketing budget a month, What additional sort of things are you looking at right now with helping in your marketing, your promotion, your sort of outreach to patients? Where are some bets that you're considering?
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think people spend a lot of time on Google looking for these things. So how can I boost my status on Google or in the SEO? Again, being a surgeon that's in my third year of practice, not my thirtieth year of practice. My, my website is a little bit younger in terms of what shows up on Google pages.
• 11:39
  So I think I'd probably spend more money that way to try to kind of boost my search engine optimization. I've tried to do a lot more open houses and stuff like that, but I think the easiest way to reach people is truly via either Google or social media. So finding better ways to reach patients or prospective clients through social media platforms too, I think is probably a secondary way of how I do it. Right.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: And then just as a little fun question for you to kind of as we wrap up here is if you had a chance to shadow a plastic surgeon where you could go and watch them operate, go to their practice, perhaps see how they do it, right? Is there a surgeon that you've never met that you're like, You know what? I'd really like to go visit Doctor. X. Anybody come to mind that you would love to have the opportunity to go and shadow and visit and see how they're doing it?
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of surgeons that have very, very comprehensive practices that do a good job of managing preoperative education and then postoperative recovery. You know, I think it's a costly endeavor to bring all of those things into one practice. But I feel like Lou Bucky in Philadelphia has done a great job of doing that and seeing what he's done from afar. I've never met him personally.
• 12:59
  And then there's a facial plastic surgeon in St. Louis, Mike Nayak that I think is he's excellent in terms of his patient education and what he puts out there on social media platforms. And he's very real Tim Martin as well. He's not very active on social media, but I feel like what we do, I love facial rejuvenation. I feel like what I, a lot of what I do in terms of facial rejuvenation comes a lot from what he does.
• 13:26
  And again, I've met him personally, so and I've learned from him a little bit as well, but I think he does an excellent job too. Right.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Well, those are all, you know, Mount Rushmore type, you know, plastic surgeons, no doubt. Well, Joe, I want to say thank you for being on the digital handshake.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: Of
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: course. It's been a pleasure, put it there, and again I want to say thank you to our sponsor, Media PSC, for helping us put this podcast together, and we'll see you on our next episode.