Ben Fung, PT, DPT, MBA
Ben Fung, PT, DPT, MBA, is the cofounder and chief operating officer of UpDoc Media. He can be reached at ben@updocmedia.com.
Practice, Location: UpDoc Media; based in Maryland, operating from San Diego, serving digitally worldwide!
Size of practice (# of locations, employees): Digital, worldwide; fewer than 10 employees
Years in practice: 8 in practice as a PT; UpDoc turns 3 years come Summer 2018
Most influential book: Why We Buy, by Paco Underhill
Favorite vacation spot: Disneyland
Favorite movie: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
How do you like to spend your free time? Martial arts (Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu), surfing, re-creating restaurant cuisines, mastering the art of coffee, and family time.
What do you like most about your job? I can help businesses, professionals, and students reach transformative levels of success from anywhere in the world.
What do you like least about your job? That I must remain patient with speed to scale, as any entrepreneur must. I simply can’t wait to help more companies thrive; this required patience is a necessary discipline of growing a model where mutual success is the aimed for and ultimate goal.
What is the most important lesson you’ve learned? “You get what you pay for.” There are a lot of things you can do in-house; however, most practices don’t have true competencies in accounting, marketing, finance, or human resources—there’s always someone who will do it for cheaper—sometimes that’s you as the owner or clinic director by doing it on your own time. The unfortunate truth of the matter is this: Companies lose far more than they gain when seeing in-house efforts as “cost savings”—the amount of revenue opportunity and market share downstream that is then lost for the short-term benefit is absolutely staggering.
Describe your essential business philosophy: Business is connecting with people and delivering meaningful value to their lives in a consistent way.
Describe your management style: Hire talented people; empower them to build, create, and grow their own success—even if means promoting them outside of your company.
What is the best way you keep a competitive edge? By being the best in content creation, brand narratives, and data-driven marketing strategies in forging long-term growth for our clients.
How do you measure your success? As a marketing and consulting agency, the success of our customers and clientele is the essence of our own success. When our clients near double their revenue, expand to new cities, and go-to-market on an international scale for KPIs [key performance indicators]—that, to me, is success—and we’ve consistently delivered on these results.
Goal yet to be achieved: Developing a full-scale employee stock option plan.
Best decision: Building our brand first, then developing revenue activities.
Worst decision: Not investing early on with automation opportunities.
Toughest decision: Choosing to not expand too quickly. Growth has never been a question—it’s always been a question of timing.
How do you motivate your employees? Encouraging them to adopt an ownership mentality in everything that they do.
If you could start over, what would you do differently? Invest early in automation and management systems.
Describe your competitive advantage: We are a media, marketing, and consulting agency for physical therapy businesses, by business-minded physical therapists; our ecosystem approach creates a brand-driven strategy, rather than disconnected tactical attempts at growth—just as a good clinician would never only use one intervention, we use the right combination of marketing initiatives for the right company, at the right time, for the right calls to action, based on their audience segments.
Describe your marketing strategy and highlight your most successful action: We have an ecosystem-based, content marketing strategy. We deliver valuable content in a clinically precise way to specific audience segments to develop brand value and trust; then, we ask the right audience segments to take action, whether it’s to buy, to receive a free consulting session, or to explore more valuable free content. We utilize this approach for not only ourselves but also our clients—creating seamlessness between the various touchpoints across a customer’s conversion journey.
As mentioned, our success is defined by the success of our customers and clientele. We’ve helped practices grow and expand to new cities, startup clinics double their revenue in a handful of months, and health-tech data science companies go to market in North America.
Yet, through all this, I’d say the greatest successful action we’ve had is in establishing trust—trust in the UpDoc Media brand, and in growing a direct-to-consumer trust on behalf of our clients.
What unique programs do you offer that set you apart from the competition? Our ecosystem approach is truly a unique element that offers an outsourced marketing solution with an in-house cultural understanding as fellow private practitioners. We truly understand the struggles. And we practice what we preach.