[Top Agency Series] Growing a Healthcare Brand Through Marketing With Stewart Gandolf

Stewart Gandolf is the CEO of Healthcare Success, a full-service brand performance marketing agency focused on healthcare and recognized as a thought leader in the industry. Over the past 20 years, he has marketed and consulted for over a thousand healthcare clients ranging from practices and hospitals to multi-billion dollar corporations. 

Stewart began his career with leading advertising agencies including J. Walter Thompson, where he marketed Fortune 500 clients such as Wells Fargo and Bally’s Total Fitness. He is a renowned speaker who has shared his expertise at over 200 venues across the United States. Additionally, he has written for numerous industry-leading publications as an author and expert resource, including the Healthcare Success Insight blog.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:21] Stewart Gandolf introduces Healthcare Success and what it does 
• [04:41] How Stewart got into the healthcare marketing space
• [11:57] How Stewart’s speaking career started 
• [14:28] Handling objections in a speaking career 
• [17:23] How did Healthcare Success grow? 
• [22:00] Stewart talks about inbound and outbound marketing strategies for healthcare businesses
• [24:38] The evolution of Healthcare Success’ services
• [29:19] Maintaining company culture for in-office and remote teams
• [35:35] Prioritizing clients and saying “no” to unsuitable ones
• [37:46] Stewart’s insights on content creation for scaling a business

In this episode…

Marketing is the backbone of every business. Doing it right helps increase brand awareness, attract new customers, and build a loyal patient base. As for entrepreneurs in the healthcare space, how can they successfully grow their brands through marketing?

Healthcare marketing professional Stewart Gandolf recommends outsourcing your marketing efforts to a healthcare marketing agency. Growing a healthcare brand is no easy feat — it can be overwhelming for business owners to manage multiple tasks such as patient care, financial management, human resources, and marketing. As a result, many healthcare businesses struggle to offer quality services to their clients and attract new customers. However, partnering with an agency specializing in healthcare marketing and medical advertising can free up your time to focus on offering quality patient care.

On this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Stewart Gandolf, CEO of Healthcare Success, to discuss healthcare marketing. Stewart explains how he got into the healthcare marketing space, the growth of Healthcare Success, inbound and outbound marketing strategies for healthcare businesses, and the evolution of Healthcare Success’ services.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Stewart Gandolf on LinkedIn
• Healthcare Success

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast 

Related episode(s):

• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast 
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast 
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast 
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast 
• “Mechanisms for Closing Million-Dollar Deals with Oren Klaff of Pitch Anything” on the Inspired Insider Podcast 

Quotable Moments: 

• “Being good at digital is hard — good digital people want to be with other good digital people.”
• “Marketing was perceived as unethical — it was illegal until the late 70s for doctors.”
• “If you’re speaking, be an authority, and demonstrate that fast and early and hard.”
• “Doctors respect people who are smart — they respect intelligence.”
• “Doctors in particular are famous for thinking they know more than everybody else.”

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs leaders today is no different. I have Stewart Gandolf of healthcaresuccess.com. And Stewart before I formally introduce you, I will make you play the guitar behind you. But I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast, people should check out. Since as part of the Top Agency series, I did a couple episodes with Jason Swenk, who grew his agency to over eight figures and sold it and then now he’s been buying up agencies. So those are interesting episodes. I had Todd Taskey, who runs a Second Bite Podcast, and he talks about how he pairs agencies with private equity and help sell agencies and sometimes they make more on the second bite than the first. So he’s talking deep on valuation, everything like that. And there was another one I geek out on which is Adi Klevit. She does SOPs for companies and we talked about all our favorite productivity, software tools and everything like that, and we shared all of those. So check those out, and more on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast we do strategy accountability in the full execution. Stewart we call ourselves the magic elves that work in the background and make it look easy for the host in the company. That is the same metaphor. You’re like the magic elves for healthcare companies. I know. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people in companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com And I’m excited to introduce Stewart Gandolf. He has built his agency since 2006. He has over 20 years of experience and marketing. We’re going to dig into that. And today he leads a healthcare marketing agency, like I mentioned at healthcaresuccess.com. Their agency specializes in healthcare marketing, medical advertising, they focus on delivering patients, influencing doctors, building brands, and ultimately generating ROI. And they work with doctors, hospitals, manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, and other healthcare clients. They also have free information. They practice what they preach and go to healthcaresuccess.com they have a blog, I think they have over 20,000 subscribers there that tune in. So, Stewart, thanks for joining me.

Stewart Gandolf 3:00 

Hey, glad to be here. Awesome. And I love the off analogy is awesome. My former roommate used to tell the other roommate helps don’t clean up after you. That’s been a stewardess. And for years I’ve never heard of y’all say about magic elves. So use the exact same one.

Jeremy Weisz 3:16 

Awesome. So tell people a little bit more about Healthcare Success and what you do.

Stewart Gandolf 3:21 

You actually did a pretty good synopsis there. So we’re a national company. We’ve got about 40 people on our team. I love doing what we do. We’re absolutely expert at what we do. And I guess the one thing I would say is that makes us maybe a little unique. There are really certainly today, a lot of good digital agencies, there’s a bunch out there. There’s a lot of good branding agencies, there’s a lot out there, there are companies that focus on healthcare, it’s really rare doing all three in the same place. So there are people that everybody says they’re integrated, but usually they may have outsourced their digital or they’ve had freelancers with a creative or whatever. So it’s not easy. It’s taken me 17 years to get to this stage where we really have process experts in each of those things. So our sort of playground is healthcare. But our approaches to bring a truly integrated team. Again, I’m not saying anything disrespect, my agency colleagues is just, they most of them would recognize it’s hard. Because being good at digital is really hard, good digital, people want to be with other good digital people. And getting good branders to want to play on that party is twice as hard to find. So finally, it’s taken us a long time.

Jeremy Weisz 3:21 

I want to talk about the evolution of the agency a little bit but talk about the niche and how you fall in the healthcare.

Stewart Gandolf 3:47 

Sure. So actually fun fact I thought I was going to be an engineer and I also passed on being an attorney which in retrospect, that would have been fun. I think I would have been a better attorney than engineer, but I’m a creative person as well. And so the creative side of me one out So while I’m still pretty analytical, or at least have that in me, it’s very similar now, but it’s much more creative. I worked my way from a little marketing company in San Diego right after graduation, I moved to as far away from Ohio as I could find, and went to Southern San Diego and worked on client side for about four years. In that case, I learned about direct response, which was up and coming at the time worked with a lot of big banks and a lot of big direct response campaigns.

Jeremy Weisz 5:30 

Yeah, I saw 1-800 workout weighing or fitness share.

Stewart Gandolf 5:36 

I’m proud of you. You did do your homework. Yes. So we worked on with Jay Walter. I was in charge of direct response. I’ve migrated up to LA that was the big time. And at that time, we were working on what became Bally’s, Total Fitness. And our spokespeople were Heather Locklear, Cher and Sheena Easton. And those were huge, huge names back then. And yeah, I came up with an idea of 1-800 workout, which became a massive asset for my client. And I always joke like, I didn’t get a thank you note for that either. But that was my idea. We had one 100 Fitness one 100 a workout they found out how to acquire them. They were just owned by some in a random pool of numbers.

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