This week on the HIPAA Vault Show, we talk with Justin Knott. Justin is the CEO of Intrepy Healthcare Marketing, a leading healthcare marketing and web design agency. He’s a visionary leader with deep industry knowledge and a passion for helping medical practices grow. Justin and his Wife Kelley founded Intrepy Healthcare Marketing in 2014 to provide specialized digital marketing services to healthcare providers. Under his guidance, the company has earned a reputation for exceptional results, helping healthcare practices enhance their online presence and attract new patients. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Justin! to learn more about Intrepy visit https://intrepy.com/
Transcript:
Adam
Hello and welcome to the HIPAA Vault Show, where we discuss all things HIPAA, compliance and the cloud. My name is Adam Zeineddine and today I’ll be bringing you a special guest. Justin Knott is the CEO of Entropy Healthcare, a leading healthcare marketing and web design agency. He’s a visionary leader with deep industry knowledge and a passion for helping medical practices grow. Justin and his Kelly founded Entropy Healthcare in 2014 to provide specialized digital marketing services to healthcare providers. Under his guidance, the company has earned a reputation for exceptional results, helping healthcare practices enhance their online presence and attract new patients. Justin’s vision and strategic expertise have made Entropy Healthcare a trusted partner for providers nationwide. As CEO, he continues to drive innovation and provide cutting edge marketing solutions for thriving healthcare practices. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Justin today. Welcome, Justin. Thank you for joining us.
Justin
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me today.
Adam
Yeah, it’s great to have you. Thank you for being on the podcast. So I gave a little bit of an introduction there and I mentioned that you founded Entropy Healthcare Marketing in 2014 with your wife, Kelly. I was just wondering what drives one to create a marketing industry and then even more so, a healthcare-specific marketing agency?
Justin
Good question. It was definitely a little bit of ignorance out of my part. I was 25 at the time, so if I knew now what I didn’t know then, it may have been a little bit more of a scary proposition. But the biggest was really I fortunately came out of an early stage investing background and Kelly actually came out of the healthcare side. She had been the head of marketing for what became one of the largest ENT practices in the US. So she really had the background on that side with the marketing. And I had a background kind of creating a business from an entrepreneurial standpoint. And so it just made sense where the market was. We were coming a year or two out of the financial crisis. I was in early stage investing, which was not a big really emerging market at the time in the city that were living in.
Justin
And so we just wanted to try something new. And at the time there really weren’t a lot of people niching their marketing agencies. And so with her background and experience, we really saw what we felt was a big opportunity to present ourselves as an expert in the medical niche in particular because it is a unique niche for sure. And at that time, there were certainly a lot of people that are still around today that were before us. But it was less common practice to go to a medical practice and say, hey, this is all we do. We understand the ins and outs, we understand the nuances and we can help you grow. Versus before it was just go after track record and go after an agency and partner with them. And so we really jumped both feet in from day one and used all of her experience to help develop referrals, build websites, all that stuff.
Justin
But were really fortunate and made, I think, a really good decision to just come out of the gate. Niching versus trying to pivot, right?
Adam
Yeah. And it definitely helps, like you said, having that experience within the medical field to really kick start things off. And I was listening, actually, to your podcast today. I think it might have been I think it was episode 176, but don’t quote me on that. And it was with our founder, Gil Vidals, and he mentioned how actually, early on, when he started off, it was general hfosting and then after a couple of years, pivoted into niche healthcare. Is that a similar roadmap for you, or did you start straight off in healthcare? Question to that is, how does it generally differ in healthcare versus your broader marketing?
Justin
Absolutely. The first was we did really again, early on, it was just about getting clients through the door. And I think that was very detrimental. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, just like Gil and his story, you have to kind of take your lump, so to speak, and learn the hard way when you’re out there. And so early on, were, I think, even less concerned about niche, even though were kind of warned from our mentor that was running a very large practice, and he was one that really encouraged us. Like, not many people are doing this, go ahead and niche. We were just fighting for our lives to make enough to pay rent and everything. So we’re like, let’s just try to get anybody that needs marketing in Atlanta. And I think we made a lot that I think hurt us for multiple years because weren’t investing our time and effort to become experts in a space.
Justin
And I think from a broader 30,000 foot, just like, entrepreneurial journey conversation, looking back, it’s so much more detrimental than you realize to not kind of make a decision and become an expert in a space and charge forward in it, whatever it is. Because what feels like a safe space today, collecting a paycheck, so to speak, from your clients is compounding over time by you not getting really good at whatever it is you’re deciding to do. And so I think early on, were just like, whoever will say, yes, let’s get the clients through the door. We’re good in marketing, so we can make them successful. And while the answer is yes, you’re kind of, especially in our space, starting over from scratch every time. So you have a lawn service company or you have a membership company, and all these different types are coming through the door.
Justin
You have to kind of relearn what makes their funnel unique. And that was difficult. It’s very difficult to do because it takes a long time to master how to be really good at advertising products for ecommerce websites. And that’s not what we do. And so I don’t choose not to do it. And so I think we did make that kind of we had a similar journey in a different way where he went after a bigger picture. I think went after a local market, just trying to win anything that we could and learned the hard way, I think, over time, churning clients a lot of frustration that we probably should have just niched from day one. And then probably two, three years after being on a merry-go-round like that, you decide it’s time for change. And that’s kind of when were like, all right, we know the medical space, we’re going to stay in the medical space.
Justin
And to your question, what makes it unique? I think there’s probably two industries more than anything that I think have more regulation and compliance in it, and that’s health and medical and financial. And having worked in both of them over the years, the more experience you can carve out in a heavily regulated space, I think the more insulation it creates for you, which is exactly what Gil talked about on the podcast, is now, being an expert like y’all are in HIPAA compliant hosting. It’s hard for others to enter the market, try as they might, because they don’t understand the nuances in the space. And that’s true for really any niche if you come an expert in it. But I think healthcare, more than anything has so many niches and verticals inside of a vertical. Like, even if you look at healthcare, we don’t touch Dental.
Justin
Dental has its own agency world, and its own marketing efforts. It’s all cash pay, it has its own set of insurances. The patient proposition is different, everything’s different, and it’s still under healthcare, but we don’t even touch it. But in medicine, it’s the same thing. Like, you look at orthopedics inside of the orthopedic space, which we are heavily invested in, and it’s our biggest subspecialty of focus is you have hand surgeons, upper extremity surgeons, spine surgeons, you have hip and knee surgeons, you’ve got all these nuances that sit just inside of one vertical, for example. And I think that’s what makes it unique in healthcare is not only do you have to learn the ins and outs of a heavily regulated industry, but then you have to learn about the treatments, conditions, and ailments that drive a patient through the patient journey that’s specific to every single individual medical niche.
Justin
And I love that. I think it creates an interesting marketing journey constantly that you’re learning from.
Adam
No, absolutely. And I guess that makes sense in terms of the niches because you think about a specific doctor and how long it takes for them to specialize in a specific thing naturally. Each specific field that they’re in is going to have so many different intricacies, both on a technical level for the surgeon or the orthopedic practitioner, but also from the business and administration that surrounds that. Right. So that’s great. So when it comes to there was one thing I read that you mentioned which I found really interesting, which was that in the last couple of years, scale has been something that’s very much sought after with agencies and businesses in terms of how can you scale fast enough. And I saw that you mentioned that you actually limit how quickly you’re growing and you actually in particular focus only a handful of clients at a time.
Adam
Could you talk a little bit more about that and the advantages that offers when it comes to the customers and the absolutely.
Justin
I think, again, this is kind of part of the entrepreneurial journey and lessons is, I think, in general agencies, and this is very much a blanket statement, but I think you kind of have two directions to choose. Is you either go kind of the custom and you can use boutique as a sense, but there’s plenty of large agencies that do this. But you kind of go the custom route. You’re offering something that is very high touch and does require learning with the partner, learning what their needs are and how you can develop solutions for those needs or you go for something that’s very much scalable from an out of the box kind of package standpoint. So you’re going more for. Again, I don’t want to dilute and say quantity over quality, because there’s plenty of agencies do a phenomenal job with that model, but it’s kind of two different models for sure.
Justin
And there’s definitely investment price points that are very different because you’re really hiring kind of like a CMO and a strategic approach versus very execution based. Like we’ll manage your ads or we’ll create X amount of content per month or X amount of backlinks. And so went the route of the boutique. I just love marketing. I’m kind of a fractional CMO by nature, so to speak, in terms of how I think. And I think that just naturally came out in how we build our client relationships and even a lot of the products we’ve developed out of sheer necessity of a client coming and asking like hey, we want to address the self pay, can you build an ecommerce arm of our website for us? Sure, let’s go do it and we’ll figure it out. That’s actually how you and I from a HIPAA vault standpoint started working together as we had a very large organization that wanted to solve for an ever-growing self-patient need and be able to streamline that through their website.
Justin
So we developed an ecommerce arm and in doing so needed a HIPAA-compliant hosting solution to keep all that data and information secure. And so with doing that, there’s only so many organizations as we even continue to grow and develop our manpower and the people that have the skill sets to address those needs to do it and be able to deliver a high-quality product. And so that’s why we made that decision, is let’s go boutique in nature. Let’s do things that are strategic and custom in nature and that will change as the landscape of marketing and chat GPT and AI and security and all that stuff changes and address those needs with our client from a more organic type partnership.
Adam
Absolutely. And there are so many similarities I’m seeing in terms of the models with Hippovault and your own company. Because as you said, if you’re going to choose for good reason often to go into specific niches, that’s great. But for example, on the hosting side, the scalability, you can do scalability when you’re catering to every single industry to a certain extent because the specific needs are not inherent and going to be requested. Right. Often. So, yeah, no, I found that really interesting how scale versus the quality and the niche kind of almost acts and there’s a delicate balance and a tightrope that’s being walked, for sure.
Justin
And I think it always just like you guys and even Gil and I’s conversations that we’ve had, it hones your problem-solving abilities. When you’re dealing with the same type of client consistently, you can, I think, build a much better mousetrap. And even early on, were struggling to grow and were kind of very resistant to why would we when we have an ocean of any business that needs marketing to downselect and take hundreds of thousands of businesses, millions of businesses off of the table. And it’s one of the big things our mentor taught us is when you’re fishing in a pond, a really small pond, it’s a whole lot easier to catch a fish than it is when you just walk up to the edge of the ocean and just throw your line in and hope you have something. And it really is a different ballgame when you start thinking of it that way.
Justin
Well, when I’m building mechanisms that are very specific to one niche or even specific verticals inside of a niche, like what we’re talking about, then it is really easy to not only sell to the next one, but find where the next potential client is and develop better solutions for them.
Adam
Absolutely. So you slightly alluded to it earlier, but could you give me an example of how walk me through how the initial engagement with a customer looks like for you. Like the initial meetings and what’s discussed. And then maybe expand on that pain point that you mentioned earlier where you met some challenges from the marketing point of view that a healthcare customer might have had.
Justin
Yeah, absolutely. Typically when somebody comes to us, they are usually engaged with an agency or they’ve tried to do it in-house and they’re trying to figure out something that’s way less of a headache and they can actually scale and not waste a bunch of money so at all. For us and for me, as kind of the salesman owner, starts with a pretty in-depth strategic conversation. It’s just figuring out where are you having trouble or where have you seen success? But you’re either having a bandwidth and personnel issue or you’re just not sure how to kind of break through and get to a patient volume that your surgeons need. And really that tells me kind of everything that I need to know. Like are you struggling with your website infrastructure? Do you not have people that can develop content or maybe don’t know how to build content the right way?
Justin
Are you maybe being misled by the organization that you’re working with currently? Either that they don’t have the expertise in medical or they may not have the transparency to be able to pull off what they’re doing. And so that’s really where it all starts for me is almost like a gap analysis.
Adam
Yeah.
Justin
As a conversation is what are you doing today? What do you want to be doing a year from now and how do we get you there? And a lot of the times, as you even know in business or these conversations, like we’re talking about it’s a lot of times, not what they think they need. That is the ultimate solution. Or maybe it’s not in the proper order in terms of getting them where they need to go.
Adam
Right, yeah, it’s step-by-step, isn’t it? You don’t want to go for the, I don’t know, the Ferrari-style solution when you need to get running.
Justin
And that’s why we kind of phase out a lot of our clients because like shoving blog posts down a client’s throat when they don’t have treatments and conditions, pillar pages built out or having them do backlink building when they don’t have really strong content to backlink build to that’s all cart before the horse type processes. And you really need to start foundationally with can your website support a content development process that sets you up for success in ranking? Well, then we need to start there maybe with your website or if you got a good website foundation we can work with, then let’s turn to content. And if you don’t have those pieces in place first, content is everything, even when it comes to ads. So if you don’t have a content page for a particular treatment you want to advertise for, you’re trying to cut corners.
Justin
And so it’s really all about a process that you go through in developing a good roadmap. So you are setting yourself up for success and not a lot of wasted money in the long run too.
Adam
Absolutely. That’s fantastic. Well, pivoting a little bit now to the future and where you see the industry going. What does, I guess, entropy do to stay current and agile? Because this is a very fast-moving industry. You discussed on the podcast with our CTO, the Patient Care podcast.
Justin
Patient convert. Podcast.
Adam
Patient convert. Podcast. That HIPAA. And the new regulations that are constantly arriving make the industry very dynamic and you have to stay abreast. What does entropy do to stay on top of that?
Justin
I think there’s a couple of things. I think self education is really key. Kind of attending conferences, learning from others, paying attention to kind of what your colleagues and competitors out in the space are doing to stay in front of it is really key. Another piece is just listening to the end user, our client. I mean, just like I talked about the self pay piece, obviously we’re aware that’s growing, but when you hear out of the mouth of a large orthogroup like 10% of our patients are walking through the door, there’s not a streamlined process to deal with this type of thing. How do you help us solve that solution? And then it really opens the doors for a much broader look at the industry and what are we doing? As health insurance has become even more of a mess, deductibles are going up, people are more incentivized to cash pay.
Justin
How do we solve for those types of things? And those are the big things, is really listening to the clients and then proactively doing our own self education on kind of what’s emerging. I think for the future of the space, I think there’s two major things and it’s what everybody’s talking about. I think for the chat GPT side of things is how do we leverage AI, but how are we sensitive to all the sensitive material that exists in healthcare while we try to adapt into this new AI world and leverage that technology? And the other side, which is a space that you all are directly entrenched in, is from a marketing standpoint, how do we continue to be really effective and really strategic at marketing while being hamstring, so to speak, by what we can and can’t do in terms of data privacy for marketing to these patients?
Justin
And a lot of people have heard about all this kind of HHS regulations that are coming out. Like you can’t use Metapixel, obviously behind patient portals, but there’s even more guidelines about if you have things on your website, then you can’t remarket, you can’t feed information back to Google to Metapixel, that type of thing. It really has turned the industry on its head because all of a sudden remarketing is off the table. Tracking in a traditional sense is off the table. Well then how do we solve for that? How do we continue to be good marketers without just throwing it at a wall and hoping that it sticks? And I think that’s going to be an interesting challenge to solve for over the coming months and years is how do we push the boundaries of what we can do in healthcare marketing while being limited by what we can and can’t do with the data for right reasons.
Justin
Obviously, we need to keep patient data private. So it’s kind of, how do we solve for that? And I think that’ll be the biggest shift in the market, is who can solve for that the best and the most effectively and keep transparency and marketing where it needs to be while playing inside of the guidelines that are kind of constantly developing now over the last six months.
Adam
Yeah, no, definitely. And I can speak to that as well for the listeners to give a little bit of background. First came into contact with Justin essentially because of that, because there was a new bulletin out of that whole entire piece. Yeah.
Adam
And I have to say, because we get inquiries a lot when it comes from marketing companies. First of all, I don’t want to throw a percentage out there, but a large percentage of marketing agencies, as soon as they hear healthcare, they just run a mile. So that’s the first aspect that differentiates you, I would say. And then after that, going through the cycle to weed out other marketing agencies and we get to you. You actually sign a Baa with clients. I found that really does set entropy out, I would say. And you were straight out of the blocks researching this bulletin. What are the effects getting the feelers out there to figure out, okay, how are we going to attack this challenge head on? So, really, I have to give you a lot of props for that.
Justin
I appreciate that.
Adam
I would assume that gives a good indication as to generally how you attack challenges and stay dynamic there.
Justin
Well, and I appreciate I mean, when were doing our research, again, I love people that play inside of this niche, and that’s exactly what y’all are doing too. So it was kind of an obvious opportunity to reach out and talking to you, talking to Gil. What I love the most about what y’all do is you can’t be a jack of all trades in this space, especially when you’re dealing with what you’re dealing with. And I would never attest to be like a HIPAA expert or a data privacy expert. And for that reason, I’m not going to try to pull anything to do with any of this, especially when it comes to a client’s data off on their behalf. And you all really white glove it. I mean, you’re doing the work for us in terms of making sure that we’re buttoned up and we’re compliant for the sake of our clients.
Justin
And that just takes a huge weight off of my shoulders, because to do that, you have to do everything that you all have done to build this business. And that’s why I love you all’s approach is it really is white glove. And so for an agency like ourselves, it gives us peace of mind, because we know you can stand in the middle between what we’re doing on the marketing side and what we’re accomplishing for our client, for the things that we’ve even talked about today and keep everybody secure and in a safe spot.
Adam
Yeah. And just to add to that, I’d say we really value the partnership because ultimately the end goal is patient privacy and health outcomes, right? So we sit in that when it comes to HIPAA, we sit almost in, not to use an It term, but a stack of HIPAA security. We’re there to secure things on a data level, infrastructure level and everything. And then you, as a marketing partner specific to healthcare, are going to be able to get them safely and privately the customers that they need and market their business effectively, for sure. Well, Justin not from entropy. Healthcare. Thank you very much for joining me today. Before we go, is there anything how can listeners reach out to you?
Justin
Yeah, absolutely. More information come to our website, Entropy that’s Intrepy.com. If you go to Entropy.com Free or just hit the big red button at the top of our website. If you go to It, you can book a video call, one of those strategy calls like I just mentioned. We call it a practice assessment. I’d love to connect with you if you’re out there in your medical practice looking to grow, but anybody else out there, I’ve created ton of content and love networking. So make sure that you connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s Justin Knott, and look forward to hopefully connecting with you and networking with you on LinkedIn.
Adam
Fantastic. Thank you, Justin. Be sure to check out his website. Highly recommended. Entropy.com. That’s it for this episode of the HIPAA Vault podcast. If you like this episode, please feel free to like on YouTube and subscribe. And until next time, thanks for stopping by.