Finding Success on Your Terms with Jake Sucoff

Tim Melanson: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of the Work at Home Rockstar Podcast. Today I am talking to the founder and CEO of Patient procure. And what he does is he helps doctors and healthcare organizations utilize content and marketing strategies to find ideal patients and keep them coming back. So we are rocking out today with Jake Sucoff.

Hey Jake, you ready to rock?

Jake Sucoff: I

am ready

to

rock. Tim, let’s

go. I.

Tim Melanson: Awesome. Let’s do it. So we always start off here in

a

good note. So

tell me a story of success that we can be inspired by.

Jake Sucoff: I’m gonna inspire you with the story of where I’m at right now in my business. I started this business patient procure in August, maybe September. And since then I’ve grown quite a bit and I have enough clients now that this is a real business. I no longer have to be shy or embarrassed when people ask me what I do, I don’t have to hide it anymore.

I can feel extremely confident about I. [00:01:00] Uh, it being a real job. It’s no longer just a side hustle. I am collecting real revenue from clients to build a business that allows me to live the life that I’m trying to live. So that is, to me, an immense success. Am I where I want to be? Not close. Am I making the amount of money that I probably would be, had I been working a normal nine to five?

No, I’m not close yet,

but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is I’m on the path to be able to live life

on

my own

terms, and that was why I started this business in the first place. So I see that as a resounding success so

far.[00:02:00]

I talk about this

a lot. It feels like

entrepreneurship is conveyed as this

almost zero sum game where you’re either an exited founder who’s made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, or you’ve raised millions and millions of dollars.

Or you’re a failure, and that’s not the reality of entrepreneurship.

The vast majority of people who are entrepreneurs are building small businesses

and

their lifestyle businesses, and that’s okay. It’s better than okay. In fact, so many, so many founders raise boatloads

of money and

end up with nothing because all of a sudden they’ve got too many people on their balance sheet.

They’re dependent on that cash coming in. They’re growing. Uh, just to grow, not trying to be profitable, and they’re not gonna live the life that they want to. And so when I talk to, uh, [00:03:00] people who are interested in

starting their

own businesses, that’s one of the first things I talk about with them is you really need to understand what your end game is and what your goal is, and understand how that’s gonna affect your life.

I don’t even know where to begin. Things go wrong for me every single day.

Constantly

over and over. It never, it never ends. I mean, I, I’m here today because of.

Years and years of ups and downs. I mean, I’ve

started companies that went nowhere. I’ve been [00:04:00] laid off.

I’ve been pushed outta companies. I’ve had toxic founders that have led to, to bad endings.

I mean, I, I’ve made tons of mistakes, but the only, one of the only things that I found to be true in entrepreneurship is as long as you can keep moving forward, it’s not

failure. You

know, you’re bound to have missteps and mistakes. You are, things

will go

wrong for sure. And it’s about how you react to those things.

And, and you really need to be, you need to be mentally tough to be an entrepreneur. It is filled with roadblocks. It’s never gonna be easy, but if you can persevere, you’re probably gonna be successful. I mean, just off the top of my head. I’ve had many hires of late that have not gone my way. I,

I, I take

a very higher fast and fire fast mentality when it comes to personnel.

I don’t have the time. I, I don’t have a [00:05:00] large team. I can’t take, I. Months to interview people. I find a role that needs to be filled. I interview as many people as I can find who are interested, and then I hire somebody. I try to get the entire thing done in two weeks or less, and then if it doesn’t work out, I’ll try to work with one of these other candidates

who I worked with before,

but

that’s happened twice over the past month where I hired somebody.

I thought it was gonna be a good fit. It didn’t work out. I fired them. I moved on, I started working with somebody new. Uh, in both of those cases, the replacement has been pretty good. And so I think

that

failure

is seen as,

uh,

a negative thing. I. And it really shouldn’t be. It’s yin and yang. Things are gonna go right, things are gonna go wrong.

It’s never the end. It’s almost certainly never the end. It’s never as catastrophic as it seems to be. As long as you can learn from the mistake that’s made and keep moving forward, that’s all that matters.[00:06:00] [00:07:00]

it’s all experience, Tim. It’s about failing over and over again and realizing with

each new

failure that it’s not the end of the world. You just have to,

you know,

get your bumps and bruises and, and realize that it’s not the end and get up and keep moving forward. I mean, it’s easy for me to sit here and talk a big game about how mentally tough I am and, and how I’ve persevered so much.

But I, I’ve had

tons

of bouts with anxiety and, and depressive thoughts and, um, feeling like a failure and that I’m not good enough. You know, that’s kind of.

Par for the course with entrepreneurship. It’s an extremely humbling lifestyle. And I [00:08:00] say lifestyle because it’s not a job,

it’s not a

career. It is absolutely a way of life.

You talk to entrepreneurs, it’s like we’re addicts. You. I just, I, I. I have suffered so much for this lifestyle that I want, and at the same time, I would not give it up for anything. If it’s up to me, this will be the last thing I ever do with my life as far as my career. I never wanna work for somebody else, ever again.

If I

can help it, I will take this

pain 10 outta 10 times as opposed to having to go into an office or work remotely for somebody who I think I’m smarter than. Um,

just to say

that. Mindset is something that you develop over time. It’s not something that, that just appears. You need to work hard at it. And it’s

something that I think

about all the time.

I mean, I go to therapy, I read, I have meditation apps. I all the time try to think about, um, gratitude [00:09:00] and, and the fact that I’m able to even. Try to do this. I have the, the luxury, the opportunity, the responsibility to build a company. I have employees who are counting on me. I have clients who are counting on me.

It is a privilege. It’s absolutely a privilege.

And

so I

try to think about that every day and, and also the fact that.

We’re tiny

and significant little specks on this giant rock hurdling through space. Like, what are my problems? Really? What are they, you know, I, I think that, that it’s a really important, uh, perspective from mindset.

You, you know, you have to keep your perspective about what, you know, what is really at stake here.

I mean, a lot of my

ego, uh, money client’s, money. You know, there’s employees counting on me, but if this company went under, I have my health, I have my family, things are gonna be okay. I, I think it’s really [00:10:00] important to keep that perspective, [00:11:00] you gotta

fail. You

gotta just go

and fail. I, I just, I played an open mic night

recently,

and it was with

a group of.

New friends who I don’t know that well in

a

new neighborhood that I now live in, and I was really excited to show them what I’m made of. And I, without making too many excuses or elongating the story too much, I got up on stage and I absolutely bombed.

It

was

so bad.

Thankfully my wife was tired and she didn’t come out that night. And one of the guys who I was trying to impress went home early ’cause

he is

got little kids and they didn’t see me fall flat on my face, but the next morning at [00:12:00] breakfast,

she was like, how

was it? And I was like, it was awful.

It was terrible. I was so bad. And

she was

like, oh no. And I’m like, but you know. I’m glad I did it. Here I am. You know, and it was a great learning experience. I know you gotta do more of it. You’re not gonna get better by doing, by being afraid of that happening again. You gotta go out again. I’m looking for my next one [00:13:00] Hmm.[00:14:00]

Well,

luckily I have two very small children. I’ve got a 4-year-old and like a one in change, year old, and so that. Makes my day very predictable. I know that I’m gonna wake up at five 30 in the morning, uh, if my wife’s. If it’s my wife’s turn, I’ll get to go back to bed for a bit. But typically up at, you know, five 30 or if not seven, with the kids, with the family breakfast, taking older one to daycare.

And then I have my lock-in time between like nine 30 or 10 and 4 35. Uh, and that’s my time to really get dialed in. So at a minimum, my schedule is pretty predictable from day to day, which means that I understand. When I need to make time, if I wanna go to the gym or workout from home or go for a [00:15:00] run. Uh, and so at least I have that predictability in my day.

Outside of

that.

I practice a lot of mindset work, a lot of,

you know, mindfulness, a

lot of gratitude work, a lot of meditation where I can, but I try not to be too strict about it. A lot of my day is on the phone just by nature of being the only full-time employee and. Being the boss,

my clients

all wanna work with me.

They want to talk to me, even though I have a large

team that

I can delegate, not large, but a team that I can delegate to. Everyone wants to talk to me. So I try not to be too rigid about, um, like at 10:00 AM I need to be journaling, and at 1 45 I go to the gym and at 3:00 PM I do my mindfulness.

That’s

more, you know, I go to.

I go to therapy weekly to make sure I am not burdening my wife or my friends [00:16:00] or family with, you know, my idiosyncrasies and, and my, my

strangeness is

that need to find their way out from, you know, what’s between my ears.

Um,

and I, like I said before, I’m always thinking about,

um.

You know, the fact that this is a privilege,

that’s really enough for me.

You know, I, I find my, I I, I work out, you know, minimum four days a week. It’s, that takes the place of most of my meditation, and that’s really my time. I don’t listen to music. That’s my time to really try to be present and to focus and, uh, think through any, uh, really difficult challenges I’m currently facing.

Um, but I’m a, I’m a huge proponent of, uh, of CBT. I think that, um, giving yourself the tools to try to sort through your anxieties and, [00:17:00] um, and helping yourself understand your emotions and the triggers before they pour out of you is,

has been probably the most powerful

mindset change I could have made for myself over the past few years.

I mean, as, as much as I can be. I mean, like anybody, I, I struggle with these things day to day and I feel like for this segment of the podcast, a lot of people would, would lie and just say, well, every day I do this, and I, you know, it’s, I, I. I struggle every day and I just try to do my best. So I try to be self-aware when

I can be

and when I’m not, I give myself grace and try not to, you know, crucify myself for being a human and, and making mistakes.

I.[00:18:00]

Yeah,

that is a That’s a skill though. I know plenty of entrepreneurs who burn out because they don’t have that ability to recognize when they’ve reached their limit and continue to push. And then instead of taking one day off, they have to take [00:19:00] two weeks off because they have pushed themselves past, uh, the, you know, the point that they can be healthy and continue to operate.

So, uh, that’s not a trivial ability to be able to understand your limits. And then I. Take care of yourself. I think that’s a huge part of, um, being an entrepreneur is understanding you know, what you need and taking care of yourself in the way that you need to be effective.

Um,

well,

currently

I have

about.

12 or so [00:20:00] part-time employees. Uh, and depending on the month, some of them feel a lot more full-time and some of them, uh, I don’t hear from. And the,

the beauty of this model

is first and

foremost, that client work can be, uh, unpredictable. And it allows you to scale up and and scale down depending on what kind of work you have month to month. My current essential employees are the folks who are, uh. Executing on the client work. You know, the way that I operate my business is basically, I don’t know if you wanna think of it as like hub and spoke or, um, having generals.

I like to think of it as having these generals or captains where for every service that I offer, I have a senior level employee who I’m paying a much higher hourly rate. Then I might for, you know, a [00:21:00] full-time employee, but they help me set the strategy and understand exactly what tactics we need to be using for each individual client case.

And in some cases I have multiple captains. Who might have a, a specialty for one of the clients I’m working with. And then I employ the foot soldiers who are, um, a little bit more entry level and

then have a much lower hourly

rate

and can execute

on the more administrative duties.

Um, and so,

you know, the

senior.

Employees are extremely hard to find, and it’s rare to find somebody who is this mix of extremely talented and can execute at the level that I need to, and willing to work part-time. Some in, in, in some cases, prefer it, which is great for me right now. Um, and then people who are fun to work with because at [00:22:00] the end of the day, I’m spending so much time with these people that if I don’t enjoy working with them, it makes my life.

Drab and meaningless. And so I need to work

with people who

have a sense of humor, who lead with, uh, energy and joy and wanna be a part of this. And so, um, you know, I have a chief of staff. She keeps me. On my toes and, and make sure everything is organized and lets me understand what are all the projects

we’re working

on.

I have a head of a director of content. She’s been essential in helping me put strategies together. I have a director of SEOA, director of organic social, a director of, uh, paid ads, and then, you know, individual, um, freelancers or contractors underneath those people.

Um.

Then,

you know, there’s all sorts of people who, you know, again, the, the beauty of this model is the reason why I’m here.

I said, you know what, [00:23:00] I, I,

I

really wanna start a podcast, but I don’t have the bandwidth. So maybe instead I’ll just try to appear on podcasts. And I found a guy whose entire job is

just

to book me on podcasts. It’s great. I pay

him per

episode and he has a bunch of other clients, and it’s a relationship that works really well.

So. Uh, it’s a model that, you know, could not have existed the way it does today, even, you

know,

three or five years ago. You know, the tools exist today that allow anybody to build a team like this, and I strongly recommend it. People, I mean, even I think

that every single

worker should have a va. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be paying somebody, you know, between five and

eight

bucks an hour.

To help you be organized every day. I mean, regardless if you are, uh, you know, a sole proprietor or work for yourself or, or work a nine to five, I mean, having a second person to keep you organized is [00:24:00] immensely helpful And,

um.

It’s been a huge unlock. I mean, this is something that Tim Ferriss talked about, you know, in four

hour Work

week.

I don’t even know how many years ago he wrote it, 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, whenever it was. Um, and it’s just as true today as it’s ever been. Even with AI and automation. Having a human being who can assist you is just, it’s a major unlock.

So

all of

the people I hire are from job boards. I hire a lot

of people

from the Philippines. There’s a great job board called Online jobs.ph that I highly recommend. Uh, I found some people on Reddit. I found some people on LinkedIn, found some people on Upwork. Uh, and you know, there’s many, many headhunting services.

I have worked with a couple of them. And I think that if you are even a little bit intelligent and you [00:25:00] have any amount of bandwidth, it’s worth just hiring somebody directly. Uh, if you work with an agency, they’re going to charge you double what a person will charge you, and then you have

this intermediary and

they never feel like

they’re working directly for you, which has been challenging for me in the past.

And it’s really easy. You can go to chat GPT and just. You know, I use the, the, the voice feature and just say, Hey, this is what I do. This is where I need help. I’m looking for somebody for this many hours. This is my budget. Write a job description for me. It’ll write it for you. You can go right to LinkedIn, right to any of these job boards, paste it right there.

You’ll get people in your inbox. And then I

usually

have every single person record a Loom video for me right off the bat so you can make sure. A, that they speak English at least conversationally, and then B, get a feel for how they communicate. [00:26:00] Then I set up a call so I can get a better sense of who they are.

Ask some questions. Again, go to chat. GPT or any other LLM. Give

me

15 questions that I can

ask

a remote worker in the Philippines,

in Pakistan, and. South America, wherever

this person is based.

Um, it’ll give you questions, it’ll organize it by the type of question.

Um, I’ve had chat GPT create assessments

for me so that I

can give it to

more technical people, create a content calendar, look at this client, edit this video, whatever, something small,

uh,

many cases I pay, uh, if it’s like for a video edit, um, or something where I think it would be unfair to make them do work for me for free.

Um, it’s just never been easier to do this. And it doesn’t take that much time. I mean, you’re talking about. Everything I just mentioned with an LLM is gonna [00:27:00] take a couple minutes to generate, uh, and then, you know, find the right person, bring ’em on. You can pay, I pay through wise predominantly, but there’s many, many ways that you can pay subcontractors, freelancers, and so this is

the

future man.

It’s now, I mean, there’s no, this, it feels like in my circles, this is well trodden ground, but I talk to people who are not. In this, uh, arena, and by this arena, I mean people who are building small distributed businesses, it, it feels like everybody’s doing it, but I talk to people outside of this world and very few people have experience doing it.

I’m telling you right now, it’s super easy to do [00:28:00]

Mm. [00:29:00] [00:30:00] Yeah, And, what I think is, what I think is really interesting is. Prompting is becoming its own skill and being able to provide clear instructions to whatever LLM you’re working with is becoming a skill. And it almost has this, um, what’s it called? The, like Fain technique. Richard Faiman talks about you don’t really.

You’re not really a master of a topic unless you can explain it to a

12-year-old, and, and

I, I’ve heard some people anecdotally say, oh, well, I don’t think I’m thinking as clearly because this LLM is doing the heavy lifting. For me, I found the opposite where it’s actually helping me synthesize and

refine.

The instructions for it, which, which forces me if I want the output that I’m looking for

to think really deeply

about what I’m looking for, about what I wanna get out of it. And then you get that output. And like you said, you can’t just publish it, you have to refine it, you [00:31:00] have to sort through it, and then you think through, oh, actually in this section where you listed these bullet points for the brand strategy, you’re thinking about it.

In this way, I need you to think about it this way

and, and,

it will give you then a next option and you go through this iterative process so quickly that it’s, it’s staggering. I really, there’s no way I could run my business in the way that I am without LLMs and without. Outsourced talent and I just, for people who are curious about starting a business, it’s just the tools that exist today.

It is an embarrassment of riches and who knows what the world is gonna be like. Even a month from now with how fast everything is accelerating. But it definitely feels like we are in this pocket of time where the ability to leverage these tools is gonna allow people to grow businesses in a way that they never have before and, and maybe never will again.

And I’m really excited to see, uh, the next iteration of all [00:32:00] of this, because it just, it’s advancing so rapidly every day.[00:33:00]

Totally.

Oh man, haven’t I talked about everything excites me,

man. I’m just happy to be

here.

I’m happy to wake up every day and get to work on this. Um, what’s ex exciting about my business we’re growing, which

is super exciting and I’m

now at a point where I. I don’t need to focus as much on growth and I

can focus

more on processes and we’re working a ton now on, we’re implementing Clickup and getting this like very in-depth onboarding and project management system.

In place where, uh, we understand what we need from every client when they start and are creating systems and processes so that we can make it way more efficient and way more [00:34:00] effective. We’re working on reporting so that we can, you know, help clients get a better understanding of the results that we’re getting.

And, um.

This optimization

phase of

the business

has been really interesting to me and I, I love operations. I love trying to think about, I mean, at my heart, I’m a salesman. I’m a talker. I love that I.

I mean, just the,

the game,

the dance of,

of courting a prospect and, and

selling them and

onboarding them.

That’s who I am deep inside. But I also deeply love operations and, and seeing things get

organized

more coherently and so.

I’ve

been working really hard on

manual systems and at the same time I have this parallel path where I’m working with this outsourced automations agency that’s helping me with building agents and, uh, injecting automation into my business wherever I [00:35:00] can.

And so I have this kind of

dual,

um, strategy of, okay, today, right now I have a project manager

and I

have. Um,

you know,

myself,

uh,

who are making sure the train is staying on the rails and we’re gonna get more effective. And with every new client, we’re gonna do a better job. And also, hopefully six months from now, neither of us

will have

to do any of this because we have this agent and, uh, you know, uh,

an automation workflow that

I’m gonna be able to drop some client documents in.

It’s gonna

scrape their

website. I’m gonna. Put in the brand, the results of the brand workshop we do. It’s gonna look at the tone of voice and the messaging strategy that I put in, and then it’s gonna just run and gonna, you know, um, create documentation and SOPs that everybody in the company are gonna be able to leverage without having to.

Um, spend a lot

of time

and so that’s what’s really exciting to me right now [00:36:00] is, um, getting to focus on improving the product as opposed to just getting more business in the front door.

Uh, well I have my primary agency. My dad’s in the background. Hey, dad.

Uh, um, patient Procure is my, my number one agency. We are

helping, uh, large MSOs hospital groups and individual physicians find their ideal, ideal client and put together marketing engines to make them come back more frequently. Um.

A

lot of what we’ve

been focusing on is the brand side of things, um, which I think

is

in healthcare overlooked.

It feels like many of the. Brands that I see are very generic and I try to work with people to unlock a [00:37:00] little bit more than that, to get a little bit deeper into why are the leaders choosing the paths that they’ve chosen? Um, how can

I help

them articulate their stories so that they can better connect with patients.

Uh, and I really enjoy this on the physician level, you know, because doctors went to med school so that they can treat people, they’re passionate about improving the health of communities and individuals.

Helping

them articulate their own stories and why they’re passionate about this is extremely gratifying.

Not just because it’s fun to work with these populations,

because I

get to feel like I, in some small part, am helping the world. So that’s the main focus of mine right now. I have a second brand that’s about to launch that I’m not gonna talk about right now, but that’s more for, um, I’ll talk about it, but not mention the name until it’s

ready.

Um, that’s more for general. Um, small and medium sized businesses. And look, the work we do is largely the same. We start from the top. We start [00:38:00] with brand. We start with a why, understanding who these businesses are, why anybody should care. Uh, and then we build a content strategy around that and a distribution engine so they can get their story in front of the people who want to hear from them and

then create a, you know, repeatable strategy.

So, um, that’s what I do and I love doing it.

Uh, go to patient procure.com, that’s got all the info, uh, about patient procure and how to find me and, uh, hey jakey.com. It’s my personal website if you wanna learn more about me and, uh,

I’m on the socials.

Oh my God. What a question.

Hmm.

I mean, how can you even pick one today? Today I’m gonna go with George Harrison because I’ve been listening to [00:39:00] All Things Must Pass a lot, and, uh, love the Beatles, love George’s solo career. And I

just think that he is

probably the most interesting of all the Beatles.

Yeah. he’s brilliant. I think that that’s probably my favorite of any of the Beatles solo albums and,

um,

what else can

be said?

He’s a genius. You. If,

you haven’t listened, go ahead and listen.

Thanks Tim. Appreciate you, man. All the [00:40:00] best.