Welcome to episode one of The Junto with Scott Rattigan. Very excited to share this with you and let's jump right into it. So really quick today, we'll talk about:
* what the show is about,
* who it's for,
* who I am and
* why I'm taking on this crazy responsibility of starting a podcast.
* A quick win for you. It's a valuable takeaway you can go home with and start implementing today.
* And Stay tuned for a dad joke written by my eight-year-old and told to me just this morning. So it's actually a pretty good one. I'm happy to share it with you.
So what's the show about and who is it for?
The Junto is a concept that dates back to 1727 with my good friend and mentor Ben Franklin. He started a social club for the mutual improvement of himself and a few other tradesmen in Philadelphia. He was worried about his propensity for over-talking and selfishly wanted to network with other business people in the day. And so he
He quoted himself in his autobiography saying, knowledge was obtained “rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.” So he wanted to learn from others. They discussed political and philosophical as well as practical interests of the day. From this group, that was, he helmed it at the helm of it for more than 30 years. And it still exists today in various forms. But this group was basically the first networking group or chamber of commerce that founded the seeds of some of Franklin's most, or inventions or concepts and ideas that are most attributed to him, including public libraries. So they all shared their books at the Junto headquarters and that became a public library based on this subscription. They came up with the ideas for a volunteer firefighting force, a local tax to pay for neighborhood constables or policemen, and the academy that eventually became the University of Pennsylvania.
They celebrated civic virtue, mutual benefits or win-win situations, the improvement of self and society, and the idea that hard-working people could do well by doing good or serving others.
So it's in that spirit that I welcome you to the first meeting of the Junto with Scott Ratigan.
So who am I?
You might know me from Functional Lawyer.
I help functional medicine doctors and entrepreneurs establish solid business and legal plans to protect themselves, protect their license and grow their business so that they can practice with confidence and security to change the lives of their patients. What I discovered was that most functional medicine doctors and other providers are scared of legal ramifications. It's kind of beat into you and your training, right? They have this nagging feeling they can lose their license or that they're just exposed legally by doing something that is a little bit outside of mainstream medicine.
So they either hold themselves back in advertising or in growing financially because they don't want to raise any red flags and draw too much attention to themselves a lot of times. They get frustrated because every time they go looking for answers, they don't seem to be there. There's conflicting advice around the internet or they end up turning to colleagues to ask legal questions for people that have gone before them when they borrow legal documents from them. And deep down, they know that they're not protected with these borrowed or documents they find on the internet. And...
What they think is that they can't find an attorney that understands them or like they do that they'll have to pay exorbitant legal fees, which we'll get to in a second. But really they just need someone to help give them the tools (quality legal documents and baseline education) to protect themselves and build solid legal and business foundations so that they can go out and change their patients' lives. And that's kind of my story as well, or our story. My wife, Linda Matteoli is a DO.
When she started her practice. I was not a healthcare attorney at the time. I was in corporate litigation. So we went to the most logical place. We went to the healthcare partner at my firm in Orlando, went two floors up, paid him about 2,500 bucks, which was a fortune to us at the time. And ultimately we came away with no real help. Now it wasn't his fault. He's a really good attorney. He just wasn't equipped to deal with CAM Law at that time. Maybe he has become more aware of it now, but at that time, he just wasn't equipped to help us start an integrative practice. So that was a lesson learned. And what he asked us was, do you have any templates that I can review for you? And we said no. It was kind of like, well, that's why we came to you. But I always remember that sentence later on. And so I ended up leaving the law firm. I took a hard left turn and ended up joining the Evolution of Medicine with James Maskell.
And so part of my role was to reach out to providers every day and see how we could help them with marketing and other practices. In doing so, I found that our experience was very common. They either went to a healthcare attorney and got no help, or they did find an attorney who knew what functional medicine and integrated medicine was and paid much more than they wanted to, to the tune of about $25,000 to do it correctly.
That is money that could have gone to building a practice, marketing, and other things. So they had this option to pay $25,000 or just get free stuff they found online. And ultimately, as I was talking to providers every day, they kept asking me for help. Oh, you're an attorney. So can you look at my stuff? And so I wasn't really well equipped at that point. But I said, sure, I'll take a look at it. And it looked like it was not very good.
So some documents that they've cobbled together or they pulled a sentence here or in a paragraph here, sounded okay. But more often than you would expect, there were several different types of font that was just copied and pasted into a single document, sometimes different font sizes. And so ultimately it wasn't that great and sometimes it did more harm than good. So I founded Functional Lawyer to help bring high-quality legal documents to the providers that needed them-but at a more affordable price.
So I partnered with a law firm in Tampa that specialized in healthcare law. And we presented templates through Functional Lawyer. You could purchase them a la carte. I'll never forget my first person that I never spoke to that purchased the template. And I'm forever grateful to her because, oh, this is something that people need. But in doing that, I was talking to people through Functional Lawyer now, and they had questions for me that went beyond templates. And so ultimately, we discovered that documents weren't enough. People needed understanding and clarity and just kind of an easing of their fears and mitigating or reducing their risk as well.
So we created the Functional Lawyer Membership, took about six months to kind of put together a library of content education that would help them make decisions that were best for their practice and themselves. And so now we have law firm quality documents, an education library, and we do weekly office hours through Functional Lawyer so they can have the confidence to go out and grow their practice.
Now, it was through those office hours that people came to me and asked me to be their business coach. I was a little surprised. But what I later kind of pieced together was sometimes I would talk about my wife, Linda, and her practice and how successful she had been and was and is. And so in kind of just talking normally and naturally, oh, this is how we do it. And this is kind of the hour she works and this is what she takes home. I didn't realize not everybody was that successful. So two different, two separate providers reached out to me to be their business coach. And I said, okay, well, I'll help you with what I can. I'm not as involved in the day-to-day, but let's go for it. So we did.
So it was about three calls a month. And after about the third call, in between I would go to Linda and ask, “How did we do this? Or how did you do that part? And how did you do that?” Linda just suggested, “why don't we just have them over to our practice on a weekend. We'll do a three day weekend and then we'll teach them everything all at once. And then we'll support them when they go back home.” Because in her mind, as a provider, she wouldn't be as distracted, you know, one hour a week and you're running kids around and doing everything else. So we did that and it was successful. They liked it. And so we started doing that maybe about once a quarter.
We'd have two or three practices come to our office in Longwood, Florida, show them around, tell them everything we did, help them build a version of it for themselves, not just cookie-cutter our way. And then supported them with coaching on the backend when they got home to implement it. Because we've all been to conferences or motivational places where you're excited and you're like, yeah, this is great. And then you get home and then life happens. You've never really implemented it. So we wanted that backend coaching as well.
Well, fast forward to COVID and we had a provider scheduled to come, two providers scheduled to come in April of 2020. Didn't happen. So we spent the next 60 days kind of putting everything into an online course. And the one that ended up continuing, Catherine, she did the course from A to Z and was really successful. So you're like, okay, we've got something here. So we did this DIY kind of self-paced course for a little bit.
And turns out not every personality type is like that or has the time to kind of sit down and do it all. What we discovered is that people, even though we had given them the same tools and everything we had done in the past, they just weren't consistently moving through the course or moving through the actions needed to be successful. So after some brainstorming and some mentorship from our good friend and buddy, Alex Hormozi, we...create a list of problems that people were experiencing in not moving forward. And then we set out to provide solutions to those problems and remove the roadblocks to success, as we like to say.
So Origins Incubator, what has now become Origins Incubator, it's a physician mentorship program, now includes all of the Functional Lawyer resources, with weekly office hours, practice creation resources, which was the initial kind of three day now DIY course, plus more. Everything from chart parts to emails that we send prospects to how we talk about insurance and how we talk about pricing and how we talk about the membership, all of that, how we onboard patients, which is really important and all kind of goes together. As well as we discovered that people were just clinically not very confident and especially when they go out on their own, there's nobody to kind of chat with about difficult cases or things they haven't seen in a while or forever yet.
And so we actually partnered with Cheryl Burdette, who's a naturopath and who lectures all over the country and all over the world, teaching functional and integrative medicine at conferences and everywhere else. So now we try to remove all those obstacles and now we have this kind of business mentorship at Origins Incubator as well.
Since then, I also authored the bestselling book on Amazon, The Practice of Telemedicine, which helps providers navigate kind of the 52 jurisdictions we have around telemedicine laws, which exploded after COVID. But I say all this not to brag, but to say,
“Why am I starting a podcast?”
In fact, the origins for this podcast are pretty rooted in humility or me being a little bit more humble about myself. One answer is, because Marcus Aurelius and Ben Franklin told me to start a podcast. That's obviously not true. They couldn't talk to me from the grave, but I just kind of had this nagging feeling that through Functional Lawyer, I would put out content and it would be sometimes erratic and not always every week or not always each month. And I got an email from YouTube in December. That said, I put out 15 videos over the whole 2023, which...
If you do the math, that's not quite 52 weeks in the year. So I realized that I kind of had grown stale in my content. One, I felt like I was repeating myself a little bit. Two, in learning more about providers through Functional Lawyer and Origins Incubator, I would receive many more questions about topics where I didn't really know the answer. So most importantly, I would get questions about...
taxes or billing or how to sell a practice or hire a new provider or bookkeeping issues or stuff that just I'm not an expert in, right? I just don't know.
And so, you know, part of the impetus for this podcast is bringing in experts that do know those sorts of things, right? So Marcus Aurelius said, “learn from experts.” And Ben started the Junto Club of peers and middle-class entrepreneurs to benefit from, you know, self-improvement through...learning from others and learning from authors at the time too.
So it's kind of best summed up by the saying attributed to a few people, but
“the more I know, the more I know that I don't know.”
Or sometimes called “the more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.”
Or also “the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.” And depending on where you look, that was attributed to Aristotle or Socrates or even Einstein, actually.
And probably a few other famous people have throughout history. Now, that's kind of the impetus. I don't know everything. And so let's bring in guests and experts or peers that do know a particular topic very, very well and wouldn't be just speculating and kind of spitballing.
So this all kind of gets into, you know, “the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know” is a little foreshadowing for the Dunning-Kruger effect, imposter syndrome, Unknown Unknowns as Donald Rumsfeld popularized, and more topics to come that hold people back just mentally, right? Although the mental side of entrepreneurship and running a business and growing that way is so huge as well as we've learned into this. So in recognizing that I don't know everything, I humbly submit to the guidance of experts across various fields and the goal for the show is to curate those conversations for the mutual improvement of everybody here in Junto, which includes you. So we'll talk to accountants, medical billers, marketers, bookkeepers, other entrepreneurs from different fields, authors, medical providers, of course, startup founders, sports legends, or legends in my eyes, therapists, and more. So we'll learn from either conversations with them or books they've written or everything else that they've put out for us, sometimes just studying their actions, right?
So we're going to learn from people who have founded some of the tools you use today and people that you might just not know yet, but they're doing really cool things in this industry and that can really help you. So there'll be practical tips, tricks, how-to's as well as–I also like this part the most–their personal journey and their personal growth and transformation along the way. Sometimes I'll have a solo show where I feel like I am an expert in an area, but more often my goal is just to provide value to you, whether it's me or we're going to lean heavily on people that do know that are experts in their fields.
So a quick win for you to take away today.
Something on the mindset side is something that affects me from time to time, and I want to bring it to you. And I know it affects other people as well. Here's what you need to know today. You're exactly where you need to be. Don't get dejected looking around, especially on social media, at others who are having success or
of success because what we all often do is compare our step one or step two to their step 14 or 16. And I've been guilty of it. You know, sometimes when I'll scroll through Facebook, I get really depressed afterward because people are seemingly having success. And I'm sure that might sound familiar to some of you too. But in studying successful people, which we'll do a lot of coming on the show, there are two big factors, two of the biggest factors that indicate success are:
commitment, taking it seriously, and
consistency, doing it for a long time over time.
So I'll leave you with this parable of the clay pots. This is from The War of Art and also adapted by Atomic Habits by James Clear.
So the ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All of those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produce and all on the right side of the studio on the quality.
The procedure was simple. On the final day of class, he'd bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group, 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds of B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot, albeit a perfect one, to get an A.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged. Works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busy churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the quality group had sat theorizing and studying about perfection and how to make a perfect pot. In the end, this quality group had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories in a pile of kind of lumpy or dead clay.
So what's the takeaway on this? Just get started. Get your reps under your belt.
The first time you try something, it will not be perfect and that's okay. Side note, the first time I ever produced a video for Functional Lawyer, it took me 38 takes. Nowadays, it takes me maybe two, maybe three, if I'm not having a great day. It took me 38 takes that first time and it was still terrible. The lighting was bad, the audio was bad. If I look back on it now, I cringe. But it got me started on the road and, you know, cringing at that is good because it means I've grown and gotten better over time.
And so...you may have a story like that, too, for you.
So don't delay, don't wait until the conditions are perfect or the lighting is perfect or anything like that, or you'll end up with maybe results. You'll delay your start time and you may not be proud of the result because what I'm trying to teach one of my other sons is that we can't have our first draft be our final draft. It's not going to be very good and it's going to be a long struggle to make that really good.
So. Just commit, be consistent, and the improvements and the results will follow.
All right, Dad Joke of the Week,
A brand new one written by my eight-year-old, just told to me this morning, and I really like it:
What do you call a wizard that likes to play music?
Albus Drumbledore.
Get it? All right, if you liked that or you found some value today, please hit subscribe so you never miss the future shows. And we really appreciate you being here.
Welcome to The Junto.
