Transcript of This Ex-Doctor Turned Career Regret Into a $2M Business Helping Healthcare Workers Pivot | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E9

2023, we did $8,000 in sales. 2024, we did $30,000. 2025, almost a million.

Wow. What changed that year?

And then this year we'll do almost $2 million.

Rami Webi left family medicine residency with close to half a million dollars in student debt and no clear path forward. That experience eventually became the foundation for Match Day Health, a company that helps healthcare professionals move from clinical practice into non-clinical careers.

Our gross profit margin's around 60%, right?

Okay.

There's around 10 million healthcare professionals if you count all of them.

In the US?

Yeah.

That's so many people.

4 million nurses alone.

How much does it cost to acquire a customer? What's your customer acquisition cost?

Right now it fluctuates between $1 million and $2 million.

Wow, that's a lot.

Yeah.

Now that you changed the business model, do you wish that you just bootstrapped it? Cause you're cash flowing a lot.

I do.

Yeah.

Here's the thing. So our business was gonna fail. We were gonna run outta money and we weren't gonna be able to raise again.

But Rami, welcome to How We Profit Wednesdays.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for being here. I know you're based in Austin, so it was an easy trip out to the studio and we're gonna really be unpacking your business model today. I wanna understand how Match Day Health profits. So to begin, let us know what Match Day is exactly like. What is the business today as it stands?

Yeah, so to put it simply, Match Day Health, we are a career transformation company for healthcare professionals. So we help healthcare professionals build second careers, maybe even third careers. And in a nutshell, that's what we do.

Okay, cool. So you basically are helping healthcare practitioners transition into more of like a corporate career.

Correct. Yeah. So if you think about healthcare professionals, they start, you know, their degrees when they're 18 years old, get into professional school, and then, you know, they, they do that for a number of years, some 5 years, some 10 years. But what nobody thinks about is what do they do after that? Mm-hmm. Typically healthcare profession careers have a ceiling and you enter that career and you kind of stay at the same range for as long as you're in that career. A lot of healthcare professionals when they're, you know, maybe 5 years or 10 years in, start thinking about a second career.

Mm-hmm.

And so what do you do when you want a second career or you want to grow or you, you want to progress or maybe you're burned out? The typical path has been going back to school or getting an MBA or getting more certifications or just staying in your same job forever. And so what we've created is a path now or an off-ramp, so to speak, for healthcare professionals that doesn't require them to get additional schooling or certifications, but rather teaches them how to take their existing experience, repackage it, and enter into what we call non-clinical careers or just industry in general.

That's really cool. I actually come from a family of doctors, so my dad was a surgeon. He passed away. My 3 siblings are doctors. Um, two of them are actually no longer doctors. One of them is an entrepreneur who works on all different things, like has a peptide business, had a medical device company. And, uh, my second oldest brother, he's a pediatric neurologist and now he works in pharmaceuticals and research and he's like a research director helping like cure pediatric epilepsy. So he still gets to work on his dream of helping with like, uh, pediatric brain issues. And he just does it in a different way. And so, it's really cool that you're actually helping other medical professionals do something similar.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's actually not that uncommon, especially nowadays with the way industry's growing, both on the pharma life science side of things, but as well as health tech as well. It's becoming much more commonplace for clinicians to have that role that maybe isn't fully clinical or patient-facing. And, you know, You know, sometimes they start hybrid or part-time and then potentially becoming full-time.

Yeah. So this is a How We Profit episode. I've gotta know, like, how do you actually sell?

Yeah, so we run, we, it's a career transformation fellowship. So we call it, we call it that because it's a comprehensive coaching program and it takes people through a journey that we've developed now by doing this hundreds of times with clinicians. And so, it's a $6,000 coaching program, and it's paid upfront usually by our clients.

Okay, so it's $6,000 for the coaching program, and they're paying it all at once. How long is the program?

3 months.

3 months, okay. And then you're basically getting them ready, repackaging their experience, redesigning their LinkedIn profile, coaching them on how to do the interview, so that they can actually land a job.

Exactly. Yeah. And all the way through to landing the job, well, getting the offer, negotiating the offer, and even becoming part of our alumni system after that.

Okay. I wanna get more into the nitty-gritty of your business, but first let's get into your story because I think it's really cool that you basically turned your pain into a business, your own pain of transitioning from a medical, you know, degree into the corporate world. You actually never became a doctor, right? So you—

I did actually.

You did? Okay. Well, tell us the story. Tell us the story. Yeah.

So I'm Middle Eastern, Lebanese, like you.

Mm-hmm.

And you just mentioned to me, like, you have 3 brothers that are in medicine.

Yeah. 2 brothers and a sister. Yeah.

2 brothers and a sister. So for our culture, it's very common to be encouraged to pursue the medical path. And for me growing up, our families, a lot of them came here as immigrants, escaped war, tragedy, a lot of suffering. And so they came here looking for stability.

Yeah.

And opportunity. And so our parents, their number one priority for us was to have stability, to have a hap— you know, a great career. And it wasn't about our passions or what makes us happy or what we're good at.

Right.

They just wanted us to be secure. And established and respected.

And respected.

And prestige and all that. And so I think that's very common amongst our community and many other communities as well. And so my idea growing up was that's the route I should take. And that's, you know, if I was gonna do anything, I wanna do something that I can be the best in. So obviously if you become a doctor, that's a career path where you can be the top of your field or the best or respected or that sort of thing. And so, you know, graduate high school, very vaguely decided I want to go down this medical career path. I had an interest in sports. I was injured one time, went to see an orthopedic surgeon, and I liked that experience. And so without too much thought, I kind of just decided I'm gonna go down the medical path and pursue that. And so I did it. I got good grades, I got into medical school, and my first 2 years of medical school, I, I did great. And it was when we started actually seeing what is it actually like being a doctor and working in the clinics and preceptorships that I had like a huge shock and I realized, oh no, I think I made a huge mistake.

I don't think I want to do this at all. I want to say after it first happened, I thought it just would go away and I thought, no, I just, you know, find a specialty I like or something else. But that never really happened. I felt like as time went on, things just kept getting worse. Hmm. And I kept feeling like this wasn't what I wanted to do. And so, um, I almost actually didn't do residency at all. So I thought, okay, do I just drop outta medical school and then start something else? Well, now I'm $400,000 in student loan debt. Oh my gosh. And so I kind of felt pretty stuck and pigeonholed. And so I said, well, I'll do another year. I'll do a year of residency, see if it gets better. So I did that.

And you're at least getting paid, right?

So yeah, you're getting paid a small amount. It's like $60,000 in residency. But yeah, you're at least getting paid. And, and you know, also maybe I should just finish, do residency, get done and have a stable career after that.

Mm-hmm.

So I sucked it up for a year and did it. And then at the end of that year, super burned out. And I almost decided I was gonna drop out then. I got cold feet and decided, all right, I'm gonna do another year. So I did another year. Again, that was when COVID hit. It was about 2019. The burnout got so much worse and it really started to feel like I was swimming upstream. I don't know if you've ever had this feeling where you're going in a direction in life and you're just resisting everything the way life's trying to take you. Mm-hmm. and that's the best way I can describe what I felt is like I was trying so hard to show up every day enthusiastic, engaged, and trying to do what's right for my patients.

Mm-hmm.

But the, the matrix of healthcare and the system and the hierarchy and all of it was just so soul, soul sucking for me. Mm-hmm. And so it really felt like I was just swimming upstream and like it reached a point where I was like, I just can't do this every day anymore. And I just kind of like let go. And, and that's the best way to describe it. I just let go and I just started going with the tide. And when I did that, everything started to kind of fall into place for me. Uh, I dropped out of residency. So I put in, I talked to my program director. We had the heart to heart. We just talked it all out and decided, hey, like, I'm gonna put in my month's notice and I'm out. And that day was January 21st, 2021.

Wow. So I just wanna pause here because, uh, your story reminds me of something that Gretchen Rubin talks about, which is this idea of drifting. So, so many people actually just drift into their careers. They drift into $400,000 of debt going into medical school or going to law school. They're doing it 'cause they just feel like it's the next logical step. It's the right thing to do. Somebody else told them to do it. They're doing it with like no thought. And you were able to study, do well on your tests, get into residency. You could have completed res— residency. It was you who didn't want to continue on and do it. And so talk to us about the sunk costs that you felt with this $400,000 in debt.

You know, it's so funny you mentioned that because I actually, at one point I was writing a book called, called The Sunk Cost Fallacy, and I wanted to just talk about it because that was the biggest thing holding me back. I invested so much time, so much effort, so much money, and I felt really, truly stuck. And unfortunately, you know, not too long ago I heard of a medical student, a medical resident who had finished from the Caribbean, graduated with $600,000. In student loans, couldn't get into residency, ended up committing suicide. And so people feel so stuck when like that, when you have that kind of like, it's like you're stuck in the matrix.

Yeah.

And people don't know how to look at that objectively and take themselves out of the situation. Mm-hmm. And not just be drowning by it. And so for me, the sunk cost fallacy is really perspective shifting because you can look at a situation and say, this is doom and gloom. Or you can look at it and say, well, you know, what if I, what if I gave myself 3 years? What if I timeboxed the situation to try, try and create something new? Mm-hmm. So I could just take some risks so I could try something different so that I could just start on a new path.

Mm-hmm.

And it's really just fear around all of the sunk costs. It's not, really, it's not a real thing. It's something we perceive to be the case. And so you just have to remove yourself from it.

Something that I loved about your story actually was that you positioned, like, once you, from my understanding, when you left residency, you were like, okay, this is my fellowship and I'm gonna do like a 3-year business fellowship. Yeah. Because you see all your friends who were in residency taking their fellowships, basically working for free, training, working for a low amount, and you're like, well, I could do the same thing but in the business world and not feel so bad about it. And I thought that was a really great way to think about it.

Yep, exactly. That was exactly my mindset shift that allowed me to take on all that risk because a lot of people thought me jumping out of residency with that much student loans without any real tangible path is just absolutely crazy. And I've always kind of been someone that's okay with risk. Like I'm willing to take risks as long as they are calculated.

Mm-hmm.

And as long as I feel internally that, that good about it. Like, I have to have conviction. And so for me, in that position, I said, I'm going to give myself 3 years. And like you mentioned, a bunch of my friends were doing, uh, cardiology fellowships, GI fellowships, and all these different things, and they were taking a pay cut to do that. I said, this is so stupid because we're able to— we're able to do a take a pay cut for someone else as long as it's some corporation or institution that tells us, hey, you have to, you know, do this for 3 years and do X, Y, and Z. And we're so willing to do that because it's the norm, because it's, there's some institution making it normal. I said, well, why don't I just do that for myself? Why don't I give myself that permission?

I love this. I love this reframing. It's so good.

And I could easily make $60,000 or $70,000 a year which is what you would make in a fellowship. And I'd say if I worked this hard, like 100 hours a week, which is what I was working in residency at anything, I'm going to be successful. It's just there's— I haven't, I haven't done it yet. And so that was my commitment. I'm going to give myself 3 years. By the end of 3 years, I'm going to have my own business. I'm going to be making X amount of dollars. And if I haven't reached these goals by January 21st, 2024, I'll go back to school or go back to residency. I'll do something else. And that was my commitment. And that was what allowed me to take my, like, just reframe everything and just not be so caught up in the fear or the drama or what people are gonna think. Just, I'm gonna go do my thing for the next 3 years and figure it out.

So what did you do first? I think you, you raised some money, right?

So the first idea was I'm gonna go right into being an entrepreneur. Mm-hmm. Right off the bat.

No experience.

No, no experience. And so the idea I had was I wanted to build this shared coworking space for clinicians where they could work together and see patients and rent out space almost like, you know, like WeWork, but it's just for patient space.

So it's like private practice doctors can like share an office space, kind of like a medical center.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But it's more like hip. It's more, it's more like your average coworking space.

It's like a hip medical center.

Yeah, exactly. And clinicians can rent space like by the hour, by the day, by, or just permanently.

Mm-hmm.

And that was the idea. And it was, it had its flaws at the time. And so for about 6 months I was working on it. I was pitching to investors, trying to raise capital. It was a capital-intensive project. It would've taken $2 million to stand up the, the first kind of full building and operations for a year. And so I pitched like 100 investors within that 6 months and raised $0.

$0.

$0. Yeah. And nice. Yeah. And basically at the end of that 6 months, I was like, okay, I'm running outta money. I gotta do something. And I, you know, that was my first failure and it was a huge punch in the face for me because I had so much riding on me being successful after that. Mm-hmm. Because I was like, I just left out, dropped outta residency. I'm doing this thing, but I felt like everybody was watching me. They obviously weren't. Yeah, but I felt like I had to prove myself. I had to do something big to be successful so that I could justify dropping out of residency.

Why do you think nobody gave you any money?

I think I just probably didn't have enough experience and it was a big risk for people. Yeah, probably at the time, like this is a first-time founder and, and the, and the environment I would say is very different today. Like what I'm seeing now in the venture world is lots of people are getting money and getting funded, but it wasn't a tech business. It was, it was almost like a real estate business. And I'm someone without any real estate experience, don't have a co-founder, and I don't think I had built enough trust to, to—

And maybe even the upside wasn't enough. Like, yeah. Yeah.

So, so there are multiple reasons. I just don't think that You know, I took the swing and I think I learned a lot through that.

Yeah.

It taught me how to pitch. It taught me, you know, how to build a pitch deck and tell a story and what investors wanna see. And so even though it didn't work out, I learned so much from it and it gave me the confidence to go and do my next thing. It could be for, for many reasons. I think I remember the feedback being was just, you know, you're gonna need so much money and there's no way to scale this and you don't even have anybody signed up yet.

Okay, so, so that didn't work out and then you were like, I'm gonna go actually get experience at a startup. You went to a startup, right?

I actually, before that, I went back, moved back to Michigan. I had to get a real job. I had earned my medical license. So technically when you have a license, you can still practice. So I had an unrestricted license, wasn't board certified, but it allowed me to go work in the urgent care, which is what I did. Worked in the urgent care for a little bit, made enough money to, you know, pay my bills. And then I was actively pursuing my next thing, which was trying to get into health tech. Figured, hey, I'm not ready to be an entrepreneur yet. Let me go work with a startup founder, work in a startup, do something that I'm potentially passionate about and see what happens. And so it was about 9 months and I caught a break, which actually brought me here to Austin, Texas. And that was my first health tech opportunity.

So, you did this health tech opportunity and then on the side you started to build your next business?

Correct. Yeah, so, I actually landed another opportunity after that. Okay. So, did that one for about 6 months, landed another opportunity, and during that time I was getting so many clinicians asking me, "Hey Rami, I want to pivot too. How did you do it? Can you show me where you're finding these jobs?" And that was around the time that I realized, well, it's not really about a job board, It's not about, you know, just finding the jobs. You have to go through an entire transformation. You have to rebrand yourself, tell your skills in a different way, go through this identity crisis because it can be a lot to process, you know, from thinking about yourself as a doctor to now thinking of yourself as someone who's an operator. And so I had to kind of figure out how do I tell people or show people really that there's, there's a lot to bridge here and just applying or finding the opportunities isn't actually going to solve the problem.

And so while you were working in corporate, you also started a podcast, right?

I did. Yeah. So actually while I was in, in medical school, I started the podcast.

Oh wow.

Long time ago. Yeah, it was in 2017. Okay. I was doing my first few episodes on Skype. So, and because Zoom wasn't even around then and it was just so early.

Yeah.

And so it was called Beyond Medicine. And I had— what I did was I would interview physicians that were famous on social media, ask them what they're doing beyond medicine, what they're doing with their social media platforms.

No wonder you left. You got all this inspiration from all these other people who had left medicine.

Yeah. So I had that entrepreneurial bug and I was actually making money from my podcast during medical school and residency. I was selling t-shirts and all these other things. It was, it wasn't a lot, but it was a small business for me at the time. And so yeah, that, that did trigger my inspiration. And I think looking back, I was always interested in that. But yeah, that was my first podcast and I grew it through influencers at the time, which was kind of like a new thing.

So you ended up starting Match Day. Talk to us about like how you, like, what was the first iteration of the Match Day concept?

Yeah, so I started Match Day in 2023. So the first iteration of that was we were doing a startup and we went and actually pitched the idea that we want to build like the Tinder for doctor jobs and build a matching platform that helps physicians and other clinicians land jobs in a better way. And so we raised about $1 million in capital from investors, angel investors, and we started building the platform and it started that way. And obviously And then it just evolved from there into something completely different.

Okay, so it started as a Tinder for doctors. Why don't you think that worked? Why didn't you continue building that? Did it ever launch?

We never actually launched it. No. So we spent money on, you know, hiring the right team, engineers, building the tech stack, and then doing sales and finding partnerships. And so we were looking to partner with hospital systems and we were talking to hospital systems. And, you know, at the time we were burning about like $30,000 a month, which is not that much for a startup. I think it's pretty lean actually for a startup. But still, you know, we were burning that capital every month. We were spending money on, on engineers to build the tech stack. And that was before Claude and all of that came about. And it was all really expensive. And so come, you know, the end of 2023, going to 2024, I started to realize we're going to burn through all of our capital before we even have our first partnership signed. And, you know, for anybody familiar with hospital, selling to hospital systems or B2B, those life cycles can take a year, a year and a half. And we didn't have that time as a startup, as a small startup, you know, we were gonna burn through that capital. We were gonna go back to investors and ask to raise, and they were gonna ask us, well, what, what do you have?

What's your revenue? And, and, and how much have you grown? And so I kind of saw the writing on the wall at some point. That we're gonna run out of money and we're gonna still be trying to get this one pilot on. And it's just, it was keeping me up at night.

Yeah.

And I knew like, I'm gonna have to go back to my investors and say, hey, this whole business has failed and I'm, I'm really sorry. And I just couldn't live with that. And it was like, yeah, I just remember I woke up at 3 in the morning one time, one night, and I was just sitting there and I was just so stressed out. Like, I just had like my hands on like my head in my, in my palms. And I was just like thinking like, What am I gonna do? This business cannot fail. I'm not gonna go back to my investors and, and say that we failed. And so I just prayed that night. I was like, God, show me a way that I can take this business and open up that path for us.

Hmm.

Very next day I go to LinkedIn and I post on LinkedIn, just kind of like a hunch, an intuition to see how people would respond to it. And I say, We're going to— if you're a healthcare professional and you want to go and land a non-clinical job, comment on this post. We can help you do it. It went viral. Nice. I think 200,000 impressions, got 1,000 comments, and everybody that commented, I just said like, I don't know, comment career or something. But we got all these people commenting and filling out the form, and I hired a VA to just reach out to every single person. And all of a sudden I was like, okay, this is something people actually want.

Yeah.

It's something that I know really well. Maybe we pivot the business to this and just help all of these people that so desperately wanna change actually land a job and pivot. And so the lesson I learned from that was I fell in love with the solution in the very beginning. I had this idea to build a tech company, to be a startup founder, to do do something cool in health tech and help with job matching. That was the dream. That was the goal. That was what I was going to do. We were building tech. And then what I realized is I fell in love with the wrong thing. I fell in love with something that was make-believe that people didn't really want. And if they did want, it was going to take forever to actually build. And I went to falling in love with the problem.

Yep.

So many of these doctors and clinicians, they didn't really care about clinical jobs. They didn't care about another tech solution to help them because recruiters were reaching out to them all the time. They had a ton of options and it wasn't a real, like, major problem for them.

Yeah.

Instead, they were wanting to build new careers, get their life back, land better jobs, not feel stuck like I was feeling stuck. And it was a huge pain and there was no solution.

Yeah.

So basically, I fell in love with the problem of figuring that out. And figuring out how do I actually help them in this area?

Is that when you funneled everybody to a Slack community from that post?

From that post, we, we took everybody and put 'em into a CRM. So we had a little form, had them fill it out.

Okay.

Went to a CRM and then we just started calling everybody one by one, emailing them and setting up appointment times to, to basically see if they were willing to, to work with us to help them land a job.

And what was your first offer?

The first offer, it's, that's a good question because it evolved into what it is now. So the first iteration of this was because we didn't have any social proof or any track record, it was a contract. So you would work with us, we would invest in you basically and help you land a job. And after you land a job, you would sign the agreement would say you would pay us a percent of your first year salary. And so it was like 7% or something like that.

Did people actually do it?

Yeah. So in the first iteration of that, it was, we took on all the risk, we paired them with a coach, we helped them land a job, and people started paying us, you know, if they landed a $100,000 job, $7,000. But that came with its issues and problems. That's why we ended up pivoting to the model we have now.

I read that you had a Slack community.

We did. That was a Beyond Medicine group. Okay.

That was from the podcast back then.

From the podcast. Got it. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Did any of those people end up becoming clients later on or that was like long haul?

Uh, I think so. Yeah. There were people that I knew through that community that ended up being clients, but it wasn't a huge percentage of them.

I asked that because actually my company, Yap Media, basically started as a Slack channel.

Yeah.

Like I basically had fans that would reach out to me that loved the podcast and they were like, how can I help? And I started a volunteer team in Slack and that turned into my whole company now and we're making like almost $10 million a year. So yeah.

And you know, before I took the leap on Match Day, we like, we tried so many ways to, so first it was a community, it was called Beyond Medicine Group. It was off the podcast. I charged $99 a year to become a member and I grew it to like 300 people.

Hmm.

And at the time I started, you know, getting 3 or 4 signups every single day. So it was like $400 every day. Yeah. Coming in, going into the Slack community. And that was when I realized, I was like, oh, I can actually leave my job and pay my rent and start building this. And so the second iteration of Beyond Medicine Group was Matched, was Matched to Health. So we started it as a community in a way, but we were trying to like tell the story of like it can be so much bigger than that.

Yeah, let's pause there for a second. So basically you're saying that when you were, when you were working at the startup, that's when you started the Slack community and then that side hustle gave you the funds to then become an entrepreneur or just try new business ideas. Is that, is that right?

It gave me the confidence because I started to see like I was getting, you know, 3 or 4 signups every single day.

Mm-hmm.

And I was working for, I was VP of clinical operations for an AI startup and I didn't, I was learning a lot. I enjoyed it, but I just, my goal in my head was always like, think back to the fellowship.

Yeah.

I have 3 years to do this. I was coming up on year 2 almost. So, I was like, I gotta figure this out now and start planting those seeds. And so, once it got to a point where I was like, I can just pay my bills, now even if it was just like making $3,000 a month, I was like, I'm willing to take that risk. And as soon as Beyond Medicine Group, which is now Match Day, hit that point, I was like, all right, I'm all in.

First iteration, like we were saying, was basically like a recruiter model, right? You get somebody a job, they give you a percentage of their first year salary. What is the model now?

The model now is it's paid upfront by the client. And so in the recruiter model, the recruiters work for companies and they get paid when they match someone. So it's like you having your own personal recruiter, but they're not really a recruiter, they're a coach. They're invested in your success. Okay. They're invested in you getting a job. That's obviously something you would have to pay for to have that white glove service. And so the fellowship now is a coaching program. And it's paid upfront by the client.

And you call it a fellowship.

Yeah.

So basically it's these medical professionals. It was doctors just at first, and now you've widened it up to nurses and other types of— well, who can do it? What are the types of professionals?

Pretty much any healthcare professional, anybody with a clinical background from medical assistants to physical therapists to nurses, PAs, NPs, doctors. Pretty much anyone who's built their career around a healthcare profession and is looking to make a career transition. And so going something non-clinical in industry, mainly, you know, our focus is health tech and life science.

So now what is the, the most recent offer? What is it exactly?

So it's a 3-month fellowship and it's $6,000. Okay.

For the most recent— 3-month fellowship, $6,000. How many clients do you have? Typically?

Every month we sign up around— it could vary like between 20 and 40.

Okay.

So yeah, around that number. And, you know, active, we have about 150 fellows.

The hard part about that model is that every 3 months you need new customers, right? They— it's like kind of like a leaky bucket. So have you thought about how to extend lifetime value?

Yeah, that's something I've actually thought about a lot. And it actually used to be a 6-month fellowship, but we did— it was 6 months for a year and then we condensed it down to 3 months because a lot of the value and just the refinement of the program, we were able to get a lot of that down to 3 months. But yes, it's, you know, that's— it's kind of like the high-ticket space. You always have that problem of having to chase new revenue. And we've thought about different ways where we can continue to support people Beyond 3 months, we haven't really figured out what is right for our clients and what's actually going to be a good business model to invest in yet. Right now it's just a variation of different upselling opportunities. So extension beyond 3 months or, you know, I think that's the next stage we want to figure out.

Yeah, it's like what happens after 3 months? How does this person still keep— because, you know, your best customers are your existing customers, as most people know. Let's talk about your customers for a little bit. You started with doctors. The problem with doctors is that they basically have golden handcuffs, right? Yes. They get paid a decent amount of money. I can tell my brother's story 'cause his story is, was actually like really positive. So he was a pediatric neurologist.

Mm-hmm.

He was making like $300,000 a year or more. Very busy. He has two kids, two young kids. He used to get so stressed out if they got sick because both him and his wife were in healthcare. So it's like they'd have to cancel patients and it was like, very difficult for them to handle anytime a kid was sick. Um, he would have neighbors who would be like eating lunch in the middle of the day. He never could do that. He used to have to take calls at 2 in the morning. And then he was just like, I love my job. It's rewarding. It's very rewarding to have patients be grateful and everything like that. It's like instant reward. But he just wanted a better lifestyle. And so he just, you know, figured it out and went on LinkedIn and started at, you know, one company, then kept moving his way up. And now he has an amazing job. He's making like almost double the amount of money. That's awesome. And I'm sure in the beginning he was making just about the same, but for other doctors, that's not necessarily the case. Like they might have to take a pay cut.

Yeah. And I think those are the golden handcuffs that they have, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's actually one of the things we realized as we started progressing we actually moved away from really marketing to physicians at all. And we focused on the healthcare professionals that were earning between $80,000 and $150,000 because for them, they could make a career transition horizontally and still earn the same amount of money or maybe a little bit more. And so the career pivot for them just made so much more sense. Mm-hmm. Whereas like you mentioned, physicians earn a lot higher incomes and so they're not necessarily willing to go into like a mid to entry-level job which is the case for most physicians. Like, if you wanted to do a career transition, you probably need to take a pay cut, but not for all. Many can pivot into pharma like your brother and actually earn more money. But I'm sure for your brother, it was actually really difficult to have to figure that out on his own and, you know, navigate that entire process.

Totally. I remember it was very difficult for him and it was kind of like he got lucky. He got like a big break. You know, there was like one specific company that needed a pediatric neurologist. And there's not that many in the world and you know what I mean? So he had to like find the exact opportunity that was a fit for him and then kind of navigate his way. Uh, but it worked out. He's so much happier, you know? And ultimately you spend so much of your life working that you wanna be happy. Um, so what kind of jobs, like for, for all the nurse, there's so many nurses in the world and medical assistants for everybody tuning in, what kind of job opportunities are really out there for people who have medical degrees that are not clinical?

There's such a wide variation, and I'm honestly always surprised because I see a new job title out there and I'm like, oh, another new job that could be for clinicians. But they're not really marketed for clinicians. They're marketed for people with X, Y, and Z background. And they always say clinical or healthcare background preferred or something along those lines. So, I'd say it falls into 4 main categories. The first one is probably sales being the big category. I would put customer success under there, account executive, account manager, medical device sales, pharma sales. So, anything in that category I've put there, maybe even MSL or medical affairs.

One of my best friends just reminded me, she was a nurse, so smart, so bright. She went to medical device sales. She's making so much money now. Yeah. She's crushing it. Yeah.

And sales is definitely, and I love sales and it's probably like, I encourage people to learn sales and like get into sales as much as possible because it's such a good skill to learn, but it's definitely also got the highest ceiling and highest earning potential, potentially. So sales is one of them. I put operations maybe on the second category that can include clinical operations, coordination, program manager, project management, product management as well. It's a very popular one. There's just so many different job titles that can fall under that. I would say a third category is education or content writing. And then the fourth category would be the consulting or strategy side of things.

Hmm. So in terms of like costs of delivering all the, these services, you have coaches and it sounds like you've had coaches from like almost the very beginning. So how do you find these coaches? How do you vet these coaches? How do you pay these coaches? How big of a cost is that?

Yeah, absolutely. So we have two full-time coaches. Uh, they're our program directors. And we pay them a full salary.

Okay. And it's not per client, it's salary-based?

It's salary-based for the, for the program directors. Um, and they're— these are super experienced coaches, Chanel and Jenny. They're wonderful. Um, and they basically built out the entire program for us, and they did all of the hiring and the recruiting. And so we've got about 15— I want to say 15 contractor coaches at the moment. And so they just step in as needed. We have so many different clients and they have different schedules, and so we need a lot of availability too that's flexible for our clients.

Got it.

And so we rely on contractors to support kind of like outside of our two main coaches' jobs.

I could imagine that could be very difficult. Quality control.

Yeah.

Reliability. And also with a service like this that's high ticket, you've gotta really deliver for your customers. And if you've got like one bad review on Reddit, Crush everything, right?

Absolutely. We, we spent and really for me, like I wanted to build the best program and to do something like that, you have to hire the best people. And so my first two hires, like we really just spent like so much time interviewing, talking to the right people, asking for referrals. And that was the big difference maker because they really built the bulk of the program. And when you hire people who are A-plus, they hire other people who are A+.

Yeah.

That is so, so important in program delivery because, you know, when your clients are happy, like you said, if you even have one bad review, it can hurt your business. And thankfully for us, like, we've got, I think, 4.7 on Trustpilot, all 5-star reviews, and all of our clients have been super happy so far. And if, if there ever haven't been, we just go above and beyond to like make it right or, or, or help them in whatever way we can. And, and that's so important.

So with a $6,000 fee for the coaching program, how much profit do you make off that with all the different expenses from the coaches, from your team? You have like a pretty small, like, executive team, like 5 people or something like that. How much, how much profit do you—

Well, our gross profit margin's around 60%, right? Okay. 55 to 60%. And then our net profit margin, it just really depends for us on how much we're reinvesting back into the business or spending on marketing.

Yeah.

But that could be around, you know, I'd say 20%, 30%.

So how do you get your customers today?

So today the main channel is obviously paid.

Okay. So why is that obvious?

I think for the high-ticket space, it's actually pretty common that a lot of people are doing Meta, but we've actually been also getting a lot of referrals. So, you know, I think that's been becoming much more common now that we're more established. People have heard about us and we've got a lot more fellows who have gone through the program.

Mm-hmm.

So referrals and then organic as well. My Instagram, my LinkedIn, the company page, uh, this podcast. Yeah, this podcast, hopefully, uh, which I need to do more of and tell my story.

Yeah, you need to do more podcasts. Well, I don't know, you had a podcast. I was like, he probably does I usually like interviewing. Okay. Okay. I was, I was thinking you might be doing a, a fair amount of podcasts if you had a podcast.

Well, let's do this. Do you like, do you like being interviewed or do you like being the interviewer?

I like being interviewed when I have something to say. So if I have like a new course and I've got all this material in my head, or if I just had a new webinar and I've got all these ideas, but I hate being interviewed when like I don't have anything new going on cuz then I just feel like boring, you know? So, uh, I'm not doing interviews until I launch my book, which I'm in the progress. Of writing. So once I have my book out, I'll save all my famers for then.

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

Okay, so let's talk about paid ads, Meta. Um, I tried paid ads once. I get all my clients, uh, through referrals essentially. So I have a social media podcast agency and I have a podcast network. Mm-hmm. Most of my clients actually are guests on the podcast and nice. And then they just become my client.

'Cause, all right, sign me up after this.

I basically designed this podcast that way. Yeah, I could definitely help you with like, podcast appearances and all the— I have so many different services that people that come on my show want those types of like LinkedIn management, Instagram, podcast production, monetization of their channels, all that kind of stuff. So I've designed a really cool like lead gen engine. And then also we grow our brand really wide so that when my team does outreach, like everybody knows about my podcast and Yap Media, and even if they don't come on my podcast, like the brand gets us in and we don't have to do really any paid other than like how much it costs to do like outbound email. So we never do paid ads. I did it once and it totally flopped. Yeah, but I didn't try hard enough. So what was your experience with paid ads like? What was like some of your first campaigns like? What is working for you?

Yeah, so, well, when we started off, we started with like a super low ad spend to just get leads and talk to them and learn.

Mm-hmm.

And then we had to figure out You know, is what we're offering here something they want? And so in the beginning we were offering basically kind of like it was a kind of like a no-brainer, like we were taking on all the risk. We were letting you sign up for— I think it was like $500 to sign up for 3 months, get coaching, and then you only have to pay us when you actually get a job. And so we just had such low risk. Yeah, it was such a no-brainer offer that We would just talk to people and they'd say, okay, you're going to take on all the risk. And then we'd help them get jobs and pivot and actually be successful. And then they would actually be so grateful they would pay us. And so in the beginning, we're just spending like a low amount on Meta, maybe a couple thousand dollars a month. And then once people started landing jobs, we realized, okay, this works great. But it came to a point where cash flow became the constraint. And so the model we were doing wasn't actually a good model because it just delayed cash flow.

And then for whatever reason, sometimes people wouldn't be able to pay or they'd have to pay it over a longer period of time. Yeah.

How would you even like prove it? Or I guess you had a contract, but like you're not gonna go spend legal fees for $7,000. It would cost the same amount to take it to court. Right.

So, exactly. So, so for that reason, we've, we pivoted the model. We collected the cash upfront, which allows us to cash flow the business and grow it. And so, you know, it reached a point where when we were closing 5 or 6 a month, we started to increase the ad spend. And then at one point we, we changed the model, made it all upfront. We started hiring a sales team, setters and closers, and then it just kind of started growing from there.

You know what I would do if I was trying to grow your business?

Tell me.

Webinars.

Webinars. We, we do that now.

You do webinars?

Yeah.

I mean, I would focus on growing your personal brand, 'cause this is a topic that a lot, there's so many, medical professionals in the world. How big is the market? Like how many medical professionals are there?

There's around 10 million healthcare professionals if you count all of the—

in the US.

Yeah. If you count all of the allied health and like support staff and that.

That's so many people.

4 million nurses alone in the US.

Yeah. And it's like, it's very targetable on LinkedIn. So you could be searching different titles and then DMing people, inviting them to your free educational webinar and then mass closing them. You know what I mean? So that's what I would do. I would be like, find every single nurse and every single medical assistant and invite them to this free webinar, give them an hour of great content, and then close them en masse.

I actually do want to pick your brain about that because I totally agree.

Pick my brain right now. Let's do it.

Well, I guess— so I've been doing a webinar every week now.

Yeah.

So I have it on my personal LinkedIn page.

Okay.

And I did it because One, we've done supplemental webinars. So all of our leads that don't close or pay on the call, we send them link, come to the free webinar if you're not convinced yet.

And the best thing about Zoom webinars is you can collect their email and their phone number when they sign up. So if they sign up once, you've got their email to retarget them.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so we do all the retargeting and it builds trust really. And that's the biggest thing because when people want to spend $6,000, like They really wanna know they can trust you.

And, and you can't build trust off a paid ad. That's why it flopped for me. 'Cause on social, people would follow me for years, then I'd sell something. They have like years of content and trust. On a paid ad, they have no idea who I am. So we'd— paid ad to, to webinar is always the way to go in my opinion.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I wanna, uh, and I'd love to get your opinion on, on, you know, um, having those be paid webinars versus free.

Free.

Free for all of them.

Free. And I know a lot about webinars. I've interviewed like Russell Brunson about it, Jason Fladline about it. Yeah. I've done maybe 200 webinars myself.

Oh wow.

Um, so what you wanna do on a webinar is you want to give free educational content, but you do not wanna give too much. You don't wanna overwhelm.

Mm.

So you want to, uh, tell your own hero story, which you've got a really great hero story. Right? So you actually were your own customer. Like, you, you're right. You have the experience to help them because you went through the same thing. So you want to go through something called a hero story. And like, that's the first 15 minutes of the webinar is you just inspiring them with your hero story, making them feel relatable to you of the same— you had the same pain points. And then you are establishing your credibility of like how many people you've gotten jobs so far, how you turned it around. And like how you just like wanna give back and, and help them now make their own transition.

Right.

Then you give them like a promise of like, by the end of this webinar in the next 45 minutes, I'm gonna help you do X, Y, and Z. And you pick like one, like 5% or even 2% of what you would teach them in the coaching program. One nugget that they can walk away with and like implement or like that's actually meaningful. And like walk them through like a framework. And then if they want more, you tell them the offer and you give them like an incentive to actually buy then. So in the next 24 hours, you get a 20% discount, or, you know, use this promo code or whatever it is, and you give them like some sort of offer at the end.

Yes.

And then there's like camaraderie and people chatting. You can invite your past students to give you shoutouts and even come on and tell, talk about their experience and You can get really creative. Yeah. And so it's a great way to mass sell. And especially for something like this where there's so many people, if it was like something really niche, I wouldn't recommend this, but because there's so many people that would be interested and there's so much to teach, like you could just do it about like how to be confident in your interview or something, you know?

You're spot on. And that's actually such good advice. And we made the mistake, I think, of overteaching in some of our webinars where we go too deep in like how to actually do something. It's like so valuable.

Yeah, you don't want to go too deep, whereas like then they just want to go and do it on their own, or they get scared and they're like, scared, this is way too much, this is way too much work. You want to just talk about the outcome and like not how hard it's going to be and all the work, right?

100%.

So just like a couple small things that like you want to teach them and take them away to build that trust and like to get them feeling like, okay, this is the company that I want to work with if If I got this for free, I can't imagine what it would be if I paid for it.

Right.

Yeah. And then case studies of all the success that you've had, like all the credibility, because you've actually helped a lot of people land jobs. So you've got something that other people don't have, which is like proof points.

Totally. Yeah. And I think social proof has definitely been like the biggest thing for us is both on the paid side as well. Like our best ads are social proof. And then the more we can sprinkle it in on our website and our socials, It's always like really boosted our sales.

Yeah. So you actually have a pretty decent email list, right?

We do. We've got about 18,000.

Nice. How did you get those emails?

Yeah, paid.

Paid ads.

Paid ads mostly. And probably organic, just website visits. We've invested a lot in SEO.

Yeah, that's smart.

Just being kind of like this unique brand in healthcare for career transitions. I do believe we're the market leader. I don't think there's anybody else in terms of like quality or skill, that's this niche providing to or like providing this type of solution for healthcare professionals. And so when people search non-clinical careers or pivoting, we usually come up and we're the first kind of, you know, place people usually learn about these sort of things. But that's been a big driver of growth for us in collecting emails. And I will say, you know, we're kind of— I still think we're kind of a baby company because we spent our first year 2023, we did $8,000 in sales. Nothing. 2024, we did $30,000. 2025, we did almost a million.

Wow. What changed that year?

The entire model.

Yeah. Okay. That's when you pivoted the model. Yeah. Okay.

And then this year we'll do, you know, almost $2 million.

That's great. How much does it cost to acquire a customer? What's your customer acquisition cost?

Right now it fluctuates between $1,200 and $2,000.

Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. Damn, I'm so lucky I get all my customers for free.

Yeah, you are lucky.

I get paid. I get paid to have my customers because I get paid for a podcast.

Yeah. And so, and that's actually pretty common in the industry for, for these high-ticket programs.

Yeah.

There's so much kind of, you gotta separate the signal from the noise and you just have to talk to the right people. And yeah, so I don't like giving Mark Zuckerberg all of our money, but unfortunately it's the way, you know, right now we're building brand awareness and, and it's been profitable. So we have a, you know, around a 4 to 5x ROAS at the moment. So it works.

Yeah.

It's just not ideal.

Yeah, it's not ideal. Organic is so good. But to your point, it's like it's working, you're profitable, you can just keep pushing at it and scaling it that way and just maximizing the effectiveness of your Meta ads campaigns. But organic, what are you working on? I know you mentioned SEO. Are you doing anything with AI, like AEO?

So yes, our agency's actually building our AEO strategy and all of that. And so it goes along with like building the FAQs and, you know, the SEO and all of that. So we have like 10 blog posts going out every week to build our SEO strategy and get in search engines. But we're also doing— and this is the part I'm most excited about— we used to have to hire a social media manager to basically run our Instagram. And right now we're able to put out 10 times the volume through Claude and through building frameworks and skills and then running ManyChat automations from our posts. So, oh nice, we're getting hundreds of comments on our posts every single week that lead to nurturing funnels, career assessment quizzes, webinars, all these different things. And that's boosted our sales, like I'd say like 20%.

Okay, unpack this.

Yeah.

So is that like many different Instagram channels that you guys are just like, like kind of like clipping?

No, it's the Match Day Health Instagram page.

Okay, it's one Instagram page. And what are you saying, that Claude's helping you come up with content?

Yeah, carousels have just been major for us. So the way carousels work is it, it goes mainly to your followers first. And so because we spend so much, you know, we spend around $1,000 a day in Meta ads.

Mm-hmm.

And we get a lot of followers on our Instagram. We're also running organic posts. All those people follow our Instagram and probably lurk for a long time. And so through these carousels, we do a lot of education about non-clinical jobs, about careers, about what they can land, because this is a space that requires a lot of education.

Mm-hmm.

People still don't know enough about it. And so we get, you know, people to comment, there's the automations, and then they can go into our newsletter or book a call with our team.

Mm-hmm.

And we've just seen a, you know, a huge bump in our organic sales every month. Um, and it's just been like a huge supplement to our paid meta ads.

Let me give you a tip. Take all your best performing carousels and make them trial reels.

Interesting.

And then my Instagram has been blowing up from trial reels. Like I just got a, like last week I had a video that had a million views, 500,000 views, 300,000, like huge, huge videos. And each video is giving me like 3,000 followers. Like it is crazy. Like I'm about to grow really fast on Instagram. And the thing that wins is actually the topics. It's what is getting people to comment and have a conversation. Yeah. So you have all this data now of all the carousels that generated comments and conversation. Turn those into reels. Take each idea and do it 5 times.

Yeah.

5 different hooks or like switch up the video cuz you can't upload the same video and do 5 trial reels a day of like the same concept and just do that every day. And like, I guarantee you it's gonna pop off. Like, yeah, there, so basically Instagram is, hear that Andrew?

Yeah. Get on this.

Instagram is basically pushing trial reels to followers, and especially because you've trained like your word cloud of your Instagram page of like all the keywords that you use. Like Instagram knows what you talk about because you guys have been consistent in your topics. So your trial reels are gonna go to people who want that and who, and like basically if you have one or two of your trial reels that are doing well, as people are scrolling, they're just gonna get fed like your next video. It's just really awesome and it's It's kind of like I've never seen this much traction on Instagram for like brand new accounts or not super popular accounts. Like for my clients, it's working really well. So like definitely lean into trial reels.

Yeah, I'd love to ask you, like, I'm guessing you have a team that works with you on your social media. How, how much of a hand do you have in like the strategy or, you know, pushing them to do certain things?

Well, uh, I'm a busy woman, but like my— at 11 PM at night, I'm always checking like my YouTube, my Instagram, and like giving everybody feedback. Um, I am involved in the strategy and setting the higher-level strategy, like what do we want to focus on, what features do we want to use. Um, but my team— I have like a big team, and my team is really like drafting the nitty-gritty content. We've got like a B-roll library of like approved videos and approved photos, so I don't always have to like approve every single little thing. And then anything super personal, I review, like if it's like a Mother's Day post or a post about my boyfriend, then like I want them to be the one writing that, you know? So it's like, I, I work on those, but other than that, my team is basically doing like everything. And, um, I basically have like monthly social media meetings, uh, biweekly content brand team meetings where we're talking about YouTube, podcast, everything, you know? And so I'm always directing my team. I think a big part of my job is just directing everyone. Uh, but not the nitty-gritty day-to-day of like, this is the post we're gonna post today, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not to hijack your, your show, but I—

No, go for it.

I'm curious.

I'm sure the listeners wanna know.

Well, I'm curious, like, what do you exactly mean by directing? Are you like, um, supporting or like setting the vision for them or more so, you know, showing them what to do or that sort of thing?

I have so many things going on. So, uh, to kind of break down like all the different like areas of my brand, right? So I have my podcast, which is like audio and YouTube, and like we're really focused on growing YouTube. Then we have LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, email.

Yeah.

And in a biweekly meeting, I've got my whole team on. It's like 20 people on, and everybody's got their work stream and reporting out on like what they did this week, what they did last week, what are the— and then they're telling me what they're doing, and I'm like, okay, like I noticed this mistake, or I want this guest on the show, or, or like with trial reels, like let's just focus on the biggest guests, not the most recent guests, and let's just lean into that. Or, yeah, because I'm really like hands-on in terms of like I'm looking at every comment that's going on my page and like I'm really looking at it every day so that in the meeting with my team I, I can bring up like, hey, I saw we're doing this, I don't want to do that anymore. Or whatever. But basically everybody's like, there's like somebody responsible for every, every like area, if that makes sense.

It's almost like you're distilling all of the insights too, because you're seeing what's working, what's moving. Mm-hmm.

And then you're just— They're telling me like, we grew this much, or like, we went viral here. I'm learning new things too. Like, oh, TikTok grew 10K. I didn't know that. Like, you know what I mean? So, um, that's how I get my information. 'Cause there's just so much going on and yeah. Yeah.

Very cool.

Okay, back to you. Um, so match day. What about the tools that you're using? What technology are you using to run this all? Like, how do people like schedule time with their coach? How do you monitor coaching calls and things like that?

Yeah. And so this is the part I love, and it's probably so relevant for someone who's starting a business or, you know, wanting to start their own business is you can start with off-the-shelf tools for everything. And what I mean by that is like Google Drive, Notion, Slack, Gmail, obviously, all these different off-the-shelf tools, subscriptions. You know, we have a ton of subscriptions that we use, but we don't have any of our own tech stack right now that we use. We actually built it in the very first year and it was useless and it's actually not great and it was super expensive and doesn't help the users. But users—

You made your own platform? Yeah. Got it.

Yeah. And it, it wasn't very effective because at the end of the day, people just need the tools that they need and they actually like using the tools they're already familiar with. Slack, Notion, Google Drive, all these things. And so we really just use off-the-shelf tools for everything. Slack is our community, so we still have the community.

Okay.

It's 1,000+ members now.

Nice.

As for job boards, we have hiring managers posting in there. Mm-hmm. All of the coach, Communications like the asynchronous ones happen on Slack between the fellow and their coach, and that's the community Slack. And then we have our team Slack, which is all our internal operations. Notion is basically set up for all of the resources, all of the guides, all of the videos that are supplementary, all of the tools that we use, different AI search tools that we set our clients up with. And then we have our tracker in there for tracking jobs. Et cetera. And then we also use it for internal operations as well, you know, whether it's marketing or, you know, setting up a CRM for different objectives and KPIs for the month, that sort of thing. And then Google Drive for connecting with fellows, the coaches use that a lot.

In terms of like how your team is structured, when you raised that million dollars, did they take equity?

Yeah, so we raised it on a SAFE note.

Okay, what's that mean?

So SAFE is a, it's a YC-designed kind of tool or vehicle for collecting cash from angel investors.

Okay.

So it's basically a promise to give equity when there's a price round or something that would trigger an equity conversion. So you typically raise it on a, on a cap. So it's either a pre-money valuation or post-money valuation. So we raised it on a, a $10 million valuation cap.

Okay.

But it's, it's not real equity yet. So we raised from angel investors and at the time we were building or planning to build a venture-backed business.

Yeah.

And so those investors have kind of like that promise of like when we do convert the equity or when there's a price round, their shares would convert into actual equity.

So you didn't pay them back yet?

So I wouldn't say we didn't pay them back yet. We actually are in the process of converting all of our existing first investors into equity.

Got it.

Yeah. So because—

And how much equity will you have to give up?

It's about 20% of our business.

Got it. That's a lot. But you got $1 million to start the business and that was helpful. Oh yeah.

Yeah. And we, and you know, you always wanna do right by your investors, especially like the first people that invested in you. For me it's like the relationships are way more important than the money. So I'd rather give away more and like do right by our investors than like have them wondering like, hey, what happened to my money? Or that sort of thing.

Now that you changed the business model, do you wish that you just bootstrapped it? 'Cause you're cash flowing. I do.

Yeah, I do. But I didn't. Here's the thing, we actually did something. So our business was gonna fail in 2023. We were gonna run outta money and we weren't gonna be able to raise again. But That was where I was like, whatever we turned this business into, I wanted to really do right by our investors and the people that took a risk on us and like not make this just a failed business.

Yeah.

And so instead of just going back to them and saying, hey, sorry, the business failed and starting this other thing, which I really could have done, we didn't. And we turned Match Day into this business that it is now.

So you could have like folded the other company completely and then been like, sorry guys, you took the risk, I'm out. Yeah. But instead you didn't. So do you have to communicate anything to these investors? Do they have any sort of like say over anything or do you communicate them at a certain—

To some degree when you're, when they're angel investors and they're, you know, on a SAFE, they don't really have that kind of say. I did always put out like quarterly investor updates sharing how the business is doing, what's happening, where we're growing. And I still do that even now. but they don't get to, they don't really have a say because they don't, you know, at once you get to like the seed stage or Series A and then they have a board seat, then that becomes a different story. Um, and also you're taking on a lot more capital at that stage versus our stage was just individual angel investors.

All right, so we're gonna do a SWOT analysis.

Oh no.

All right. What do you think your biggest strengths are? As a company right now?

As a company, our biggest strengths are marketing and opera— and operations. So we have a very strong program, very high quality, high caliber coaches. Um, so from a program fulfillment side, like, we're super strong. Um, and also from a marketing side of things, I think we've just done a really good job of establishing ourselves as like the leader in the space for career transitions.

Speaking of success, what is your success rate for actually helping people get a job?

So we track success over a 6-month period. So within 6 months, 80+% of our fellows will actually land a job. The average time to offer last quarter was 88 days. Right now it's about 112. So slowed down a bit because of the market slowdown. But we're also going into like September, October, which is peak hiring season. So Hopefully that number will, will speed up again too.

And in terms of like capacity with your coaches, like, are you looking at it like we've got X amount of coaches, we have this much capacity for clients and we're this much underfilled? Like how do, how are you like monitoring your goals?

Yeah, we have an update every single week. So a weekly operations update and we kind of have a percentage of capacity. So we have a percentage of capacity that kind of floats around. So anytime we're above 70%, we start thinking of hiring. When we're— when we know we're ready to scale, we'll start thinking about additional contractors. We'll start interviewing and preparing for that process. But, you know, typically above 80% is— that's kind of like yellow flag. And above 90% is like, okay, we got to figure this out ASAP because we're bringing on new clients all the time. And so we might run out of capacity in that stage and we never want our fulfillment to be the bottleneck.

How much is your founder story a strength at this point? Do you feel like it's grown beyond you?

I think our business could do well without me, and I think it would probably do the same amount of revenue with or without me. Maybe, you know, for me it's really been the trust factor because it's my story.

Yeah.

And it's just, you know, to establish the business and get it off the ground, it's really helped. But now I think Matchday carries its own weight. It's got social proof, it's got strong marketing, strong brand. We want to still kind of, you know, take the key, take me, the key man out of risk, out of the business. Like, I want to run Matchday forever. I love the business, but I don't want to be the main risk to the business. If I ever can't do something or be, you know, doing the ads or anything like that, I don't want the business reliant on me or my personal brand. I really want it to stand on its own two legs.

Are you doing all the Meta ads right now? Are you the— the face of it?

Just, I'd say probably half of them. We hire UGC creators. My ads usually are the best performing. And I think it's— I think there's something about being the founder is that you just have the most conviction and people can sense that.

Yeah.

And so that's part of it. And then I think just being a doctor also gives you credibility. And I say like, I say this like my degree didn't go to complete waste, you know, the $400,000 degree.

Yeah.

It's like now it helps me, you know, build trust with our audience, and that's worth something.

All right, let's talk about weaknesses.

Weaknesses. I want to say we don't have weaknesses, but of course we do. I would say areas that we're improving are sales and getting better at having a strong sales team.

Like closing people from the ads.

Yeah.

Because it's all calls. Like they book a call.

Yeah, so they book a call with our— we call it our admissions team. And so there's a qualification call that's about 30 minutes. And so that's the first kind of experience someone has with Match Day, 30-minute call. Right now we have 4 full-time setters, so they're available for the calls. They're the first kind of like interaction someone has with Match Day. And so we make sure we have a good first impression, but also we're qualifying, making sure this person is the right fit for us, we're a good fit for them. And they're also financially qualified, so we're not wasting their time or our time. And then we have the team that's like our closing team or admissions closers, and they are really closing the deals and bringing in the revenue.

Are these international contractors?

They're all US-based.

They're all US-based that are doing that. Does that get expensive?

No, they're all commission-based.

Commission-based.

Our set team gets a base. Our closers are all commission-based. Um, and they do really well.

Take a, take a second to like walk through what that setup is like. Do you consider those people team members? Are they kind of like, how does that work?

I consider them a core part of our team.

Okay.

Yeah. Because sales, and I think this is where a lot of people, I've seen like people outsource sales and I think that's a terrible idea. Mm-hmm. Sales is part of our culture because it's like the professionalism. It's like, you know, if you have a lousy salesperson and they're, not showing up professionally in there talking to your customers or not handling things appropriately, it makes your whole business look bad. So I consider them like an integral part of our team. I meet with them weekly, always, you know, going through coaching exercises or whatever. We also have a sales manager, but to break it down, we have setters. And so these are the people setting the closing appointments. They're doing the 30-minute calls., and we pay them a base, so they get a flat base. It's, uh, $1,500 a month, and then they earn a commission of, uh, could be between 5 and 7% per deal. Mm-hmm. And their OTE, you know, is around $4,000 to $7,000 a month.

And that was included in your customer acquisition cost. So it's the paid ads and the cost of the commission of sales.

No, not in our customer acquisition cost.

So, oh no. So customer acquisition cost was just the paid ads?

Just the paid ads. Oh cool.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sales is 20% of gross revenue. So that's a, you know, big line item.

Why commission-based for sales? Why not just hire full-time, like a full-time salesperson that does everything?

I think the industry, and I think a lot of people maybe know this as like high-ticket coaching industry, high-ticket sales industry. There's like, I don't know if you're familiar with like Shelby Sapp.

I do, yeah.

So there's a lot of people promoting this now and the whole industry is kind of, trained on just being commission-based. And, you know, for them, it's like they're able to make higher salaries if they're really good. And so, most of them don't really want to be salaried or anything like that. They want to work on commission because it also gives them— they just, they also make more money doing it that way.

Okay. So, that's a huge chunk of your cost is actually the sales and the commission that goes to the sales team. Now, what about the weakness of it being like coaches? Do you feel like that's scalable?

I do feel like it's scalable. I feel like we could grow to— I mean, I think we could easily get to a million to $2 million a month business. I do think that's on the horizon for us. It might take us, you know, another 2 or 3 years to get there. But I think we're— we've set up the systems now to be able to scale. And so on the fulfillment side, like, we definitely can scale. It's just a matter of having the right quality people and then having the right leadership in place to scale that team. So I'm not doing— obviously our program director does all the hiring, all the quality assurance. And when you hire really good people, you can scale. So that's just number one is like hire good people.

Yeah. And you have a good program. You said you spent a lot of time on the program.

Yeah, exactly. And so, and we have a lot of systems in place on the fulfillment side. I'd say the bigger issue for scaling is just keeping our customer acquisition costs down.

And then like we talked about increasing, like what are the other offers so that you can increase lifetime value of your customers?

Yeah. So the first—

or just get more customers, like have such a big volume that it doesn't matter.

Yeah. I mean, my dream is, you know, for healthcare professionals is we can help them through the life— lifetime of their journey. And I think about it in a couple ways. One, everybody in healthcare has student loan debt. So I think about how can we help them with coaching, handle their student loans, strategize, have financial advisement.

That's a great idea.

After they actually, you know, land the job and are thinking about, okay, now how do I structure the rest of my life and career and financial responsibility? So that's, that's something that I'm thinking about is like, how do we layer on services? Because what's unique about us is when someone comes in and works with us, the, the amount of trust and rapport that they have with their coach is actually just phenomenal. Like, they want to go work with that coach forever. They want to be best friends with that coach. They really have a lot of respect for them. And that gives us kind of a privilege because now we have that relationship with them. And because we delivered such an exceptional experience, because we help them get that next job, they're going to trust us when we say, hey, we've got another program here. We can help you with your student loans. We can help you with, you know, whatever it is. It could even be life insurance and disability.

What about like just life coaching? Like, hey, now that you got a job, like you can continue on with like monthly life coaching or something.

I don't know.

Yeah. I don't know if you need certain qualifications for that, but.

We've thought about it. Right now it's, so we do like a a 3-month extension for fellows if they want to do that at a like discounted price.

If they didn't get a job yet.

If they didn't get a job yet, we'll do like a 3-month extension at like a very high, highly discounted price just to make sure we're supporting them until they, they get the job. And then we do offer à la carte as well for fellows that graduate. So after they finish the program, they can always book again with their coach for like one-off sessions for promotions. Things like that, they're always able to do that. So we do also generate a little bit of revenue that way as well, just now that we have more alumni. But I think there's still also a lot more opportunity where we can take that trust that we've built and, and provide more value for our customers.

How about the opportunities? Do you ever think about expanding beyond healthcare or like what are the different opportunities that you're thinking about?

I think health tech healthcare is such a big opportunity, such a big industry, and our advantage is that we're so niche. I feel like, you know, really there's 10 million healthcare professionals. That's kind of how I think about our TAM and what can we do to help more of them. The reason I started Match Day, like my mission, what really drives me right now, it's actually just helping people get that spark back. Mm-hmm. Because so many healthcare professionals, if you've seen them after a shift or even day to day, they just—

Yeah, they're exhausted and miserable.

Yeah, they just look deprived of life.

Yeah. And tired.

And I want people to have that kind of spark back in their life where they don't feel drained and hopeless and defeated. It's like they can show up and be present at home, be present with their families, be present in their communities.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, we do that through helping them with their careers. That's one way to do it. There's probably lots of other ways too. But, you know, thinking about really the core demographic of healthcare professionals, that's who we want to serve and thinking about more ways we can do that.

So, opportunities, your podcast, are you putting out new episodes or what's going on?

Very minimally. That's something we want to do more of for sure. And I think it's like, I think maybe even just having on guests that have made the pivot or who are doing the next thing. I think that's our big next opportunity.

It is, 'cause you could probably get so many leads from the podcast from professionals that are interested in that kind of stuff. And it can be, it doesn't even have to be a huge audience.

Totally.

Uh, because it could just be like your exact target audience. Okay. For threats, any competitors that you're worried about? Does AI threaten you in any way?

I don't really look at our competitors, honestly. I just try not to pay attention. You know, I think, I think I see it in the sense, sense that it's a good sign when I start to see competitors. When we started doing this, like this model of Match Day 2 years ago, there's no one doing it. But I've started to see like independent career coaches pop up talking about this, posting more on social media. And actually, I think it's a good thing.

Yeah, because you could just take their followers.

Well, they create more brand awareness about the non-clinical career pivot, right? And, you know, I think it's great. I don't, I don't think like I just for me, like philosophically, I just don't believe in like focusing on my competitors. I just think if I just, we just do what we do, like, you know, the more the merrier. They can, they can have a piece of the pie too if they want.

Any other threats that you can think of?

You know, there's always the threats you have to be thinking about as a business owner. And like, you have to be a little paranoid.

Yeah.

Of like, you know, what could potentially put us out of business?

Mm-hmm.

And so Meta going down, like, that could be a huge threat because we have had our reliance on Meta ads. And I think a lot of coaches and, and businesses like ours rely, uh, on Meta. And that's why we've invested heavily in like building more organic presence.

I was gonna say.

A referral system. Ways that we don't have to have that reliance. And then just kind of the general economy, you know, $6,000 is an investment for a lot of people. When the economy is good, people are willing to invest themselves to further their careers and growth. I think we're in a fairly safe industry because our demographic is healthcare and that's a stable field. It doesn't really— it's recession-proof in a sense.

Yep.

And so I think we're okay there. But as a business owner, you just have to always be thinking about what things could hurt your business and be like threat, like life-threatening for your business. And, and, you know, I'm always keeping an eye out for those things.

Some of the ways that you failed, because the best way to learn, guys, is from other people's failures. And I feel like we've learned so much in this interview already, but what was the biggest product or platform mistake inside of Match Day? What's the biggest mistake that you—

um, spending money on an agency to build us tech. Horrible use of funds, horrible decision. Should have never done that.

You're not in the tech business, right? So you basically entered into the tech business instead of just focusing on your core thing, which was coaching. And there's so many different platforms out there that are like specifically designed for coaching services. So, uh, what was your worst hiring decision?

Worst hiring decision? Think about that because I don't—

you feel like that's been strong?

I feel like that's been pretty strong. Um, we're really good at hiring, and I think we let people go really quickly if it's obvious they're not a good fit.

That's good.

Um, I don't think I've had too many bad hires. Maybe on the sales side. Oh, we have had bad sales hires.

Okay.

And that was because we had a bad sales manager at the time.

Like when you have C+ people or C people, yeah, they're gonna hire like other bad people.

They're gonna hire other bad people and they're gonna be bad.

One of the biggest mistakes I did early on, so when I first started my social media podcast agency, it blew up like right away, like month one and we were making six figures. And I had like essentially a team of interns. Like I didn't even have, like, I was still working a full-time job at Disney and I had a team of interns and I was like letting the interns This is a long time ago. I was letting the interns like hire people or like maybe we had just started paying people and I was letting those first employees like hire people without me even interviewing them. And then suddenly we had like these horrible people on the team and that was a big mistake. And then I was like, okay, like I have to do all the hiring interviews. Like no matter how— now, you know, I've got people I trust, but back then it's like you gotta make your first hires.

Definitely.

Yeah. What cost did you underestimate the most?

I think the cost of entrepreneurship. Like, you never really know what it's going to take to be an entrepreneur until you do it. And, you know, I've, you know, I work 100 hours a week, you know, and I thought I would have, I was working a lot in residency, but like, I'm always in the business. I've always got a pulse on it. It doesn't feel like work to me because I enjoy it.

Yeah.

And so it's easy in a sense, but I work a lot.

Mm-hmm. It'll get better.

But yeah. And so that's, you know, there has been definitely the scares and the mental cost because you just, to get it to the point where you're like outside of liftoff, like you've reached escape velocity, you just have to like pour so much into it. I feel like we're just getting at that point where we're reaching escape velocity and I'm able to like, take a breath now. But it, it did take a lot to, to get it to that point.

What decision did you make too slowly?

Firing toxic people. Yeah.

I thought you just said you fire really quick.

And I do now. I do now.

You do now. Lesson learned.

I do now. Yeah. There's, you know, maybe only like 2 scenarios where there was someone where I should've let them go sooner and not because they weren't a good like they were excellent operators, but they weren't good team players. They didn't have the right attitude. People were afraid to go to them for things or weren't very approachable. And that just, it just ruins the dynamic and it creates stress for you and other people. And so, like, if you have people like that on your team, even if they're amazing, you just got to let them go.

What's a founder habit that you think is holding Matchday back?

Not doing enough content.

Yeah, you got to do more content.

Yeah.

You started out in podcasting in 2017. Your podcast Podcasts could be huge right now if you were just consistent, right? So just get back to it. Start guesting on podcasts, start doing your podcast, start chopping up clips from your podcast, blowing it up. Well, that's what you gotta do.

That's, that's, that's a really good point. And, um, I don't know what it is like about just becoming an entrepreneur that just made me so much more introverted because I'm so in the business talking to people all the time.

Yeah.

I feel like getting on camera and, and it's also like you have to switch your brain a little bit.

Yeah. And back when you were doing your podcast, was it audio only?

It was audio only. Yeah.

Now it's a whole different world.

Yeah. It's a different world getting on camera.

It is.

Yeah.

Uh, but you can do it. I believe in you.

Thank you.

Um, okay. So if somebody wants to copy this business, any ideas of like people who are tuning in, obviously not specifically your idea, but lots of people do career pivots and lots of people need new careers.

Yeah.

What are some ideas that you have for people or advice on how to copy your business?

Yeah, I would say, You know, anytime you start a business, like the more authentic it is to you, the better that business is going to be. And so everybody has a story. Everyone has something that's happened in their life that they've overcome, that they've faced as a challenge, and they've learned how to navigate that. So in the coaching space, if you were to want to become a coach, if that's in what you want to be, you can build a business around that. You can help someone overcome a very specific challenge that you know better than most people. And so I would say to, for one, is just be honest with yourself. Like, don't fall in love with some solution because you think it's cool.

Yeah.

Fall in love with the problem.

Yep.

And that was the first mistake I made as a, as an entrepreneur is I fell in love with a solution that wasn't even really for me.

Yeah.

And when I came back to my roots and I became like went back to like integrity for me, everything fell into place. And so I really believe this is like the world's trying to unfold for you and it's like swimming downstream. You just have to let go and be in integrity and do the thing that feels right. And you can build a business out of that. Like, you don't— I don't believe in like the world where you have to be icky or do the wrong things. To be successful anymore. I think you can be in integrity and do something that is right for you and make a very successful business out of it.

That's beautiful. Well, Rami, thank you so much for joining us on How We Profit. This was such an amazing conversation.

Thank you so much, Hala.

And that's how Rami and Matchday profit. Every business has a hidden engine, and today we learned that Matchday is not simply selling career advice. It's selling transformation, a structured path for healthcare professionals who feel stuck in clinical practice and need the guidance, accountability, and network to move toward a new career with greater clarity and confidence. Thanks for listening to How We Profit Wednesdays, the Young and Profiting series where real entrepreneurs share real numbers, real margins, and the real story of how their businesses actually work. I'm Hala Taha, and I'll see you next time.