Episode #61: Community Acupuncture School with Michelle Hamilton on the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast

This week I’m talking with Michelle Hamilton, founder of the online program, Community Acupuncture School.

Michelle and I talk about how she opened her very first community acupuncture clinic outside on a patio, despite people’s advice not to do it, and how it was one of the best decisions she ever made.

We also talk about:

  • How Michelle built that patio clinic into a successful multi-practitioner hybrid acupuncture practice with community acupuncture and one-on-one treatments that sees over 150 patients a week
  • How seeing multiple patients per hour in community style practice actually supports Michelle’s introverted nature
    All the reasons community acupuncture is great for patient retention
  • Her sliding scale and membership options
  • And much more

If you’d like to launch a community clinic, or grow the one you already have, I think you’ll really enjoy this episode.

Let’s dive in!

🎙️ Listen to Episode #61: Community Acupuncture School with Michelle Hamilton

Show Notes:

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Transcript:

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (00:04)

Welcome to the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Grasek, and I’m here to help you get visible in your community, take marketing action with confidence and get more patients in your practice and more money in your pocket every week. We both know you’re a talented, passionate acupuncturist and that acupuncture has the power to change lives. So let’s dive right into this episode and talk about how you can reach more patients.

(00:28)

Hello there and welcome back. This week I’m talking with Michelle Hamilton, founder of the online program, Community Acupuncture School. Michelle and I talk about how she opened her very first community acupuncture clinic outside on a patio, despite people’s advice not to do it, and how she built that into a very successful multi-practitioner hybrid acupuncture practice with both community acupuncture and one-on-one treatments that sees over 150 patients a week. We also talk about how Michelle thrives as an introvert, seeing multiple patients per hour in community style practice, all the many reasons Community Acupuncture is great for, patient retention, we talk about her sliding scale and membership options, and much more. If you’re planning to launch a community clinic or grow the one you already have, I think you’ll really enjoy this episode. Let’s dive in.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (01:25)

Hello, Michelle. Welcome. How are you?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (01:28)

I’m good. Hi, Michelle.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (01:31)

I know how weird is it to say hello to someone with your own name. It’s very strange

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (01:35)

It’s a great name. Thanks so much for having me.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (01:39)

Absolutely, my pleasure. I’m really glad that you could talk today. You are a practicing acupuncturist. You’ve been in practice a little while, and you teach a wonderful online class called Community Acupuncture School. So I would love to talk to you about pretty much everything, building your practice. We chatted briefly in the past, I believe you said you’re an introvert. I’d love to talk about that, and how you manage your energy in a community clinic. And of course, I’m sure my audience will have lots of questions about community acupuncture schools. We can talk about all those things. How did you originally get into acupuncture?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (02:18)

It wasn’t one big event. It was a series of little things that led me on that path. I’ve always been an athlete. I’ve always been really connected to my body. I was I played basketball in high school and college, and then I went on to run competitively at the marathon distance, so I was a competitive marathon runner. I’m still running quite a bit now as well but along that path you get injuries. And you as an athlete, the most important thing is that your body’s healthy and functioning so you can compete and when you get an injury, that definitely stops you from doing that. So you’d go to the doctor and I’d have like inflammation in my sous and how do I fix this? I have a race in two weeks.

(03:08)

There wasn’t a lot of answers. It was like take ibuprofen and that was it. That didn’t seem, that was not acceptable. So you start looking for answers. I stumbled upon an acupuncturist and I got some treatment for a soleus injury, and it was really effective and then I was like, well, what else you got? Like, I got PMSs, what do you got for that? What do you got for that? So I started getting treated regularly and I loved it but I wasn’t, it wasn’t like, oh, this is my career calling. At the time I was at university and I was studying to go into law, actually and halfway through my studies, I took a break and I did some traveling and I came back and I had about like two months before school started again, so I opened up like our local newspaper and massage school was starting the next day.

(04:03)

It was like a six-week program and I was like, I’m just going to go do that. I was a carefree little hippie kid, and I was just like, I’m going to go check this out, and if anything, I’ll just learn how to give my family and my friends massages or whatever. So I went and it cracked me open. I learned about energy, I learned about the Meridian system, I learned about all these different healing modalities while I was there. The way I describe it was like, I remember them showing the map of the Meridian system, and I looked at it and it was almost like I recognized it. Like some people will say that about like foreign languages like, I just knew French. I don’t know why. It just came. I was never that person. Like even my studies at university were I was, it was a challenge for me, I was just forcing myself to get into a career that would make the most money. That was the best that I knew to do.

(05:07)

So when I was exposed to the Meridian system, I was like, this is amazing. I want to know everything about this. I started studying it a bit on my own. It was while I was in college, like my third year that I was, I was like, I want to be an acupuncturist. We all have that moment, and you’re like, oh, crap, what does that mean? And I came from a very conservative, I came from a Mormon family, I’m one of six kids, and my dad’s, we’re all very Western oriented. My dad’s a dentist actually. I go to my parents and I’m like, “So I want to be an acupuncturist,” and they were like, and this was like 20 years ago. So acupuncture was very different. They were like, “You want to do what? Is that even a, is that a religion?” They were so confused. So they’re like, “How about you finish college and then you can do whatever you want?” I was like, okay.

(06:03)

So I did that, I graduated, and then like within a week I started acupuncture school and it was the biggest exhale of my life. I felt like I was with a tribe of people that I really resonated with. I was studying something I was excited about and I just love it. I feel so blessed that I found, like how people find their soulmates, I feel like I found my soul career and I just pinch myself every day that I get to do the work that I do, and that I actually like doing the work. I mean, there’s one thing to be really fascinated with the meridian system and traditional Chinese medicine. It’s fascinating. It’s interesting. But to actually go into practice and work with people one-on-one and in group settings, and to be their guide in their healing journey, that’s a very different thing.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (06:56)

Yes.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (06:56)

I saw that actually in school. There was definitely people that were really good at the school part and not so good at actually treating patients. So I’ve been really blessed. It’s been a great combination of like heart to heart connection with people, plus the entrepreneurialship aspect and the medicine itself. It’s like a three-part love affair.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (07:20)

Yes, all those beautiful layers. I love that

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (07:23)

Yeah. So that’s how I got into it. I’ve been practicing for 13 years now, and I can’t imagine doing anything else. I was working with my coach a couple years ago, and I was at a hard spot in my practice. I’m sure we all get there and we’re like, I just want to quit. I don’t want to do this anymore, and she was like, “Well, what are you going to do? What else are you going to do, Michelle?” I’m like, “I’d drive a school bus. I don’t know. It’s like, I’d probably open another clinic.” I just feel blessed to be on the journey.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (07:58)

So after you graduated acupuncture school, did you start by opening a more traditional practice with the one-on-one treatment model?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (08:07)

Yes. So the day I graduated, I found out I was pregnant.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (08:14)

The magic of the universe, two gets that once, two intense kids

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (08:17)

I literally, my pregnancy test was dripping with urine on it as I set it down, go walk across, get my diploma. So it opened this new chapter. I was looking for something that, I was looking for a group that I could join because I was very much, I’m having a baby, I don’t have time to market. I don’t have time. So I joined an integrative clinic, which was such a blessing. It was a group of chiropractic, there was like five chiropractors, four massage therapists, just took a big juicy clinic and I rolled into there and I started with traditional one-on-one practice where I’ve seen one person an hour, I had one room, and luckily they had a big enough space that there was room for me to grow.

(09:05)

So after about eight years, I moved on to, I had three rooms and I was seeing people every 20 to 30 minutes, depending on my schedule. So I did that for about eight years and I loved it. I loved being a part of a group. I think as a new practitioner, it made me feel supported. It’s a lot to go from an acupuncture student to running a practice in a town that you haven’t been established in yet. So it was great. It built my network but then after eight years, I started to get a little itch. I had achieved, what we were taught in school was like the pinnacle of success. See one-on-one, one patient, if you’re really good, get two rooms, then you’re really killing it. If you’re really good and you get three rooms.

(09:56)

And there was some problems with that. My practice was, was full and so to get an appointment, it was like a two-week wait. I’d run into people in the community that would throw their back out or have a migraine or things that I knew that acupuncture could really help them, but I couldn’t get them into my practice and so it was frustrating. It’s like, well, what good is that? Meanwhile, I was treating a lot of wellness patients that just loved getting regular acupuncture. So I was conflicted with that. Then the other aspect that was a pain point for me at the time was that I wasn’t affordable for a lot of people, and especially my people. After about eight years of practice, I went through a divorce and I became a single mom and my finances, as with most, drastically change and I came to the realization that I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be able to afford to see myself.

(10:55)

I was going through what was the most painful and stressful time in my life. It opened my eyes to the truth that a lot of times when we need healing and we need treatment are also periods where we don’t have as many financial resources as we would like, especially to spend on things like acupuncture. Those two things got me thinking. I was curious about the community acupuncture model. I have heard a lot about it, but I had not been taught how to treat community style. There’s no community clinic anywhere near where I live. So a lot of it was just trial and error and self-taught and anything I could find online. That’s what I did. I opened up, in the big Integrative clinic, there’s this big breezeway, and the providers there, and the owners were generous enough to let me use that space as a community clinic. And it was outside guys. It was like, it was outside. I was like, well, if people will come here, this is a good test.

(12:05)

I was just getting what I call spirit was just prompting me, like, do this, do this, do this. I was like, okay, fine, I’m doing it. So I buy 10 recliners off Amazon and they get delivered, and I set them all up on the breezeway. I set up a Facebook event, which was a big thing back in the day and I told my patients, and I was like, put a post on Facebook and opened up just a lunch hour one day a week. I just did cash only and sliding scale, it was $20 to $40. It was, I think I had one assistant sometimes. I think I had a college girl that would come help me every once in a while, but it was pretty much, I was running it and it was invigorating. I loved it. It was so nice to treat the people that really, really needed it. There was a lot of like service workers that would come in with tendonitis and overuse injuries, whole families would come in together and get treated and that just, it just grew. How good things grow, it’s like word of mouth, really is how it grew.

(13:11)

It got to the point where I was feeling a little uncomfortable in the clinic space that I was, like I was taking over the whole clinic, which is a good problem, but I was like, I need to, I need a space. So I found, but I wasn’t feeling, as a single mom, I wasn’t feeling comfortable to just close down my one-on-one practice so I opened a, I found a basement space which was actually a step up from being outside. There was like no signage. It was like, you go like underground. It was pretty cool. It was just one big treatment room. I opened up like 10 hours a week and I was like, well, let’s try this and see how it goes. Did that for about a year and it was a huge success and it got to the point, splitting myself between two places wasn’t feeling really nourishing, so I combined them into one space. That’s my clinic now. It’s called the Zenden. So we have a community space and then I have two private treatment rooms. I’ve been doing that, oh gosh, let’s see, that space has been open for four or five years now. It’s been going great. That’s how I got here.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (14:24)

So you are still doing some one-on-one treatments? Is it mostly community style?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (14:30)

I do a blend. My day is like 50/50 and I’ve got other providers in there as well. So when I’m doing privates, I’ve got another acupuncturist that is tending to the community clinic and then we’ll switch. It’s great. One of the things I was afraid about doing community acupuncture was my private acupuncture patients are just going to go to community. Like, I’m literally competing with myself. And that wasn’t the case. I mean, it’s great to have this option and this fluidity, a lot of them go back and forth. It’s great to be able to go to a private, in a private treatment to say, “You’ve got tennis elbow, you can knock this out in 12 visits in community acupuncture, and you can be seen three times a week, and I have availability and it’s $30 to $50 now.”

(15:20)

They love it. They’re like, yes. They’re actually going to go see their whole treatment plan through, and then it goes the other way where I’ve had people come into community and they’ve got really complicated issues or like infertility or something like that and I’m like, “Well, this is a little more complicated. Why don’t we book a private session and we can get a more thorough diagnosis and take a look at your diet and maybe I can recommend some herbs and get a good treatment plan in place for you?” They love that too.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (15:51)

So do you do a sliding scale with your community acupuncture patients?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (15:55)

Yes. That’s been one of the fun things that I’ve been a little creative with. So we do have a sliding scale. It’s $30 to $50, that’s our drop in rate. Then we also do something unique. We have a membership program where you can get unlimited community acupuncture for a monthly fee very similar to like a gym membership and people love it. There’s people that come in every day and it’s been amazing to watch them on their, I mean, most of them are in crisis and that’s, or some of them aren’t, some of them aren’t in crisis, and it’s just their meditation practice. So it’s great to have that offering and make it affordable to do that.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (16:40)

I would love to talk about Community Acupuncture School. I know that your school is a month-long program where you walk people through pretty much setting up a community acupuncture practice from scratch. Is the membership option and the sliding scale, like the pricing something that you walk people through in your program?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (17:01)

Yeah, absolutely. The program is basically what I would’ve loved to have when I was first starting out. I made a ton of mistakes too. I didn’t know what I was doing. A lot of the ways that you learn is by making mistakes. So the membership pricing is something I walk you through. I’ve also played around with a menu in the community acupuncture clinic. That’s something I talk about too. It’s virtually, it’s similar to like a menu you would get in a restaurant, but it talks about, I came up with cute little treatment names for things like neck nicks is one of the treatments. It’s like for someone that throws their neck out. It’s a little bit of like cutesy and it doesn’t quite capture all of what TCM is, but it’s a great educational tool because people will go through the menu and they’re like, well, acupuncture can help me with my sleep. What’s the sleepy time treatment? What is that?

(18:02)

So it’s a great way to shorten the intake and get right down to what they want to work on, as well as educate them about what acupuncture can do. So that’s one of the things that I share my menu with my students and talk them through everything from what chairs to get what you need to set up pricing, how to talk to people. That’s like such a big part of what we do, is like that first visit, how you present what you’re going to do, and how you can help. First of all, can you help them? I feel like that’s a big thing I’ve been focused on lately. I went and saw another practitioner for something going on with my skin, and at no point did she say, I can help you. She never said like, yes, this will work. This is what you need. It was like, yeah, here’s your facial. And like, that was it. I walked away and I was like, I don’t know if I’ll go back. That was a good learning experience.

(19:02)

And I think that’s important too, to learn how to communicate treatment plans with patients and do that in a short amount of time, too. You don’t get an hour and a half on that new visit. You get 15 minutes. So it really makes you, I mean, if community’s done anything selfishly for me, it’s made me such a better practitioner because you’ve learned, you learn how to fine tune your diagnosis really quick. You also take a lot of risk in a community clinic. At least I do. Like I’ll go home and I’ll read about a new treatment method that I want to try and for whatever reason in community clinic, I feel like more comfortable trying new things. I think it’s because it’s a lower price point. That’s just psychology. If someone’s paying like $200, you’re like, I got to do four gates, four doors because that’s what we do. But I’ve been like, oh, I’m going to try the balance method and see if that works. Then it works and then you’re like, cool, I’ve got a new tool in my tool belt. So that’s been one of the things that’s been really helpful. I love sharing treatment strategies in the school too. I give a whole list of my go-to points for different ailments that are consistently work. So that’s important.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (20:19)

I think it helps too when you feel pretty confident that people are going to come back a couple times in the same week. Like, okay, well we tried this new thing and maybe it didn’t work quite as well as what we did two days ago, but that’s fine, we can shift. We learned something. Feels like you have more freedom when you know they’re going to come quite often for treatment.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (20:39)

Yeah, they are. You really get to see someone the two, three times a week, which is, that’s traditional Chinese. That’s how they treat you in China. Private practice, I’d see people like once a month, that’s not going to, that’s great for wellness, but if you have an ailment and you really want to treat it two or three times a week is probably what we’re looking at. I think there’s a block there when you’re charging $150 a treatment or $200 a treatment. It’s hard, I think, for providers to really recommend what they really think people need.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (21:13)

Yes. I’ve been talking about the importance of discussing the treatment plan with the patient. I’ve been discussing that with a lot of people lately, it seems. It’s like a hot topic in the acupuncture community and I think it’s so important. I know for me, in the beginning of my practice as a very shy introvert, I would have a really hard time telling patients what to do and saying, “This is acute. I really need to see you two times this week and two times next week and then maybe we can space it out.” The way that I mostly remember being taught in school was once a week for six to eight weeks, and then you reevaluate. But as you’re saying, sometimes that really isn’t enough to get great results and I found it so hard to shift away from that conventional method and actually say the words tell people straight up, this is what you need. But over time I discovered that patients really do want to be told what to do. The reason that part of the reason they’re paying you is for your expertise.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (22:14)

Yes. It was hard for me too, for starting out. A lot of it too, is because I didn’t know, I didn’t know how many treatments it would take. They didn’t teach me that in school, so I’d be like, let’s just see how it goes. It felt really arrogant to be like, oh, 12 visits is what you need. I’m like, what if they do the 12 and they’re not fixed? I don’t feel comfortable just saying that. But finally I came around, it was like we need to lead. You need to understand by the time the acupuncturist, by the time your patient walks in your door, they are so fed up with their problem that they went online, they talked to a friend, they tried to find someone that would fix it. This is important to them and they want someone who has just as much interest in fixing their ailment as they do.

(23:01)

It’s not your job to decide whether or not they can afford it. You don’t know people’s financial situations at all. It’s your job to say, this is what I’m recommending and then you walk away. It’s up to them. And at least it, and it’s great too because when you write down the treatment plan, when they come to you and they came once a month for two months, and they’re mad that it’s not working, you can be like, “Look, buddy, here’s the treatment plan. How about we revisit it and we stick to it?” And a lot of times they’ll be like, “Okay, okay.” I think people, it’s important that people want to be led and I think you’re being neglectful and you’re doing a disservice if you are not leading.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (23:47)

I had a business coach a long time ago who used to say, keep your hand out of your patient’s wallet, meaning don’t make any assumptions on what you think they can afford based on the car they rolled up in or the amount that they’re complaining about their financial situation. And over time, I really watched that unfold and be true because people can come, they can drive up in a really nice car and if you can even see the vehicle they’re in, and you might assume, wow, this person is going to have plenty of money. It doesn’t matter if they have money or if they’re in debt. Like they really just need to be ready to prioritize the treatment. People who are not financially resourced can still make the decision to put what they have towards their health. There’s all sorts of levels of privilege that can determine that, but at the end of the day, regardless of how much money is in that person’s bank account, they have to make that commitment to themselves. And part of that is first listening to the acupuncturist say, this is what I recommend based on my experience. It’s tough at first. I think that is, at least for me, that’s been one of those things that has improved a lot the longer that I’ve been in practice. And I think we’ve been in practice the same amount of time. You said 13 years, right?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (25:01)

Yeah.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (25:02)

Yep, same.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (25:03)

That’s definitely something that has grown with me as well. It’s interesting too, there is the power of the mind in all of this as well. I feel it’s so weird because there’ll be times I’m like, I don’t know how many treatments this is going to take but I’d be like, I’m just going to give my best guess. I’m like, I’m guessing six, two a week for three weeks, I feel like would turn this around. Then sure enough it does.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (25:31)

You get more accurate with your analysis over time. We had chatted before, and I think you mentioned that you are an introvert and we were talking about the energy that it can take to treat a lot of patients. I was really curious about the energy involved in a community acupuncture clinic where you can be treating dozens of patients in a day. I don’t know how, like what’s your max or what you like to treat. But I thought you had some really interesting insights about being an introvert in what’s essentially the high-volume clinic.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (26:05)

I mean, I am an introvert a hundred percent and the work that I do is very much in the public. I’m working with the people, I’ll see, like in community clinic it varies. In private practice it varies, but we see close to a 100, 150 people coming through our door a week. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of energy. That’s a lot of people. I look at my energy as like a bank account. It’s a resource that I only have so much to give and if I overspend, I need to put deposits in immediately, if I’m in the red. A lot of what I do on the days where I am treating a lot of patients, I know I’m going to need a down night. I know that I’m going to need to up my self-care. That’s a practice that I just really learned the last couple of years when I started to burn out a little bit.

(27:05)

So things like, part of my self-care is like, I’ll come home, I’ll do an Epsom salt bath immediately. That really helps clear my energy, I find, relax my nervous system. I do a lot of different therapies. I do like red light, I’ll go, we have a float place here that I love. You go and you just go float in the water for an hour and it’s dark and there’s no sound. I’ll just go in there. It’s so weird when I’m in there, I call it my, like my board meeting because it’s just me, I’ll go in there and I get all these resolutions and solutions to problems in my business. They just come to me. It’s really important I’ve found to regulate my nervous system, especially when you’re taking on a lot of energy. And I think boundaries are important as well. I never give out my cell phone number ever. You always think, oh, just this once I’m going to send a picture. They wanted a picture of a needle in their hand I’ll send them a picture from my phone, and then it’s like, nope, I’m getting text messages, “Can I eat this? Is this good for my condition?”

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (28:17)

Oh my goodness.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (28:18)

Stuff like that. You’re just like, no

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (28:19)

Hard pass.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (28:20)

I mean, it’s more about self-care. Time and nature is really important to me. I love to trail-run, things like that.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (28:30)

Do you feel like because you have less time with each patient, that it’s more, like your energy is more focused and maybe there’s less, it sounds like there’s less conversation, which for me as an introvert, that’s the most draining piece typically, is even though I adore my patients, they’re so wonderful, but sometimes it’s you’re on patient number nine and the small talk, it just suddenly is so difficult. I wouldn’t mind like a wham bam, thank you ma’am approach where it’s like, there’s no speaking. Please lay down. Tell me the pertinent details.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (29:09)

You know what, you’re right about that. Because you would think, oh my gosh, 20 people in three hours, that’s an introvert’s nightmare. But I definitely, you’re right, when you go into a private session, I’m going to spend an hour and a half with you, we’re going to talk about your medical health history, we’re going to talk about your relationships, we’re going to talk about childhood trauma. And we’re also establishing like, this is how it’s going to go moving forward. So every follow up, it’s like this dumping ground, which is great. Some of it is clinical information that we need, but it’s a lot for an introvert to take on. I find in the community clinic, I get to be more with my technical side and less of my empath side. Because I have five to 10 minutes with you. It’s literally, what’s your problem? You have a headache? Okay, where on your head is your headache? Oh, it’s your left temple. Okay, let’s go ahead and recline you. I can, let’s fix you up.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (30:07)

Yes.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (30:08)

That’s it. You’re giving the best that you can in that moment, but it doesn’t have to be more than that. And it’s a lot easier after I put the needles in, I’m going to be back in 30 minutes, I’ll set a timer, let me know if you need anything. It’s almost like the energetic cord gets cut there immediately, whereas with the privates, it’s like those are the people that you’re at home worrying about. So it’s a lot, it’s actually easier for an introvert to, or an empath to treat a high volume because you’re not activating that heart energy as much. It’s there. I’m coming from a heart-centered place, but I’m not opening myself energetically to every single person. I just don’t have the time or the space to do that. So I end up being more protected over the long-term. Does that make sense?

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (31:00)

Yeah, absolutely. It’s like very natural built-in boundaries that are easy for the patient to understand because they’re based on time. Like they can see the eight other people in the room who are waiting for you and so they’re like, okay, thank you.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (31:15)

Yes, it really shortens the conversation too. They’re like, I don’t, I guess I’m not going to like gossip about my neighbor because they could be here or whatever.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (31:22)

Well, or like tell you all about their vacation, which I’ll admit sometimes that’s one of my favorite things to talk about with patients. If we need small talk, I’m like, “Tell me what you’re cooking or tell me about your trip.”

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (31:32)

Yeah, the personal information really gets narrowed down. And there is like, there’s cool things that happen too in the community space, like referrals. So that’s been interesting. Just the other day I had someone come in and they’re like, “I’m looking for a midwife. Do you know of anyone?” There happened to be the most popular pediatrician in town sitting right next to her and she’s like, “Wll, what are you looking for?” I was like, perfect, you two figure it out.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (32:02)

Discuss, I have to go.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (32:04)

It was so great to just like unload that. As it should, like our community should be carrying some of that. There is that piece of it too. It’s like some people that come into the one-on-one treatment, they just want connection and a lot of that can be met in the community clinic and take that load off of your shoulders a little bit.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (32:23)

That’s such a beautiful thing. I love that perspective.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (32:27)

Yes, it’s cool.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (32:29)

Well, I have one more question for you, and that is, what is your definition of success?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (32:35)

I think your brain goes through all the things like financial freedom or being able to travel or having a nice house and really, I mean, we all know that none of those things really bring you happiness. So success for me is laughing every day. Having so much joy that I am just laughing like a belly laugh every day at whatever, that is success to me. Sometimes there’s blockages to that. There’s stress, there’s anxiety, there’s, I’ve got two kids, there’s problems with them or whatever, but I feel like if I can access joy every day, I nailed it.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (33:16)

That’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I’d love to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit more about Community Acupuncture School, if you’d like, and you can let us know where we can find you and connect with you online, how would people join your program, that sort of thing.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (33:33)

Sure. Community Acupuncture School, the doors are going to open for our next class in September. I do have a wait list on my website if you’d like to be in the know on that. My website, I’m sure you’re going to link that in the notes. I’m also pretty active on Instagram if you want to follow me and see what I’m up to. But yeah, the course will be launching in September. It’s a month-long, but it’s video self-led with two live calls. Then I also include a coaching call with me where I’ll get more specific on how I can help you launch your dream community clinic.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (34:15)

I love that because I try to do the same thing with Acupuncture Marketing School, where self-paced people are watching the videos and doing the worksheets, but at some point, I think it’s so helpful to have a face-to-face person, even if it’s on Zoom, to give you feedback and encouragement and a little accountability to say like, yes, you have great ideas. They are going to work and you should take the first step. Then people do it and they’re like, wow, this was, I didn’t realize that I just needed a tiny bit of encouragement, but that I really do have good ideas. Then they, I feel like they don’t really need me anymore after that. They just hit the ground running. But I think that discussion with a person who has been there before is really exciting and empowering, so that’s nice that you include that.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (35:02)

Yes, and I’ve just been blown away with this last group that we had. By the end they’re like, yeah, we found, everyone’s like, I found a space, I’m opening a clinic, we we’re having a grand opening. I’m just like, wow, okay. Good job. You don’t need me anymore. Go fly, fly. But yeah, a lot of it in mentorship, what you need is someone to tell you you’re not crazy.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (35:27)

This is a good idea. It’s been done before.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (35:29)

That’s a good idea. You should do that. You should a hundred percent get behind that and you should do that. Then the sky’s the limit. I feel like that’s what I was needing. Like I was needing someone to tell me that it wasn’t a dumb idea.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (35:44)

Put those recliners outside on the patio. It’s a good idea.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (35:49)

There was plenty of people telling me it was a bad idea.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (35:53)

They’re always going to be out there.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (35:55)

I know. I’m just excited to be able to provide that, what I was needing, what I was missing. I mean, when we were first starting out, the internet wasn’t what it was now. You’d go to a weekend seminar, maybe find someone you like and you’d be like, can I just live with you? It’s like, no, and that was it.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (36:14)

Can I email you persistently?

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (36:17)

Can I write you a letter? That was back in the day. So yeah, I’m just excited to really help these new practitioners that feel it their heart that this is what they want do and they just need a little help.

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (36:31)

Well, thank you so much again for your time.

[MICHELLE HAMILTON] (36:35)

Thanks Michelle.