Built a Thriving Agency in 9 Months—Proven Systems, Automation, and Leadership Wins with Jake Sucoff

What if you could build a thriving agency in just 9 months—without fancy VC backing, a massive ad spend, or years of struggle?

In this episode of the Catalytic Leadership™ Podcast, I sit down with Jake Sucoff, founder of Patient Procure, who scaled a niche healthcare marketing agency faster than most entrepreneurs even get their first 10 clients. Jake shares the exact proven systems, automation strategies, and leadership wins that allowed him to not just grow—but thrive—in record time.

We dig deep into the leadership mindsets, team-building frameworks, and operational playbooks that elite agency owners are searching for right now. Jake reveals why email and SEO are still secret weapons for client retention, why personal branding drives conversions, and why you must stop being the bottleneck if you want a team that thrives without your constant involvement.

If you're ready to stop guessing and start scaling with precision, this conversation will equip you with actionable steps to move faster, smarter, and with a leadership foundation that can sustain 7-figure growth and beyond.

Connect with Jake Sucoff:
To connect with Jake, visit www.patientprocure.com or his personal site www.heyjakey.com for insights into leadership, marketing, and growth strategies. Email: jake@patientprocure.com. 

Books Mentioned: 

• The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Chapters

• 0:38 Meet Jake Sucoff: From Asset Management to Agency Founder
• 1:55 First Lessons in Leadership (and What He Got Wrong Early)
• 4:03 Why Most Agencies Are Nearly Indistinguishable Today
• 6:12 Personal Branding and the Trust Factor in Client Acquisition
• 10:47 Building Content Repurposing Systems to Maximize Reach
• 13:19 Why Email and SEO Still Outperform Paid Ads in Client Retention
• 20:08 Evolving from Fulfillment to Visionary Leadership
• 24:52 Leadership Growth and Getting Out of Your Way
• 25:46 Hiring A-Players, Building SOPs, and Scaling Team Culture

Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:00

I am thrilled today to have on the podcast. Jake is an entrepreneur, marketer and a four-time best man. He's the founder and CEO of Patient Procure, a marketing agency that specializes in helping medical practices book their ideal patients and keep them coming back. Patpro leverages exceptional content, storytelling and technology to create reliable patient funnels so practitioners can focus on what they do best caring for patients. Jake's career spans 15 years of building and launching products across diverse markets, including B2B, saas, enterprise healthcare, a startup incubator and loyalty rewards hardware. He has spent these years working directly with C-suite executives, pitching in high-pressure environments and using data to influence decisions. Jake's real passion is his family, his friends and music. He's constantly tinkering with automation and AI these days so he can spend less time in the office and more time with the people he loves. Jake, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show.

Jake Sucoff: 1:15

Thank you for having me, William, and thank you for that extensive intro. If I knew you were going to read the whole thing, I would have made it shorter.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:23

I want people to get a good sense of who you are. I don't even need to speak.

Jake Sucoff: 1:27

You got, everybody has it all that's. That's my whole story.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:30

So, and yet, somehow I feel like there's more, there's a bit more.

Intro / Outro: 1:40

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:57

Well, let's start here. I would love to start with you, Sharon, from your perspective, a bit of your story, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did this whole thing get started?

Jake Sucoff: 2:11

I feel like I've been a leader for a long time, which now, in hindsight, maybe is easy to say, but at the time didn't feel like it. I started my career in asset management. I spent a bunch of years selling financial products, which taught me a ton about sales, cold calling, interfacing, client management, and from there I started my first company, which was that mobile rewards and mobile marketing company, text Savvy, which was a great experience. That was my first taste of management. I had an intern who was the only person that worked with me. I was walking door to door trying to sell this technology and I put so much of myself into it that I didn't leave enough for the person who I was managing. They were totally ineffective and it was completely my fault. And it was a great first taste and understanding that if you don't give the people who are working for you the tools to be successful, they never will be.

Jake Sucoff: 3:11

From there I went to WeWork where I managed our incubator program. I did that for a number of years where I was an independent contributor I didn't have anybody working under me and from there I went into the agency world and that's where I've truly built out my leadership capabilities or been able to experiment with growing them. I wouldn't say that I am a finished product as a leader, but I'm working hard every day to be the best boss and leader than I can. I try to lead by example. I try to, as I mentioned before, give people the tools to be successful, and I am extremely focused today especially because I have such a distributed team that's all over the world with putting together SOPs and documentation and making sure that the people working for me have really clear directives and the software and support that they need to be successful, and that is extremely top of mind to me every single day.

Dr. William Attaway: 4:12

So tell me about your agency. What distinguishes you?

Jake Sucoff: 4:15

That's a great question because I don't want to denigrate myself and my industry, but the reality is I think of myself kind of as any other service leader today. I know that there are many, many marketing agencies that exist and it's almost become I don't want to say fungible or just completely, just completely. There are some differentiators, but largely you're getting a lot of the same services regardless of which agency you're working with. So I really try to stand out in the way that most service providers should by providing a really, really top-notch experience, making sure my communication is on point. I'm extremely transparent with what we do and I just try to hire the best people so that we can provide as good a service as anybody else.

Jake Sucoff: 5:09

I think that there are ways that you can differentiate from create content for people, to run ads for people, to write blogs for people. They're largely the same tools that everybody has, so I have a keen attention to detail. I make sure that every piece of content, everything that we create, is an extremely high quality, but I wouldn't say that I am producing something that is novel compared to my competitors. But I do think that focusing on healthcare allows me to get lots of case studies and lots of experience working within the industry, which is what my clients really are hoping for when they work with me.

Dr. William Attaway: 5:55

You know, when healthcare practices think about marketing, there's a lot of different perspectives and opinions on this. Some shy away from it. Some wonder, like, should we even have to do that? Like this is something that everybody really needs. At some point they don't even know where to start or what platform to focus on. Where do you begin when you're talking to somebody coming from one of those perspectives?

Jake Sucoff: 6:19

I like to start with the physician's passion, and that is often almost always around the particular specialty that they have. It's the reason they got into medicine. It's the reason that they are putting in many, many, many hours every week, in excess of what they need to, to make sure that they are getting the diagnosis right, they're putting together treatment plans and they're making sure patients get the care that they need. So I start with that personal connection to help the physician better articulate who they are, what their specialty is and why they do what they do.

Jake Sucoff: 6:54

Ultimately, patients are going to connect with their physicians because they feel like they're going to provide an outsized quality of care to them, and that comes from feeling like they actually care. It's in the word, right there. So, beginning with what's the specialty, why are they specifically interested in it and why are they better qualified to treat this patient than any other physician, is the best place to start. Every physician, every practice, is going to have their own communication style. They're going to have their own communication style. They're going to have their own process, their way of delivering care. Those specifics can be dialed in as we work through messaging strategy, but we like to start with just talk about why you care, because that's always a really great way to connect with patients at the top of the funnel.

Jake Sucoff: 7:47

So it feels a little bit like a personal branding thing for the physician then yeah, it's really interesting because marketing today, first of all, I believe that every single entity, regardless what you do, needs to have some kind of media aspect to it. If you're selling socks and that's not to say you need to take a stand against social issues I think that, back to this example about socks if you're buying socks, I don't think they need to know who you voted for, I don't think they need to know your stance on hotly contested social issues, but I do think that you need to have a presence and connect with your audience around what they're interested in Cozy feet, but probably more specifically, are you hiking? Is it for runners? What's the landscape that your ideal customers are interested in? But In addition to that, there is this growing movement of founder-led brands, where people more and more trust large companies less and less, but they trust individuals more and more, and so you can probably have more success marketing yourself and your personal brand than you will marketing your company.

Jake Sucoff: 9:02

It's no different regardless whether or not you are a concierge doctor and you are seeing patients. You don't take insurance, it's just your face all the way up to if you are working at a hospital and you want to connect with people, just to grow trust and have them understand who are the physicians who are carrying out these procedures. It is more and more important for physicians to have their own personal brand and, honestly, these days the lines have blurred between personal and professional. I think that people have become more comfortable with bringing themselves to their work and so, through that, it becomes this okay. Of course, they need to know what are your credentials, they need to understand that you have this expertise, but they also want to know who you are and see your family and understand what books you read. And, again, to connect with patients on a deeper level, you need to open yourself up a little bit and introduce more of yourself than maybe you needed to in the past.

Dr. William Attaway: 10:05

You know, I think when you think about marketing, there's so many different options. There's so many different places you can be and go, so many different platforms. Like where do you start? Is there one platform that you should really focus on? That's the best. Where do you counsel your clients to start?

Jake Sucoff: 10:28

Yeah, it really depends on your goals and, of course, depending on whether you're trying to meet people for the first time versus convince somebody who's engaged with you or your brand a few times, a different channel might be appropriate over another. What I think is really important today is the ability to repurpose content, depending on what that goal is. It's never been easier to take a video of yourself. Take the transcript, turn that into a blog post, take short form video, put that onto YouTube shorts or Instagram or TikTok, or even LinkedIn has video. Now, if you're going to be speaking to your colleagues, if you're trying to get speaking engagements, if you're trying to connect on a professional level, linkedin is going to be a better option. But if you want to connect with patients, depending on what your specialty is, you probably are going to have a better chance at that on Instagram or on TikTok. But you also have to remember that, depending on the platform you're on, there's going to be a lot of competition that you're up against, unless you're doing some kind of viral chiropractic service where you're recording the clicks and the pops from the person, you're adjusting, or you know. This type of content isn't for me but the pimple popping and the more graphic stuff. I mean that has a decent shot at going viral and competing with cat videos, but most of the physicians I work with are not producing content that has that viral factor. So we really focus on where do we think that your target patients are hanging out, and let's meet them with the information that they need across the entire funnel to A learn about the condition that they have. If maybe they don't have a full understanding of it yet, then learn about your unique way that you treat it and then maybe get an introduction to your practice and then finally, you know, have some calls to action where you are helping people. Put all of this together and then book an appointment with you.

Jake Sucoff: 12:34

I didn't really answer your question there. The reality is you don't necessarily have to choose only one platform and, yes, it is easy to get paralyzed by choice. There are so many different areas you can start. I try to think deeply about what's your goal and then work backwards from that. If it's to engage with your existing patients and get them coming back, email is probably the best platform for you and that's the one that, between that and SEO, I think those are the ones that have the greatest ROI, especially when compared to how little they're used, when compared to paid ads and organic social media. I think that if you really dial in your SEO and your email strategy, you're going to especially after some time. It does take some time to see the fruits of your labor, but that's going to be probably one of the better investments you can do.

Dr. William Attaway: 13:24

I think email and SEO makes sense. I totally get that. I think there's a reticence, particularly in healthcare, around social media, you know, and really diving into what so is crowded, to be sure, but also, gosh, is that really where I want to be putting my business? And I love what you said just a second ago, because that's really where your clients are and where potential clients are. They are on social media. You're simply going to where they already live and spend so much of their time. You know it's easy to forget that.

Jake Sucoff: 14:01

You know, as a business owner, even in the healthcare field, I think and going back to the goal of the strategy that you're implementing, I would caution I do caution my clients and I would caution any other physicians who are considering social media. Unless you do have that extremely viral service that you're offering, I would not think about organic social media. Even if you do have something viral that you're offering, I wouldn't think about it in terms of an acquisition strategy. I would think about it more in terms of growing your brand and helping to grow trust and make connection with your target patients. If you're running meta ads, you're going to want to have a really strong presence, because the first thing somebody is going to do if they click on one of your ads is go to your profile and look at it. But think of all of the different potential channels and platforms as different touch points. You need to be doing an integrative strategy.

Jake Sucoff: 15:01

There is some wisdom in saying pick one platform, become an expert at it, just keep doing that until you feel like you've reached your absolute potential. But you don't really need to choose anymore, especially if you have somebody who's helping you manage this. As I mentioned before, you can create one video, a five minute video of yourself not even five is a long time. A two minute video of yourself that can live on YouTube. You can put the shorts on all of the places I mentioned. You can get the transcript. You can put those on to all of the other platforms I mentioned. So you don't really need to choose, and in fact, in some cases you might not have any understanding about where your target audience is actually spending most of their time. So by testing a lot of them at once, you might give yourself an opportunity to actually see which one deserves an outsized amount of your attention.

Dr. William Attaway: 15:52

That's really good. So many practices are just becoming pervasive to leverage email and we've touched on that a little bit but also text messages, and this is becoming more and more common. Do patients really want to get all those emails and text messages, because I mean, I get a lot of both. Is that really something that practitioners need to think about and physicians need to think about, if they're not already doing it?

Jake Sucoff: 16:20

You definitely need to think about it. The short answer is yes. If you look at the data, sms messages and emails still work and they work extremely well. I am of the same mind of anybody who says I am inundated with texts and emails at this point and I can't take any more. I feel that way and at the same time, I know what the data is telling me from the platforms that I'm running campaigns on that they do work. So I think there's a way to do it tastefully and candidly.

Jake Sucoff: 16:53

If your patient doesn't wanna receive the message I don't think them getting, it is going to convert them from a patient to not a patient. They'll unsubscribe if they wanna unsubscribe, and that's totally okay. But you're probably gonna get a lot greater benefit than you are detriment if you're managing campaigns on these channels and it's absolutely worth. You know email in particular it is SMS actually falls into this category as well. Of all of the marketing channels, these are the two that you can truly own the rails of communication.

Jake Sucoff: 17:31

If you're putting a lot of dollars into Facebook ads or meta ads and any pay-per-click, the social media companies are 100% responsible for targeting your ads to the people who they deem should receive them If they change their algorithm. If something's happening during the election cycle there's lots of ads coming in During the holidays, there's ebbs and flows. There are things outside of your control that are going to affect your reach and are going to affect the money that you're putting into these channels. That doesn't happen with email and it doesn't happen with SMS. You have a direct line to your patient. You can get in touch with them when you send the message, and that's extremely powerful, and as long as you're not taking advantage of that trust and inundating them with messages, and as long as you're doing so in an authentic way that speaks to the true character of your practice, I don't think anybody should worry about upsetting their patients.

Dr. William Attaway: 18:29

I think that's a really good thing for people to hear, because they don't want to run people off, and so often there is this feeling that hey, I'm just going to bug people, I'm just going to bother them, and I love that you're coming at this from a data perspective. I think database decision-making is critical, particularly when we're talking about running a business, and I love that you bring that into the conversation.

Jake Sucoff: 18:52

People are fickle. I mean I, day to day, sometimes I get an email from my healthcare provider and I'm just like oh, another one, and I delete it. Sometimes that's happened where my first reaction is like oh, and then I click on it and then I think, oh, I do need to book another appointment, and then I do it. So, like you, know, it works and people's.

Jake Sucoff: 19:13

You know moods change with the wind, so you can't, unless you are being really scammy and spending lots, sending lots and lots of these messages. Um, this is the the age that we live in. If people want to hear your message, then they're going to appreciate getting a message from you, and if they don't want to hear it, then great, They'll self-select, they'll unsubscribe, and then they won't be bothered anymore and that's totally fine.

Dr. William Attaway: 19:43

Well said, jake. Let me ask you this so your business needs you to lead at a higher level today than it did just a year or two ago, and that same thing is going to be true a year, two years, five years from now. How do you stay on top of your game? How do you level up with the new leadership skills that your team and your clients are going to need you to have in the years to come?

Jake Sucoff: 20:10

I love podcasts and interviews, and I love listening to leaders from all walks of life talking about how they lead their journeys. I think for me, I'm doing a lot of work on myself, on my ego, and trying to be more humble and trying to tell myself that I am immensely, immensely lucky to be able to do what I'm doing. And when I wake up in the morning and I feel overly stressed and I feel like I want to take it out on my wife and my children and my friends and my parents and I'm a ball of just negative energy, I really try to sit down and breathe and tell myself this is a privilege. I had a client. She was the CEO of a multi-state operator. There was probably I don't know 14 or so brands in the roll-up, about 60 to 70 individual practices all across the US, and she used to say that and I loved it and I've adopted that as my own motto the pressure is a privilege, because it's so true, very few people get the opportunity to do this, and so I try to stay humble. I try to understand that or tell myself daily that if I don't get out of my own way, if I don't remove myself as a roadblock, if I don't remove myself as the bottleneck, the company will never be as successful as it could be. So, trying to get better at delegating understanding that I hire people for their expertise, not to tell them what to do, I hire them to listen to them. I hire them so that they'll tell me what to do and that's been a big unlock of mine over the past eight months as I've run this company is to really understand that it's not about me. I am trying to find people who are better than me to do the jobs that I'm doing so that, first of all, I can remove myself from the day-to-day so I can focus on scaling the business and interfacing with clients and making sure that everything is operating smoothly, and also because it's going to make our work significantly better.

Jake Sucoff: 22:27

I am, at my heart, I'm an operator. I'm a salesperson as well, but marketing was a field that I just fell into. I didn't study it in college. I've been a voracious reader and watcher of experts on the topic over the past seven or eight years to really try to learn as much as I can. But that's not deep in my DNA. Deep in my DNA is hiring great people, trying to organize processes and software to make people more efficient Now with AI and automations. Introduce these tools in ways that make myself and my team more efficient and more effective and, just like I said, get out of my own way, because that tends to be the biggest stumbling block for most founders.

Dr. William Attaway: 23:16

That is very, very true. That's one thing I talk about a lot is how, so often when I'm working with clients, the problem is nothing external. The problem is between their ears, and getting out of their own way is the thing that will enable them to move to the next level. So so true. So, as you are learning and growing, you are encountering a lot of different books, a lot of different podcasts. Is there one that stands out that you would say, hey, this one's made a big difference in my journey, that you'd recommend to the leaders who are listening?

Jake Sucoff: 23:50

This has probably been recommended on your show before, but I was talking about it with a new friend who's a new founder the other day.

Jake Sucoff: 23:59

The E-Myth is a book that really transformed the way that I think about all of the things I was just talking about with getting out of your own way, working on the business, not in the business. If you want to grow your business, you need to remove yourself as the engineer and hire engineers and work as the marketer and spokesperson and um all it's. It was a profound read for me. That really helped me understand what it takes to get to the next level Podcast wise. I mean, I have a lot.

Jake Sucoff: 24:33

I've recommended this a number of times, but I really like Tim Ferriss, not just because I think that he is a great interviewer and not just great because I think he gets really profound insights from his guests, but it's very accessible. I think he does so in a really relatable way. It's not overly heady. I never feel like he is talking down to me and I love that the breadth of his guests is so vast. It's not just one type of guest, it's so many different types of people and I feel like that is really important. You can really get a lot out of diverse perspectives.

Dr. William Attaway: 25:13

That's so good. You know you are a growth partner for your clients. You help them think and look at things a little bit differently so that they can move into a season of growth. If we spun the table around for just a minute and I could snap my fingers and I could solve one problem right now in your business. What do you want that problem to be?

Jake Sucoff: 25:40

I am spending a huge amount of my time right now hiring and, as I mentioned, this business is fairly new. We launched in, I guess, july or August of 2024. I know it's probably the most important thing I can do. As I mentioned, an organization is just it's people, and if you want to have a great organization, you need great people, and it's extremely important to me to have a really strong culture in addition to having really competent people, and so I interview every single person and I follow up with them, and if I am creating any kind of assessment or any kind of project for them, I'm the one who is creating it, I'm reviewing it, I'm going over it with them, and it is extremely labor intensive. So, if I could just snap my fingers and remove myself from one area, it would be that. However, I know that doing so would likely dilute the quality of the individuals who are coming into the company. So, um, that would be it, though. The other one would be, if I could, just not.

Jake Sucoff: 26:53

It's difficult to have difficult conversations with employees, and it's something that I am getting better at. You know, I I am really focused on. I got introduced to radical candoror some years ago and, in addition to that more recently introduced to Radical Ownership, and, I think, having the two of those combined, where I consider every single mistake that happens from one of my employees my mistake, because I wasn't clear enough, I didn't give them the instructions that they needed to be successful, I didn't create the right SOPs, I didn't give them the software they needed, whatever. I think if you combine that with being radically honest with people about what their shortcomings are, not only are you going to get the best out of them, they're really going to appreciate what you're doing for them, because the alternative is you don't say anything and either resentment grows or you just end up they quit, or you fire them because they're not as effective as you need them to be. And so I have found this to be really transformative in how I work with people. I love that.

Dr. William Attaway: 28:05

Jake, this has been such a great conversation and I'm so grateful to you for sharing so honestly and transparently from your journey so far. I think you've really added a lot of value to the people who are listening today. I know they're going to want to stay connected to you and continue to learn from you and more about what you're doing. What's the best way for them to do that?

Jake Sucoff: 28:27

You can find me at patientprocurecom, or my personal website is heyjakeycom. You can shoot me an email at jake at patientprocurecom. I love connecting with people. I love getting messages, happy to provide any advice or a shoulder to cry on or just a couple of listening ears. I'm really good at that.

Dr. William Attaway: 28:50

So please feel free to reach out and we'll have all those links in the show notes. Jake, thank you, appreciate your time today and the value that you have added to every one of us. Thanks, wayne, appreciate it.