Catalytic Leadership

Predictable Growth Systems Any Franchise Owner Can Replicate

• Dr. William Attaway • Season 4 • Episode 3

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Scaling a business shouldn’t feel like guesswork. If you’re tired of relying on referrals or one-off wins that can’t be repeated, this episode will show you a better way.

I’m joined by Don Traxler, leading growth strategist and founder of RevSpark Media, where he helps medical clinics, wellness brands, and franchise owners achieve seven- and eight-figure growth through predictable growth systems. Don’s expertise spans men’s health, regenerative medicine, weight loss clinics, telehealth, and franchising.

In this conversation, Don shares why cheap leads and AI automation alone create bottlenecks, why referrals are like “building on sand,” and how franchise operators can replicate scalable marketing systems across every location. We unpack how to move from unpredictable, random results into data-driven, high-intent client acquisition that fuels sustainable growth.

If you’re ready to replace chance with clarity, and growth with systems you can trust, this episode is for you.


Books Mentioned

  • Getting Things Done by David Allen

  • The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss


Connect with Don at revsparkmedia.com or on LinkedIn. His book, The Franchise Advertising Excellence Playbook, is available now on Amazon.



Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

I am excited today to have Don Traxler on the podcast. Don is a leading growth strategist and the founder of RevSpark Media, where he helps medical clinics, wellness brands and healthcare entrepreneurs scale to seven and eight figure growth through data-driven patient acquisition and high-performance advertising. Don's expertise spans men's health, regenerative medicine, weight loss clinics, telehealth and more, building marketing systems that deliver real, revenue-generating patients. Don, I'm so glad you're here, man. Thanks for being on the show.

Don Traxler:

Thanks for having me, william, excited to be here.

Intro:

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:

I would love to start today with you sharing a little bit of your story with our listeners, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How'd you get started?

Don Traxler:

Yeah, I don't think we have time to go into all of it here, but you know we'll do our best. I honestly came from an engineering background. I was a civil engineer Originally, found that I had what most engineers don't have, which is a personality. Nice, right. So I, um, I was fortunate enough to I was commuting 120 miles a day round trip for for that job and, um, I listened to a lot of podcasts, audio books and all of that, and I ended up finding a mastermind that I became a part of, um called the foundation, uh, with Dane Maxwell and uh, that was geez.

Don Traxler:

Back in 2013, I want to say, um, and the whole notion of that was, you know, uh, finding a problem to solve that was deep enough in a market that you could solve with a software as a service company. Uh, so I dove into that, um, I did actually, you know, just to fast track that story Um, I ended up, uh, meeting a bunch of people from that Um. They invited me to move to Boulder and live in an entrepreneur house and I said, why not? So I quit my engineering job, packed my car, went to Boulder, um, the we did start a software company. It was a little early for its time. But what led me into this was actually all of that group of, you know, of folks that I met. It was really in the heydays of digital marketing. It was just becoming a thing and, yeah, we sort of helped each other, you know, realize the opportunity and got started. So I started Red Spark Media geez, about 15 years ago now and it looks a lot different today than it did back then and we've gone through a lot of iteration. But really, as it pertains to the company now and development as a leader to answer those questions my journey kind of started out in necessity.

Don Traxler:

Here I wasn't trying to, you know, run an agency or write a book at first, right, I was trying to help growth-minded founders, you know, solve real problems, and especially in complex industries, right, like healthcare and franchising. And over time I really saw a pattern, right, that there was so much potential and people were struggling because they were largely still using, you know, old school playbooks. They were looking at it, as you know, just a set and forget kind of thing. And you know, so I built this as a really as us, being a true growth partner, not just a spoke on a wheel company that you hired to run some ads for you and what really kind of you know drove me in the development as a leader was also out of necessity right.

Don Traxler:

As we grew and we grew our client base, we grew our team and that was a continued learning curve right. And to know that you have people depending on you and you have families you're supporting and mouths to feed, that certainly drove the development as a leader right. To figure it out, to dive in and do anything that I could to be the best leader that I you know that I could be. So a lot of books, a lot of masterminds, a lot of leaning on, you know, the community that I have to really you know, foundationally be the best leader that I could. And also learn through mistakes, too. Right, you know, that's one of the I think, one of the best ways that we can learn how to be a leader.

Dr. William Attaway:

I agree. You know, I think the mistakes that you make. Service is the pathway to success. So often, if you understand, failure is an event and not an identity. And one of the things I appreciate about your journey is that you know, no matter where you went, no matter what you did, you know you were always keeping that in mind. You know and I think that's important and cannot be overstated the importance of mindset in successful entrepreneurs like you.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know you mentioned your book and if folks are not familiar with this, this is your new book, right? The Franchise Advertising Excellence Playbook is your new book, right, the Franchise Advertising Excellence Playbook. And it is exactly that I mean, as I was, as I was reading this, I thought this is, this is the fruit from so many mistakes or learning opportunities, and now you put this into a format people can just take and they can execute straight from the, from the, the, the truths and the insight that you put in this book. What, what prompted this? Like there's always a reason, the why you did it. Why put all this, all your secret sauce, into a book?

Don Traxler:

you know. I think the short answer is is that we can't help everybody, right, um, and we are really fortunate to have been able to help a certain number of franchises and franchisees, you know, to realize that there is there is something different and there is something better from a standpoint of being able to not only have measurable success but know what you should even care about in terms of you know what, what metrics are important here? Right, and really this is it's specifically for franchise owners, whether, whether you have two locations or 20, you know who know that your advertising should be performing better, but you're kind of frustrated with the generic approaches, um, the, the corporate centric. You know one campaign for every location, um, and you know who really don't maybe even understand, um, how this needs to change from a multi-location. You know coordination, um, and the need for, like, systematic replication, right Um it.

Don Traxler:

To me, it really it really stems the the best performing franchise operations in, in our opinion, and what we see is those that start from the centric, holistic approach, from corporate and having things essentially systematized out right. That means more than just your advertising campaign. It means having a consistent use of a CRM, right, and how the marketing is going to be essentially deployed across multiple locations, so that if you're at two locations and you're all of a sudden going to 10, well it's not as scary, because then you know that you're just replicating this same system every time and that you're going to get not only consistent results but it's consistent management from you know the corporate system as well, so we dive into a lot of that in the book and really it's particularly a powerful tool for appointment-based franchises. You know healthcare is an example because we work a lot in the healthcare market. But home services and really any other kind of service-based industry, you know where customer lifetime value and systematic excellence really determines your success 100%.

Dr. William Attaway:

Talk about healthcare for a minute. Like you've got a lot of clients and have done a lot of work to help people be successful in that industry. What are the biggest mistakes that you see these owners that are making, these doctors and the providers?

Don Traxler:

when it comes to marketing and patient acquisition. I think a lot of it is well. For one, I think it's a fault of the market as market as a whole. Um, and what and what kind of messages are being disseminated to these folks in the market, meaning from other agency owners out there and things like that, right, there's such, there's such an, a presence of um, sensationalism, right? Um, and putting these sort of sensationalized promises in front of them of, hey, all you need to do is, you know, create some ads, we'll use AI, we'll automate everything. And it sounds great, right, who wouldn't want that? Like, oh, I don't have to have, you know, human elements here, I don't have to have people operating, you know, on this all the time. I can just run an ad and AI and automation will take care of everything. So people book appointments, show up, awesome.

Don Traxler:

The reality is is that AI is great to a certain, to a certain point, right, but we still, especially in healthcare and especially in high touch environments, where we still especially in healthcare and especially in high touch environments, where, you know, if you're in anything like a concierge level type of business, people expect to have human interaction, you know, and there's a huge part in that which you're never going to get a commitment level out of somebody that can just do everything through AI and automation and book their own appointments and everything. Your calendar will fill up, but you'll have super high no-show rates and largely it's because people don't have that human touch point. There's no previous rapport built, there's no commitment to the appointments and to that. You're going to end up wasting a lot of money and wasting a lot of time to then figure out that that is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make. Wow.

Dr. William Attaway:

I think that's something that anybody who's in that field can resonate with. We've got all these leads, all these fantastic potential customers, but then the no-show rate is so stinking high. That's right, and it's so incredibly frustrating, because you feel like you spent money to acquire these things but they never panned out.

Don Traxler:

Yeah, even more so, william. You're spending money on, sure, the acquisition of the leads and the opportunities, but these people take up valuable time on, you know, your, your practice's calendar and that's wasted time. But it's also expense that you have to pay your team, right, you have, you have maybe a nurse or a PA or MA that they're getting paid to sit there and, you know, waste the time when this is allocated and set aside for somebody that doesn't show. So it kind of ends up being like a multiplication of cost frustration as well. As you know, these are people that, especially from the medical side, right, these are people that have spent so much time in education and you know they're there ready to impart that knowledge and help Well, but then when they don't show up, that's incredibly frustrating, so very very.

Dr. William Attaway:

you talk a lot about high intent patients versus just leads. What is the difference versus just leads? What?

Don Traxler:

is the difference, yeah, Big difference is really. How do I say this best? So the advertising platforms make it incredibly easy for you to generate a lead right? Facebook in particular. They have what they call a high volume lead form, which essentially, you can click on this ad and it will autofill your information, which may or may not even be correct, and you can submit this thing without even knowing, sometimes, right so, to the client, to the business.

Don Traxler:

You may see oh man, we're getting a ton of leads and they're super cheap, you know, a couple dollars per lead. But they repeatedly try to call people and they get things like my name's not Bob, I didn't sign up for anything, Stop calling me Right. And that, you know, obviously leads into the rest of that frustration we already talked about. Now I would venture a guess, and I would bet dollars to donuts, that everyone would be way happier getting fewer leads than are more likely to convert, even if they cost a little bit more money, right? So in order to achieve a higher intent lead, there are many ways to do that in any sort of lead journey to ask them specific questions, things that they actually need to fill out and answer beyond just their name, email and phone number right.

Don Traxler:

The other part is and one thing that we have invested in in our company is actually building a consumer data platform. So data is really kind of the next big thing, right, Data is going to be as important as oil in terms of advertising. And when you can start with a better audience better meaning understanding that you have a defined audience that has already shown some sort of intent then combine that with those other lines of questioning that I mentioned. You have people that will be more often than not, converting not just into an appointment, but you'll have better conversion rates into actual revenue from that.

Dr. William Attaway:

And that's exactly what the owners want, right. So often they're just not sure how to get there. They're just not sure how to get there, Right. You know, I imagine that you run into people who are like well, you know, most of our new patients come from referrals. Yep, you know, most of our new businesses is word of mouth. Is there advice that you would give to people who have built their business or their practice around referrals and word of mouth alone? Like what would you say?

Don Traxler:

to them. Yeah, I mean. Well, congrats for one thing, right, congrats to you have built a practice that is sustaining you and your family, and you know the employees that you have. And I would ask are you happy with that? Right, are you happy at that level?

Don Traxler:

Because, if you're not, the only problem with building a business on a foundation of referral word of mouth is that you have no way of scaling that and you have no predictability. You do not know if you're going to have one referral this week or 10 or not, right, um, so relying on that to grow a business is it's like building a house on sand, right, um, it's really it's not a reliable and predictable way to do that. But utilizing, obviously, keeping referrals coming in is a fantastic thing and nurturing them and churning, you know, really growing referrals from even new patients that are generated is very important. Now, having on top of that, having on top of that, a very systematized and strategically focused new patient generation ecosystem, right, that is really what will make the difference and allow predictability in terms of having growth goals that are above and beyond that. You know that level that you reach just from referrals and word of mouth.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's good. Can you think of a client that you have helped in this way to get from that referral or word of mouth only type of growth into something that is scaling?

Don Traxler:

Absolutely. The one that comes to mind is actually one of our first franchise clients in a specific franchise system. They came to us actually in a pretty dire situation. I remember this distinctly I was actually trying to take a vacation, and vacation as a business owner as I'm sure you can understand and many people can understand, it's a loaded word, right, indeed, but I really could sense the necessity and the priority here and essentially what had happened was, within this franchise system, there were a certain number of approved vendors that they could work with and this particular client canvassing the area they're doing things with the local community to raise awareness and bring in that business from an organic standpoint and word of mouth and referral. So they had grown that very impressively. I mean, they were doing well.

Don Traxler:

However, they came to us in a position where they had just terminated with that other agency and essentially they were in panic mode because, well, they had expansion goals, they had already started to, they had signed, you know, letter of intent on the next you know franchise location and all of that.

Don Traxler:

So to not have continued opportunity coming in was a very scary thing. And so, you know, we, we quickly, um, we did what needed to be done honestly, which was to work quickly to get them back at least up and running, where they were generating new opportunity quickly, and from there, less than two months later, we helped them achieve their best month ever at that time and actually were the top grossing franchisee in that franchise system. And from there we helped them. They went from that one location, they now have three and are opening a fourth, really relying very heavily on exactly this system right, the system and process of continuing to drive high intent, patient opportunity, and that obviously supplements the ground game and the word of mouth and the referral in order to really achieve some fantastic outcomes here.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's awesome. I want to talk about you for a minute. We've been talking about your business and what you do, and I think that is incredibly important, but it all starts with you as the business owner, as the point leader. Your business, your clients, your team need you to lead at a higher level today than they did five years ago, and that same thing is going to be true three, four, five years from now. So 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 and your business are going to need you to have in the years to come?

Don Traxler:

Yeah, I, you know, honestly, I I look at this two ways. One, you know, being in a position of leadership means that in times of chaos and complexity and confusion, I need to have clarity right, or I need to have as much clarity as possible to then be able to align people, resources and envision to move that forward and envision right to move that forward. And truly, william, especially in terms of, you know, our work in franchises, I really stay sharp by staying close to the operators right, the franchisees, the founders and also other marketers in the mix as well. You know we have a really good I'm fortunate to have a really good network of you know, other colleagues in the space where we get together regularly and different masterminds, and you know we talk about what's working and what's not and it's super important and I think it's tremendously important for everyone, business owner or not, to surround yourself with, get a mentor. You know mentors can be tremendously important, certainly from a business perspective, but also really in your everyday life, right, and really just also being around peers that challenge my thinking. That's good.

Don Traxler:

You know, like writing that book was, that was a huge level up moment for me and you know that was really a big push from you, know people that were a bit ahead of me, and it really kind of forced me to to codify what, what actually works right and and not just what sounds good in theory, because, as a leader, you know you, you sometimes are afforded those luxuries of um, being able to dream a bit and you know the massive drivers are what really works, and not only understanding what works now, but really having your ear to the ground about what's going to work next, right, what's changing the landscape, what's what's upcoming and and when things that could potentially disrupt, you know like, I mean the whole notion of AI coming through and in such a big manner.

Don Traxler:

Really really important to understand how we're going to embrace that and utilize it to our best abilities, but also to remember that it isn't going to take everything over. It is not going to replace everything, and it's even more important to focus on the things that it's not going to replace, to make sure that we're really really doing our best to show up in those areas right. So that's good.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, I think that's an important point. You know people. People look at the uncertainty ahead. They look at a time of change, like we're in with AI, and fear seems to be rising. You know what's this going to do to my job, my company, my team. What's this going to do to the jobs. You know the people who work for me and I think that's well said. You know there is the human element that will never be replaced. No-transcript.

Don Traxler:

Yeah, it's probably been mentioned many times on your show and I know that you also share the same feelings surrounding this book, but it's getting things done so good, david Allen. Honestly, it's been transformational in how I spend my days and how I'm able to really prioritize what is what is super important, without losing focus on, you know, things that that may not need my attention right now but are still very valuable you know to. To focus on that. That is absolutely been, uh, a really, really big one. Um, the other plug that I would make, which is uh, I haven't I haven't heard too much about it lately, but um, four hour work week by Tim Ferriss is, uh, yes, man, that one.

Don Traxler:

I don't think that book will ever really um fall out of my memory. Um, one, I don't think that book will ever really fall out of my memory. It has certainly been tremendously impactful on how I've grown business, how I've looked to really make my time most efficient, but I think it also obviously ties into getting things done as well. Right, it's all about using your time effectively. That's so good.

Dr. William Attaway:

And for the listeners who didn't hear it, we actually had David on the show. You can go back to season two and listen to that episode with David Allen, where he shared a little bit about his system. It's one that I've used for almost 20 years now and it is the best productivity system that I have found. One more question, don. This is one we ask everybody. It's easy to look at you and think, oh wow, man, don's just got it going on. His business is just up and to the right. He's never struggled like I struggle. He's never had challenges like I have. And it may be that some of the listeners are thinking that If I could snap my fingers and solve one problem in your business right now, what would you want that problem to be?

Don Traxler:

Honestly, I think one of the most difficult things to manage in a business, especially with scaling and growth, is, um, the human element, right Um, especially when things grow to a point where you no longer, as a leader, have the ability to be in touch with every, every person on your team. Um, and that certainly has been, uh, a point of, you know, crack showing in our, in our business, many times. Um, so, truly, I think, if there was a magic wand that could help, would be helping to make the human element a bit more consistent, I suppose, in scaling, because that is a problem that I know we face, and I know many other people in our network face as well, and we see it on the client side too. You know, though, franchises will regularly have their like their, uh, their office managers leave things like that Right Um, where everything looks good on paper. Until that, you know, that human element ends up breaking or or going away. So that would be, if you can do it, william, help me out there.

Dr. William Attaway:

I mean I'll snap my fingers. I can't guarantee anything's going to happen. No, I think that's very real and I appreciate that. I think it's a good reminder that, no matter where we are in our business journey as entrepreneurs, everybody's struggling. Everybody's struggling with something. Everybody's struggling with challenges and problems. They may look different or sound different, but nobody gets off without having those. Don, this has been such a great conversation and I'm so grateful for you, for your time and the insights that you've shared so generously today. I know folks are going to want to stay connected to you and continue to learn more about you and from you and more about what you're doing at RevSpark. What's the best way for folks to do that?

Don Traxler:

Yeah, can absolutely go to our website, revsparkmediacom. I'm sure you'll include that in the show notes. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on there and I'm always, always open to growing my connections there, and I do want to put it out there that I am always open to answering questions or being of help and service, right, so please don't hesitate to reach out to me and I'd be more than happy to help if I can and if anyone's in the franchise world that's listening. You can find the book on Amazon as well. Perhaps we can link that up in the show notes as well.

Dr. William Attaway:

Absolutely. We'll have all that linked in the show notes, Don. Thank you so appreciate your time today, man.

Don Traxler:

Thank you as well, William.

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