How a former ER nurse transformed heartbreak into hope—founding a recovery program and a marketing agency
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Show Notes:
On this episode of Mission Matters, Adam Torres interviews David Sanchez, Founder of Digitalis, about his journey from ER nursing to building a faith-based recovery nonprofit and a healthcare marketing agency. David shares hard-won lessons on business ethics, purpose, and scaling with intention.
About Digitalis
At Digitalis, the team brings consistent website traffic to healthcare facilities to increase revenue and save money on advertising.
Before working with Digitalis, clients often struggled with deciding where to focus their digital marketing dollars.
Through the Digitalis Growth System, clients experience more online visibility, more new patients, and greater trust from patients.
When Dr. Melissa Austin was preparing to open her OB-GYN practice in Glendale, Arizona, she didn’t have a logo or website yet.
Digitalis created an effective SEO strategy using the proven Digitalis SEO System. Within two months, North Valley Women’s Care had women coming from across the Phoenix metro area to become her patients.
The solutions offered by Digitalis include:
- Healthcare SEO
- Content Marketing
- Medical Blog Writing
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on be Our Guest to Apply. Alright, today’s guest is David Sanchez and he’s the founder over at Digitalis. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to it. All right, David, so I’m excited to get into your story, man. I, I understand that you were originally an ER nurse and you also not, and you went from that to starting an addiction rehab program. You also started a marketing agency. I mean, a, a lot to, a lot to cover here and excited to get into it.
I guess just to get us kicked off let’s start with the ER nurse to, creating a program like, how’d that come about? It was a long journey, definitely. Mm-hmm. So well I was working in the emergency department I’ve been a nurse since 2009, so in 2010, 2011, I was working in the emergency department and seeing.
Overdoses every day seeing people. Mm-hmm. Coming in asking for help every day with alcohol or drugs, and I really started feeling like I needed to do something to make a greater difference. Mm-hmm. Because oftentimes I wasn’t able to do a whole lot to help them besides give them a phone number for a place or, you know, send them to have the social worker come and talk to them.
But I just felt like I needed to do more. You know, and I really felt like that’s, that was a, a calling. Mm-hmm. And so I went and talked to my pastor about it and he said, well, the church will get behind you. We, we’ll do everything we can to help make it happen. And so with the help of, of my church, we’re able to start a nonprofit and be able to start helping people.
So we founded that in 2014, and I’ve been involved with addiction Recovery ever since then. Wow. What are some of the things as you’ve kind of been on that journey? I mean, everybody learns no matter what, what somebody’s trying to do. Mm-hmm. And there’s always unexpected things. I’m curious on your end.
Yeah. You learn anything unexpected as you’ve been going through this. I would say one of the biggest, there’s several lots of surprises, of course. Mm-hmm. I had no idea that business was so complicated. I’d never owned a business before. I didn’t have any family members that were involved in business, but the business of addiction recovery, I didn’t realize that it was so challenging.
And also it is kind of the wild west of healthcare in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of stuff that’s just not regulated and not a lot of common practices are actually either kind of gray areas or sometimes can be actually borderline illegal activity. And so I kind of had to navigate through that because, you know, I’m a nurse at heart.
I’m, I want to help people and I wanna make a difference. So one of the, another big surprise was that. How expensive advertising was. Mm-hmm. Because I, really wanted to help people but there’s, it’s extremely competitive in this field. I was paying at one point over $15,000 a month on advertising, just like Google ads and Facebook ads, and just so people could know about us that we existed and that we could help them with their addiction problems.
And. And I was paying over a hundred dollars a click some months. It’s just extremely expensive. And so that’s actually how I ended up starting to get into advertising because I was like, oh my gosh, this is so expensive. How can I just don’t see how it’s possible. But it turned out that I was able to start learning, get a team together, make wow, be able to make a greater impact.
And, that led me down the path of learning marketing. Wow. So what, was that piece of it like? Because I feel like that’s, I mean, you had to have had a strong mission. Most people, I shouldn’t say most people, but many people would maybe give up at that point. They’d say, what? I’m just not working.
I’m spending all this money. It’s too expensive. But like, you took it a step further and you’re like, well, let me see what I can do. And that changed things. Like what was that like? Well, fortunately at the time, I had a team that was able to help with a lot of the marketing, so I wasn’t doing it all myself.
So we had some person, somebody doing video, another person doing. Mm-hmm. Like the social media management. And so luckily I wasn’t another person doing the in-person marketing, like business development. Mm-hmm. So luckily it wasn’t all me on my own. So I had started learning search engine optimization, content marketing.
Mm-hmm. And we’d hired an agency, so the agency was helping with the Google ads and the search engine optimization, we call it SEO. And so I just was dabbling a little bit in it before that, but as they were doing it, they were telling me, Hey, yeah, we’re doing this, we’re doing that. But as, as months rolled by, I, I couldn’t see any visible results from it.
And our numbers were actually going down because I was tracking Google Analytics, like to see the number of clicks we were getting, the number of views, how many people were contacting us, and it was just getting. It was just mysterious. Mm-hmm. What’s happening? You know, there’s no visibility. one time, like I mentioned, the gray areas one time, another like like a call center, basically like a call farm.
They had actually. Change on Google Maps. You can go in and recommend a change to a Google profile. Somebody had changed our Google profile and recommended a different phone number, so they had changed our phone number on a Google Pro profile. Oh my God. And so all of our phone calls that were coming in through Google were actually getting routed to some other, some.
Call center in another city. Wow. And said, man, why are the phones so dead? And we realized it after a few weeks. And so I was like, man, this is crazy. I’ve gotta, learn this stuff and figure it out. And, so we ended up saying, you know what? I, let’s fire this agency. We’ve, I’ve gotta learn this on my own.
I’ve gotta take it more seriously because my main job is to. Help as many people as we can. And, and if, if things are just not working out well, then it’s, it falls on me and, yeah. even like one of the final straws came when my agency rep, the guy who was doing the SEO stuff for us, he showed up to a meeting as high as a cutting heroin.
And it was, it was really obvious. Me, because, because I, I know what it looks like. Yeah. Like, oh my gosh, this guy, this is. It’s not gonna work. And then, so I tried to talk to his supervisor and I was like, Hey, you know, I, I’m concerned about, you know, this gentleman, and, I wanna know, is there somebody else I can talk to to get help?
You know, is there a supervisor? And the guy, the sales rep had gotten me, I. Who had helped me to hire them. He’s like, no, there’s, there’s nobody else you can talk to. Sorry. Basically he was just blowing me off. I’m like, okay, this isn’t gonna work guys. Let’s take it in-house. Mm-hmm. And so from there I was able to develop systems and really learn how to make things work.
And I decided, you know what? This things changed around really quickly. We started making a lot more impact and I learned how to be able to. Equate dollars and cents to, you know, how much are we actually spending per new person we get? And then from there I was like, you know what, if we’re able to change things around and it was so hard to find help before, there’s other people that need this type of help, so we might as well start helping some other facilities and to offset the, cost of our own marketing efforts.
So that’s what I ended up doing, and I started digitalis because of that. Wow, what a great story. And maybe go a little bit more into your niche. I’ve checked out your website, of course, and so it’s you know, you’re generating leads for it says just read right off the website, get 30 new patients in 60 days, generate 30 to a hundred qualified new patients on autopilot.
So now you, figured it out for yourself, and now you’re being of service to others. Like who’s your target market? Like who, gets the most value out of working with you and your team? Yeah, mostly it would be something related to behavioral health, so mm-hmm. Psychiatric practices, mental health, substance abuse.
That’s really who we target a lot of times. Mm-hmm. And also many specialty practices. So it could be urgent cares, primary cares surgical specialties. Mm-hmm. And what about geographies? Like any particular area that you serve or anything like that? Or is it, is it pretty much agnostic? It’s mainly in the us.
I’ve had some, I’ve talked to a few companies from other countries, but it makes the most sense for us to focus on English speaking countries and especially the us. Mm. Understand the market and the system the best here. Yeah, what a great story. What a great story. And as you, continue to scale this side of the business like what does that look like for you?
Like a lot of, and I ask this question by the way, a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives that watch this. And I’m always curious about like the vision. So now you’re at a certain point, like, where do you go next with this? Well, right now, I, really try to balance my time because I like to be personally involved with the recovery program.
Mm. We’re still, we’re still active. ours is a faith-based program. It’s Christian based. Mm-hmm. So I like to work personally with the guys to help them. And it’s a long-term program. It’s, it’s a year long minimum. And so I like to work personally with the guys doing a bible study with them every morning.
Wow. Helping them real personally. You know, helping them to, get a job, learn the social skills that they need to keep a job, and just really to make sure that they’re gonna be successful in life. Mm-hmm. In the long term, what do you think? So I’m trying to balance that time in between those. That’s amazing.
Answer your whole question. It absolutely does. What do you think the benefit of, doing the daily Bible study and also you being like hand, like many, at many points, many believers may at certain points as the organization gets bigger, maybe kind of miss some of that hands-on attention and they may like, you know, be working on, you know, scaling, doing this, doing that, but you still manage to be in the, you know, doing the work.
Like what does that mean to you? That’s huge. Yeah. We restructured three years ago, or it’s longer now. Gosh, that was 2018. We restructured. Yeah. Anyway, it was about three years ago that we restructured, but it was, I. Yeah, I was just managing the management team and mm-hmm. So I had four or five managers that reported to me, and we had 25 staff at the time, and it was just too complex.
I was spending so much of my time dealing with compliance and, and billing insurance and stuff. Mm-hmm. It was frustrating for me because the original vision was to help these guys get their lives together and save their lives. Yeah, and we also had a women’s program at the time, an outpatient program, a detox program.
It was just a lot because I was trying to scale, and it is a nonprofit, so it didn’t personally benefit me. I was just trying to help more people. Mm-hmm. However, it just becomes so complex when you get away from your, or I shouldn’t say when you get away from it, but when you. allow things to consume your time and your focus and your energy.
Mm-hmm. So for me, I had to really get back to first principles. What, do I want to accomplish? What is the simplest way to achieve that? And for me, I want to help save lives. I want to help teach people how their lives can be changed through the power of God. and learn how to learn how to. develop the skills to be successful.
Mm-hmm. And so for that, I just wanted to focus on the things that may, that could make the biggest impact in my community, which is housing. Mm. So addiction, recovery, housing, and then teaching and life skills. Those are the two biggest gaps in, in our area where I’m at in Northern Arizona. Mm-hmm. So I decided to just focus on that, and so now we have, I mean, now it’s a, program run by volunteers and it’s just extremely streamlined, simple.
It costs, I would say it costs me. I can’t, I don’t want to give all the exact numbers, but basically 96% less than it did before. Wow. So much, much, much lower overhead. Very simplified, and that way I know that we’ll be able to pay the bills regardless of the situation. Mm-hmm. And that we can continue our mission and keep helping people.
It was so much more stressful before. Mm-hmm. And I’m also able, with my, with the marketing business, I have time to do that and focus on helping healthcare facilities grow in a way that. I can give them the time and attention they need so I can focus on quality rather than quantity. I’m not just trying to bring in revenue.
It’s, I can help people. So we, we work with a, a small number of clients and it’s just, we work very closely with them, basically as their marketing department. Mm-hmm. So that way the quality is there. We can be excellent at everything we do. At the same time, I’m able to have a life, I’m able to help people.
In the program and outside the program. Mm-hmm. Enjoy some time with my family. We have, we have two daughters now. While we were restructuring, we ended up adopting two of the baby girls that were born wow. Two mothers who were addicted to Fentanyl and we were able to get them at birth.
They’re unrelated to each other, but they’re part of our family now. They’re, now, they’re about to turn three and five, and so I Congratulations. That’s amazing. So we’re able to enjoy life and then function in life while being on this journey, which has been very unpredictable, but also extremely rewarding.
Hmm. What a great story. And I, like one of the, oh, I like a lot about this story, but that concept of not rushing and, and understanding like the quality and remaining focused on what you, what you’re actually looking to accomplish. Yeah. I think that says a lot and I feel like many entrepreneurs feel this burden and this.
Thing to where they have to continue to grow. They have to keep on for me or they have to like, it’s gotta be forced. And so even, even our company, like, so I’ve now, I mean I’ve been doing this nine years, I’ve done over 6,000 interviews and, and people, you know, they ask me, we could be bigger. We, we got our decent size, but you know, we only got a little over 30 employees.
And I feel that God calls me to continue to be having conversations just like I am now. And what’s interesting is to reach other people. The way that I’ve been able to even do it, even outside of our shows is we were, I was called to helping other people and it was very naturally, I didn’t, I didn’t plan on being in the, like you, ended up being partially in the marketing business by trying to help.
I ended up. Partially being in the well, I shouldn’t say partially. Now we’ve launched over 250 shows. Oh wow. So for other individuals. And so our podcast production and distribution and things like that. But we’re not in, a rush to continue to grow as a media brand or outlet. ’cause if we were sure, I mean, we’ve been offered, you know, investors, people to invest and do things like that.
We could grow really fast, right? We could do all those other things, but mm-hmm. I kind of intuitively just know like, God’s not. Calling me to do that exact thing. Yeah. That I’m not really too worried about like where this goes. He’s in control and really. Like the growth and everything else, like in his time is gonna be what it’s supposed to be.
I just have to maintain stewarding what I’ve been given and the opportunities and remaining grateful and trying to spread, you know, love. Like that’s my, mission there. Yeah. And the rest that’s gonna take care of itself. Not really too worried about it, but I don’t I don’t feel called to rush and do this and we gotta be the next Forbes and we gotta do this and we gotta take out all this money and private equity and this, that, whatever, and grow like, eh, how about I wanna have a conversation in this case with you, David, and like that feels good to me.
And, and hopefully do our conversation. Other people are gonna hear that and they’re gonna be inspired. And hopefully, and you got me thinking about Bible study again, ’cause I haven’t been to one in a while. So like, this is good. This is, the kind of conversations, ’cause I’ve been, maybe I’ve been watching too much on YouTube in terms of my, even though I do love Dr.
Miles Monroe. That’s my, that’s my boy. I love it. I love listening to him. But he fires me up. But I can’t forget the communal aspect of it and, and being around others and what that means and what that holds, which is what you’ve gotten back to the root of and when at one point maybe you were going in another direction, which is amazing to me.
I think it’s a great story. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when you, when you say yes to something, you always say no to something else. Mm-hmm. And that’s, that’s how effective people are. Effective. You look at people who are incredible at what they do. You always have to say no to something. You always have to turn something down because you only have so much time and attention.
To be excellent. You have to be unskilled or ignorant about something else and there’s nothing wrong with that. Yep, yep. Absolutely. That’s what I it’s interesting the way that works. It really is interesting the way that works, but I prefer it. It’s less, less stressful. Yeah. Yeah. For me at least, I don’t wanna know how to do everything.
I’m okay if I know, if I can learn how to do a couple of good things like really well, and be the best at that. That’s all you need in this world. Like exactly. You can make a difference, but in only so many ways. You only have so many years. I love it. I love it. Well, David, this has been a lot of fun having you on this show today and really learning more about your mission, your journey if somebody’s listening or watching this and they want to connect and they wanna follow you, follow your team, anything else like that?
How do they do that? I. The easiest way to reach me is on LinkedIn. I’m, I’m pretty active there. You can just look for David Sanchez and an RN at the end. Because I’m a registered nurse, there’s a lot of people with my same first and last name, so don’t forget the RN part. I. Amazing. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on them and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And David, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you so much. It’s been great. I really enjoyed talking to you.