The One Medical Story with Dr. Joseph Michelli, the Author of All Business is Personal: One Medical’s Human-Centered, Technology-Powered Approach to Customer Engagement

Podcast, Season 7

If you’ve ever had to wait for your doctor first in the waiting room and then in the examining room, or struggled to get an appointment or had trouble getting a prescription filled while on the road, you know why primary care in the United States is in such desperate need of disruption.

One Medical has been transforming primary care through the power of membership and customer centricity since 2007. In 2023, One Medical was acquired by Amazon for nearly $4 billion. Dr. Joseph Michelli has written a well-researched book on One Medical’s journey and what enabled such rapid growth and such strong customer engagement. The book is called “All Business is Personal: One Medical Human-Centered, Technology-Powered Approach to Customer Engagement.”

In today’s conversation, Joseph and I talk about how the company reimagined every step of the patient journey, One Medical’s three key success drivers, and what the future of healthcare might hold.

 

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Listen to the podcast here

 

The One Medical Story with Dr. Joseph Michelli, the Author of All Business is Personal: One Medical’s Human-Centered, Technology-Powered Approach to Customer Engagement

 

If you’ve ever had to wait for your doctor first in the waiting room and then in the examining room, or struggled to get an appointment or had trouble getting a prescription filled while on the road, you know why primary care in the United States is in such desperate need of disruption.

One Medical has been transforming primary care through the power of membership and customer centricity since 2007. In 2023, One Medical was acquired by Amazon for nearly $4 billion. Dr. Joseph Michelli has written a well-researched book on One Medical’s journey and what enabled such rapid growth and such strong customer engagement. The book is called “All Business is Personal: One Medical Human-Centered, Technology-Powered Approach to Customer Engagement.”

In today’s conversation, Joseph and I talk about how the company reimagined every step of the patient journey, One Medical’s three key success drivers, and what the future of healthcare might hold.

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Robbie Baxter: Joseph, welcome to the show!

Dr. Joseph Michelli: It’s great to be here, Robbie, thanks.

Robbie Baxter: How did you become interested in customer engagement and service excellence?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Probably my mom and dad’s fault. But I’m a psychologist by training, so that probably fits. They said early on that, “You’re not in this world to be served. You’re on this world to serve, and if you can find a way to do that, you create value. If you create value, you’ll be fine.” That’s pretty much the lesson.

You're not in this world to be served. You're on this world to serve, and if you can find a way to do that, you create value. If you create value, you'll be fine. Share on X

Whenever I would be a little haughty or pretentious, they would just say, You’re not here to be served. So there are variations of that message, but it always came across the same. If you’re going to create value in the world, the world will be okay for you. If you think the world owes you something, it won’t. And so I think I was going to do that through professional services as a clinical psychologist worked in healthcare for a while

As a clinical psychologist and then as an organizational development specialist, it was in that organizational development specialist phase and some work I did in graduate school with the Pike Place Fish Market that really took me out of the traditional mental health services business.

Robbie Baxter: Were you a fish thrower?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Oh, well, that’s a good story. No, probably my 1st consulting client was Johnny Yokoyama of the world-famous Pike Place Fish Market, and ultimately, he and I wrote my very 1st book together, called “When Fish Fly,” and it really was a follow up to all those fish videos that were out in the universe talking about play make your day, choose your attitude. Those kinds of things.

John Yokoyama (left) and Dr. Joseph Michelli (right)

Robbie Baxter: That’s amazing. I love that. I think you’re the 1st person that I’ve interviewed in 80+ interviews that has mentioned working in a fish market, and great title for a book. You recently wrote another book. What number book is that?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: 14th, I think.

Robbie Baxter: Why do you keep putting yourself through that?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: I don’t have many more left as someone who’s written books, and between the writing and the marketing. It’s challenging. But then again, we can cry a river. What big people problems those are! I mean, the beauty of it for me is the impact. The potential to change the way people think about something, and maybe give them a few ideas to improve their success rate. It’s kind of like being in a tree when people are in the maze and trying to say, “Hey, you might want to consider going left instead of right, because there is that dead end coming up.” That’s what I enjoy about the process of writing and the output of writing.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, helping people see around corners.

A lot of people I’ve had on the show that have written a book, they shared all of their knowledge, or a lot of their knowledge, the pattern recognition they had earned either through being in the trenches or through research, and then they’re kind of done. But you have written several books, many of which are about particular entrepreneurs or organizations. 13 books is a good number. What made you write all these books, and one is “All Business is Personal: One Medical Human-Centered, Technology-Powered Approach to Customer Engagement”? After all of these books that you had already written, what made this one worth writing?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Yeah, I think all of these books are worth writing in some form or fashion, because I’ve had the chance to work inside these companies, and in this case, I’ve worked inside One Medical. This is the beauty of business. You work with somebody in one place, and then they move on in their career, and then you get a chance to work with them in a whole new setting. Watch their leadership with a new set of leadership problems and challenges. So this particular individual is Amir Dan Rubin and he had been the chief operating officer over at UCLA Health Systems when I wrote a book about them. He then went on to Stanford Medical, and he was responsible for all of their healthcare facilities. He went to Optum and then ultimately ended over at One Medical. He was over at One Medical when he took over for the founder.

 

There’s a lot of investment money in play, which is a very different scenario from a state run healthcare system. And so we took on the challenge of, how do we take this startup to the next level, so that you know it would have a greater impact? And lo and behold, they did that, and Amazon bought them for 4 billion dollars. So it was a wonderful journey with them.

Robbie Baxter: I’m guessing that most people listening are somewhat familiar with One Medical, but for the ones who haven’t heard of them, can you explain briefly what their business model is, and what value they aim to provide to the people that they serve? And of course, because this is Subscription Stories, if you can share the part about the membership model itself.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Yeah, I was going to start by saying it’s an accidental subscription model is what this company is. It was not designed to be a subscription model in its 1st iteration. It was designed to be a disruptor in healthcare, and it just so happened that the disruption was sufficient enough that they did what James Gilmore and Joseph Pine talked about in “The Experience Economy”, which is to make the experience so great that people want to pay to have access to it, and I think that’s really the journey for One Medical. It started with Tom Lee, a Harvard-trained internal medicine specialist. He also went to Stanford Business School and did a project using the Blackberries, which took the physician’s desk reference essentially just all the drug interaction kind of things, and took it from being a bound copy to something that was transferable digitally through the Blackberry as best we could access anything then, and so that should have been enough. Right? But he said, “No, I really want to disrupt the actual service delivery face-to-face experience.” So he went about hiring a bunch of technologists in Silicon Valley, opening their 1st location in San Francisco in a high-rise building, not in a medical campus. And he starts just taking apart what the traditional healthcare system is and trying to find ways to solve those problems by optimizing the experience.

In short, they did things like making sure you could make your appointment via the app, not having to call somebody. This is pretty early on. They were also able to take away the idea of having to sit in a waiting room and sit in an exam room. So those kinds of pain points that redesigned the entire experience, asking, Why do we do these things led to an experience that people really enjoyed going to this location. So access to the app costs something. So they decided, let’s make it a membership. And quite early on. They had no idea what to charge, and they also didn’t have the e-commerce that we have today. So he asked for a check and said, “Does $30 a year sound like a good price point to be a member of One Medical?” He got some checks and didn’t get some other checks, and I think kept everybody anyway at first.

One Medical’s Murray Hill Office

Over time, they perfected that model so that you are paying an access fee for same day or next day appointments. The use of the app creates lots of scheduling convenience, lots of other conveniences, but a lot of communication interface between you and your providers and the insurance builders, and all that. But you’re still having to pay for your healthcare just the way everybody else does through your health insurance. It’s really kind of concierge, if you will. If you really want to pay a lot of money, you can get into concierge and have somebody at your back and call, or you can have this kind of hybridization thing, where you’re getting a little better quality care through membership. But you’re still relying on your health insurance to pay the bill.

Robbie Baxter: He was the 1st doctor. I remember reading at the beginning, right? He was the phlebotomist and the doctor, front desk, and everything all combined. And then over time, he sort of systematized that experience for the primary care relationship.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Yeah. The membership experience is tied to that whole idea of how do we onboard members? How do we refine our unique value proposition for members? Why would anybody want to join our membership? How do we get people to be members in places where we don’t have a physical presence? If I don’t have a doctor in your town, how do we get you to want to use the app, because you’re going to get access to virtual care that is relevant to you? So just looking at all the membership touch points, journey mapping, the membership experience, putting people responsible for that over time. But you’re right. In the beginning, he was the chief strategist, chief digital designer, membership recruitment. You put the label on it. That’s what he was.

Robbie Baxter: That’s really important. Because a lot of times in the member experience, iif you’ve never sat in a middle seat and economy between 2 large people. It’s hard to have a sense of how horrible it is. When I go on a plane, I sometimes wonder, do any of the execs ever sit in the back of coach by the bathroom? Because then you really get a sense of how broken the experience is.

I just had an appointment to get my mammogram, and I’m at Stanford, right? So it’s supposed to be great, waited for half an hour, went in, waited for a few more minutes for the technician to come in, because their time is more valuable than mine. No one explained anything, and you just realize that it’s even at a great place like Stanford. It’s still really hard to be treated like a human being and treated with some level of respect.

How many years since One Medical launched?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: It’s about 14 years.

Robbie Baxter: Years, but it’s still an issue at a lot of the big healthcare providers.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: One Medical is primarily a primary care organization, right? So it’s that family doctor experience, if you will. They are integrated with health systems like Stanford, right? And so they would the front door of the primary care. But they’re going to refer you to Stanford specialists. In that scenario, you should get easier appointments because you’re a One Medical member, and those relationships should get you in more urgently than maybe a primary care physician who’s not in that system integrated. Those are some of the benefits, but it’s still its navigation in healthcare is one of those classic things that is really challenging. And we’ve not come anywhere close to solving that. And we’re really gonna hit a shortage here of just care providers, right? So part of the membership opportunity is to have the ease and convenience and assurance that you’re going to be able to get care in a world where there are fewer people to do it. My favorite kind of use case for the membership is if I were to travel to Palo Alto today, and I were sick when I got off the plane, and I had to decide what I needed to do?

The membership gives me the opportunity to go to the app and then check through a curated list of symptoms. So I’m not doing Dr. Google and convincing myself that I’m near dead. What level of care should I get? Is this an emergency room visit? Should I schedule an appointment with somebody who’s in the Palo Alto region? Who’s a provider for One Medical? Can I just do it with a treat me now? Click on a button on the app itself, and then comes a provider who’s licensed in California, who can then make the prescription, and send it to my hotel near me because they know the area. That’s the value proposition of the membership. It’s the ability to say we’ve got an integrated medical record so that the virtual care provider is part of the system, unlike maybe my healthcare system, where I could get a virtual appointment but they’re a 3rd party who probably doesn’t have a very well-integrated record with what’s going on in my primary care’s office, and I don’t want to get in the weeds of all this. I think what I’m pointing out is that the value of the membership is that there’s integration. There is some streamlining. There’s some ubiquity of care. There’s some triaging of what I need in the moment and help me make that decision, because my lifestyle is on the road all the time, so I need to be able to get care wherever I am, not where my primary care physician is.

The value of the membership is that there's integration. There is some streamlining. There's some ubiquity of care. Share on X

Robbie Baxter: This member-centric approach and an approach of what the ultimate outcome is that a member seeks, and how we can keep layering in value to solve that problem for them. And so for you, it’s I want to stay healthy, and if something happens to me wherever I am, I want to be able to treat it. Respond to it quickly. I always think that health care is ultimately about maximizing healthy minutes. Happy minutes are not in the doctor’s office waiting room, right? It gives me the information I need. Give it to me where I am. And it’s just a very different approach to thinking about health than waiting until someone has a problem and then responding to it.

You wrote this book, you structured it with 3 key drivers that make One Medical so successful: the people, the innovative design, and execution, and then an emphasis on sustainable growth. Can you talk about some of the ways that each of those pieces has come into play in building the business that they have?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Yeah, I certainly would imagine there are membership models where people are not as important as it is in healthcare service delivery, right? Streaming opportunities and things that are platform-dependent. But when it comes to healthcare, you got to have talented people who are available to serve in the space. So you have to have all the technologies and the membership model that allows you the ability to access those people at the right time, in the right place. But you need the people. Those people need to be able to do their job without having to do it in their pajamas at night, after they clock out of work. So, using some of the technologies to make sure that they take the burden off people, so people can actually have work-life integration. And I think that’s a big emphasis point on this 1st section of the book. So if you are a membership company that relies on people to execute and deliver. I think there is a real understanding of how do you select them? How do you develop them? How do you train them? How do you help them drive efficiencies? I think a lot of the conversations we have about people’s culture often sound like it’s really we’re creating cruise ships for people. We want great experiences for people. But we want to create high-performance teams alongside a great culture.

And so I think what you see in this particular model is the real emphasis on using Lean Technologies and Six Sigma. Taking walks to Gemba and all those things that are necessary to develop a culture that is not only purposeful and autonomous, but also is one where there is accountability, structure, and celebration of performance. So that’s the 1st part.

And I think on innovation, it really is constantly looking at what you just said a minute ago, how do we keep adding value? In the now, sometimes it’s just a straight parity play, like we’ve got a competitor who’s in a membership model and they offer these things. If we’re not providing that value, we’re at a disadvantage. And then there are the differentiators. What are the things that no one else is offering that we can offer at scale? And then let’s start trying those and figuring out which of those are resonant with the audience.

Then we just kind of build those out. Try to stay ahead of where the customer is going. I think those are the 2 big ones, and the sustainable growth is largely anchored to the idea that you can’t go for it all at one big swoop. You have to kind of do this incrementally over time and start looking at value networks and expanding through value networks and the like.

Robbie Baxter: I think one of the challenges for a lot of entrepreneurs is that they see the world they want to build and the vision. But then they’re all the way back here at the beginning, and you can’t. Unless you have tons of resources and a crystal ball. You can’t build it all at once. You’ve got to keep testing and iterating. In some cases, you actually have to generate revenue, generate some profits, and demonstrate to your investors that you have a scalable model. There are a lot of milestones you’ve got to get through before you can go to the next level. So many organizations really struggle with what’s first, second, and third.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Yeah. And I think that the beauty of this is if you can prove the test of concept right? If you can get to break even fairly well, if you can get some virality on growth. Those are things that really start to fuel the engines, right? And if you’re not getting those things done. You can want to change the world all you want. But you’re probably going to change a very small world.

So it is really trying to find that resonance and being able to leverage that to get broader and wider and deeper.

Robbie Baxter: Did One Medical do anything to get the viral word of mouth? Or did it just happen on its own?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Strategically, I think what they did is they created a beachhead, and they really nailed it within their area. They knew they didn’t have a marketing budget. This is the difference between now with Amazon. Like Amazon, they have a giant megaphone with their membership model, which they’ve attached the One Medical model to, but in the old days, they just had to get viral in San Francisco. I mean the fact that you’re near Stanford means you were kind of hearing about One Medical in the very early days, and that virality was happening, and then they get enough money for advertising. You’re going to see it on a billboard. They’re going to be kind of avant-garde at the time you’re standing at this bus stop, or whatever train station on the BART. What germs are present while you’re standing here at the BART? And if you want to get checked, we’re down the street corner. So they got to that level of advertising. It was just in time in the market, very local and edgy. Then they had to get a second beachhead right. They had to establish that this could work outside of San Francisco, a lovely part of the world. But is it going to play in Chicago? And so they had to prove that, and they did. And they developed those partnerships. And this is part of scaling which is what I was trying to get at by going wide. They developed strategic partnerships with healthcare centers that already had relationships and already had networks of lives under care. And so then they could get a fast start in a market because they were accessing the front door for those patients, and the quality proven in another market was able to be demonstrated as something we’d likely expect here. And you get a couple of those under your belt before you know it. People are clamoring to join you.

Robbie Baxter: What are some of the things that changed as they grew? And you mentioned partnerships and culture.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Big culture. I think the technology team got bigger and bigger. I mean, as much as they had technologists to start. They just really went into getting as many high-quality medical technologists as they could. And so they were using AI very early on, so that when I texted in a question on the app, it said, “Not sure why I’m not getting reimbursed for this service charge.” There was no human. It was going to an AI that filtered that into the administrative queue.

If I’d have mentioned sniffles in that message, it would have gotten into the clinical queue. So I think the emphasis is constantly on how do we use technology and early on quality checks to make sure that those are getting routed correctly, but for the most part takes less time for some human being to have to respond to, and then triage it and send it to the appropriate place. So I think that became the emphasis since then in technology. So now they are using AI capture in appointments with permission. So instead of my clinician having to write notes. The AI is capturing what was going on.

The clinician can review those notes quickly instead of having to focus on writing them and taking them out of the interpersonal moment. And just more and more of that, the constant sense of where we can use this tool reliably, knowing that it still hallucinates. Where can we use it? Not to make clinical diagnoses, not to put anyone at harm. But a lot of the administrative, repetitive tasks, just big investments in that. So there was more time for people to do what only people can do.

Robbie Baxter: When we were chatting as we were setting up for this interview today, you were talking a little bit about the amount of data and the ability, when they reached critical mass, to be able to work at a population health kind of level.

What does that mean? Both for the experience that an individual patient receives, and for the value of the business.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Well, I’m going to stay with an example that I like to talk about, because I love to talk about colonoscopies. There’s few things more exciting to talk but since nobody wants to do them, and when you turn 50, if you’re a member, they’re going to send you a task to do your colonoscopy, and they’re also going to send you a test kit that you can do by mail, so that you have at least a screening, since most people aren’t doing that because of the intrusive nature of the colonoscopy. And so they’re able to look at what messages increase the probability that you’re going to actually do the screening right? So, we look at how to activate people to their own health? Through effective messaging, they can do A/B testing on that. They can look at what percentage of people do that they can. They can figure out what the right cadence and pacing are to send those messages to people.

 

Screenshot Taken From Cologuard of a Sample Colonoscopy Test Kit

 

Just a variety of lessons learned about, how do we encourage people to slip into the slipstream of wellness, and so many other examples of that they can look at their treatment rates on something like diabetes and their interventions that they would try whether that’s group interventions or specific counseling or cultural sensitive counseling to diabetics. All these things are part and parcel to understanding the most efficient way to deliver something in short supply, which is healthcare service. And so they’re actively involved in constantly trying to learn their interventions. And they’ve got a lot of data just on the app, just what did you click? What did you do? What did you complete? What were your results and findings? What was your next action after you did it? Did you read the follow-up information?

With lots of wearable devices, they have lots of data that they can access and utilize to understand how you’re you’re engaging your health.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, I saw a crazy stat that, according to Aflac, 90% of Americans delay preventative care.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: If 50% of all disease is lifestyle related, the more you can learn about how to help people do what they want to do. Most of us want to be healthy. I think most people want to make the world a better place every day they wake up. I think they want to be healthy and they want their kids to be beautiful, right? There are certain things we want. And I think if you can help people get those things, you’re creating value. And that’s what’s for me. I have so many memberships. I don’t even want to think about the kind of money I spend on memberships, but each one that I do is about making me successful in something that is important to me, whether that’s in entertainment or music, or whatever it might be. Those memberships are to create value and continue to innovate, right? And they grow, and they don’t just stay in one lane. The very 3 things we just talked about with One Medical is as long as they keep doing that, I’m a member.

Robbie Baxter: Membership is about the long game. When an organization has a membership mindset, they’re thinking these are the customers I’m going to have for a long time.

It’s not about solving a problem in the moment, it’s about helping them on the journey. It’s about seeing them around corners as we’ve discussed. It’s around pattern recognition. And it’s ultimately around helping them achieve an ongoing outcome that is important to them, whether I want to have the most fun possible in my free time, or I want to go as far as I can in my career, or now I want to have as many healthy and happy. minutes

It's not about solving a problem in the moment, it's about helping them on the journey. Share on X

The world of membership is only just scratching the surface of health care. Health care is still kind of a mess, and I know my example to you of the mammogram, you’re like, well, Robbie, that is not a One Medical service, the mammogram. You have to go to some other provider, and maybe that’s why.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: The technology may catch up with that. It’s a pretty Draconian torture thing for most women, from what I gathered.

If you just think of the Cologuard as an example, I mean that notion that we could come up with a screening that is sufficient for us to be able to figure out when we need to intervene. So I think we’re going to see more of that. I completely agree. I would go one step further, and that is given the doubling rate of knowledge in the world right now, I think any membership that curates good knowledge in a sea of crazy information is in and of itself a great value. The app alone for me on One Medical, where I can get a triage of the questions I need to know about a condition on my own terms, is very valuable to me right now.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah. Now you talked about the acquisition of knowledge and the speed of change. Now, One Medical is owned by Amazon. The largest leaders of that change. What do you see in your crystal ball? What’s going to happen with One Medical now that they have the distribution, the platform, the technology, and the relationships of one of the biggest direct-to-consumer businesses in the world?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Oh, well, if I only could answer that question, I’d know where to put my money, wouldn’t I? I’m a realistic optimist. So just know that I tend to lean into optimism. But I am pulled back a bit by realism.

On the pure, optimistic side of this thing. It’s going to be this curation platform they’re going to be. You’re going to be able to go to Amazon much like you would go to Grubhub, they are the platform. You go there. You get to select from all these subspecialty treatments that they have called for you, and you can access them. Gosh! Knows how much add-on that is beyond the base membership to get into the platform. But once you’re there, you know, you’re going to have somebody who’s super super knowledgeable about something that, like nutrition that maybe your family doctor may or may not have been. So I think you’re gonna have that. That’s super positive. They’re going to have an integrated suite of services are already doing some of that at the expense of companies like CVS and Walgreen, where you used to have to wait around inside the building, and you know they call your name over the loudspeaker after you handed them the prescription, and you still didn’t know how much you’re going to pay. So it wasn’t until after you shopped over all the discounted candy from Easter, that you could then get to this place where they told you how much it was going to cost you to leave the building.

I think any membership that curates good knowledge in a sea of crazy information is in and of itself a great value. Share on X

So I think because Amazon Health Services, which includes One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy, they’re getting integrated, so that the provider that I’ve just clicked on while I landed in Palo Alto, and they told me I needed this prescription. They can tell me it’s going to be, same day, they can get it to my hotel, and within 4 hours. All that’s going to be integrated. That’s the good side.

The downside is that you have a company that specializes in logistics. That is now in the human service space, and there is nothing in Amazon’s history that I can see. Whole Foods might be somewhat of an exception, but it’s still very supply chain driven. As dependent on humans as the service delivery. So person to person care and health care so it’ll be interesting. I mean, if big health companies have not done well in healthcare, so that’s the hedge you have to make against all of this, and I don’t try to solve that in the book. I think I talk more about how you create a company that really is a membership business that is sellable for $4 Billion dollars to Amazon, the rest will be determined.

Robbie Baxter: Nobody knows what Amazon’s going to do. We’re seeing lots of member-centric startups certainly here in Silicon Valley but all over that are picking away at some of the chronic health issues when One Medical really took primary care. But you know, we’ve had the CEO of Midi Health talking about women’s health at midlife menopause, or perimenopause.

We had Thirty Madison. That’s a company that has identified the Top 20 chronic health issues that doctors don’t care about but patients care a lot about. They’re going after them one by one, saying, “You know it may not kill you, but it does make your life a lot worse.”

Dr. Joseph Michelli: His/Hers. All those who specialized in either men’s issues or women’s issues. I think you’re seeing that now, will they all thrive? Is the new frontier creating membership models around that subscription? Or is it going to be that they all go to an Amazon platform someday? And just as the people who sell to Amazon now aren’t Amazon companies, right? Well, some are, but most of them aren’t, and they’re just the aggregator, and you get some benefits by being a member of Amazon, as it relates to access in some of these places. That’s the question.

Amazon decided to buy One Medical. That’s clearly the strategy they took on this particular frontier. Will that change over time? And they go to an aggregation of these other specialty options, and those specialty memberships may very well want to have the eyeballs of Amazon and the traffic that Amazon generates through its own membership platform.

I just know that the membership of One Medical blew up when they bolted it onto the Amazon membership. So as part of Prime, it’s like $9 a month or $8 a month. I don’t know what the current rate is to be a One Medical member, and it was a discount for maybe let’s say it was $12.15 before, suddenly there was this pulling you in through the prime channel into the One Medical membership, and that’s an add-on to your regular prime membership fee.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, it’s fascinating, and there’s so much else that I want to ask you. But I know I know we’re short on time, and I’m hoping that we have time to just run through a speed round before.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Got it. Let’s do it.

Robbie Baxter: First subscription you ever had?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Gosh! Rolling Stone magazine!

Robbie Baxter: Love it. Your favorite subscription right now?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: It’s called Ultimate Guitar. And yeah, it’s guitar lessons and downloadable sheet music.

Robbie Baxter: Advice for new grandparents.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: I’ve got 9 grandkids, so savor every single dang moment of them, and then send them home sugared up.

Robbie Baxter: And the last place, not including One Medical, where you received great service?

Dr. Joseph Michelli: Oh, the last place I received great service was at a restaurant just about a week ago, and after the dinner was over, the owner came, did his table touch but walked me to the door, opened the door for me, and just asked to make sure I knew where I was going next. If I need any directions.

Robbie Baxter: Amazing! Joseph, thank you so much for being a guest on Subscription Stories. I hope you’ll come back soon.

Dr. Joseph Michelli: I’m a huge fan of yours. Thank you.

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That was Dr. Joseph Michelli, the author of “All Business is Personal: One Medical Human-Centered, Technology-Powered Approach to Customer Engagement.”

For more about Joseph, go to www.josephmichelli.com, and for more about Subscription Stories, go to www.RobbieKellmanBaxter.com/podcast.

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About Dr. Joseph Michelli

Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D., C.S.P., is an internationally sought-after speaker, author, and organizational consultant who transfers his knowledge of exceptional business practices in ways that develop joyful and productive workplaces with a focus on customer experience. His insights encourage leaders and frontline workers to grow and invest passionately in all aspects of their lives.

Dr. Michelli is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Nielson BookScan, and New York Times’ #1 bestselling author. He received his master’s and doctorate from the University of Southern California.

Having journeyed with a close family member through a six-year battle with breast cancer, Dr. Michelli is committed to social causes associated with curing cancer and abating world hunger.

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