I’m excited to announce that Tara and I will be running a practice growth and management workshop for naturopathic doctors on April 17-18, 2010 in Toronto, ON.
This is for both new and established ND’s – you can get all the details and register at NDSuccess.com, but let me give you the highlights here.
Getting new clients takes time, energy and sometimes money. For all that investment, it’s a shame when they don’t come back. We’ve had a lot of faces through our practice doors over the years, and while we do our best to keep them engaged, we don’t retain everyone. As a result, we’ve got our share of “dead” files in the back room.
This year at our strategic planning day, one of our team members came up a great idea for reactivating some of those old patients. It only takes a few minutes a week, and although we’re just starting out, I think it’s a great plan.
There are a lot of names for what we do in practice – alternative, holistic, complementary, integrative. But behind the labels, we all have one thing in common: we’re trying to help others. The catch, however, is that in order to find those people who need our help, most of us have to make some effort to market our services.
Sometimes, though, the very thing that makes many practitioners so good at what they do – their ability to connect with and be sensitive to others - also makes them very, very uncomfortable with the idea of marketing. Behind many of the questions we get from practitioners is a common theme: I’m shy/introverted/timid/reserved. How can I promote my practice?
Note: Kevin Doherty is one of the first people I stumbled across a few years back when we started this blog. He built a successful acupuncture practice, then went on to become an author and business coach.
He’s a smart guy, which I like, but he’s also walked the talk, building a six-figure income while maintaining a life.
We had our annual Celebration of Health at the clinic a few weeks ago. It’s become a tradition for us – we invite patients and the general public, and spend an evening at the clinic enjoying some great food and drinks, and generally enjoying ourselves.
It was a great success, but this year I was trying to pay particular attention to why. Here are a few of our thoughts, but we’d love some further tips. Anyone have any great ideas? Leave them in the comments!
Recently, the naturopaths in Collingwood and surrounding area got together to discuss some joint marketing for Naturopathic Medicine Week. There are more practitioners here than ever (and many more coming soon), and this is something we’ve been wanting to do for years – to collect all our “competition” in one spot and chat.
Why, you ask? Because for us, competition really is good for business and patients. Here’s why turning your competitors into collaborators benefits everyone.
We went through a multi-day strategic planning session last fall. In our case, that essentially meant Tara and I sequestered away in a cheap hideaway where we could focus on the big-picture of the business, and do some great hiking when we needed a break. It was three days very well spent.
One of the real advantages to this process was that we came out of it with a concrete, concise template for how to move forward when things get dicey. I’ve gone through the plan and pulled out the strategies that I feel are making the biggest difference during challenging times:
The stats show that about two-thirds of us make New Year’s resolutions. My guess is that the majority of the other third can’t help but think at least a little bit about 2009, too. It’s natural. We’re thinking about getting organized and making fresh starts. Out with the old. In with the new. We feel the need to grow, change and just get better at what we do.
The challenge is that these are pretty big projects, and it’s easy to bite off more than your practice can chew. Instead, I like to think of one principle to focus on in the coming year. It’s a bit like herding – I need one idea that can guide all those tiny details, decisions and actions in the right direction. Each “cow” might have its own unique path and nature, but at the end of the year, I want all those bovine bits to arrive at the same place.
Reader M writes:
I’m wondering what the best way is to network with other practitioners in a small area. I’m feeling uneasy, shy, and even slightly pushy just cold-calling people, especially in planning exactly what I want to say. I don’t want to inconvenience people, and I don’t want them to feel like I am trying to take business away from them.
We’ve touched on leveraging professional referrals (one of our 5 P’s), but I want to go into this in more detail and give you a step-by-step system that works.
There is a natural progression to starting an alternative health practice. After opening your doors, the first order of business is, of course, to get as many new patients as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a natural second step in this process is to forget all about these patients once they leave the office. The file goes safely in the cabinet, and the next time it comes out is when the patient takes the initiative to call for an appointment.
Getting your holistic patients to return with regular frequency iswhere you start to reap the rewards of the hard work and expense of attracting new patients to your practice in the first place. It’s where you begin to turn your focus from the external world of prospective patients, to the internal world of the existing patients in your practice.
