Tara emailed me the other day:

“Just pulled in to the grocery store and then pulled right back out because I remembered you needed a quarter to get a cart, which of course I did not have. The moral? Don’t make it tough for your customers to spend money at your store – the quarter is about them, not about me and they lost $100 worth of business because of it today.

Now I’m sitting in the their competitor’s parking lot writing this email.” 🙂

Compare that with another email Tara sent me a couple of days later:

“I was just thinking about how delighted I was with the fact the hotel had a little container on the bathroom vanity that contained Q-tips. Such a little thing, but it makes me want to stay here again. How much did that cost the hotel? Hardly anything, and they have a delighted customer.  It’s the little, inexpensive, but unexpected things that truly delight.”

In both of these cases, pennies were traded for dollars. In the first case, the store reached for pennies and lost dollars. In the second, the company gave away the pennies, and got dollars in return.

But the real story here is one of service. Providing it–or not–is what’s driving the flow of pennies to dollars. Tara and I are both service geeks. There’s a lot of joy in good service. Money, too, I think. It’s worth thinking about where you’re exchanging dollars and pennies in your own practice.

What’s most important about service in our industry, though, is what it means.

Most of us aren’t in the business of naturopathy, or massage, or chiropractic or acupuncture or nutrition. We’re in the business of private health care. People are paying out-of pocket for what we do, and when people people pay out-of-pocket for things, there’s always a reason.

Sometimes the reason is that what you offer actually works.

But I think more often the reason is that you offer great service. Because it shows you actually care.