The Practitioner's Journey » practice marketing

3 Ways to Simplify Your Practice Marketing

Dan — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:54:21 +0000

As I dig deeper into the traits that successful practitioners share, I’ve discovered that–no surprise–they all tend to get a lot done, particularly when it comes to marketing. The problem, though, is that practice marketing can be a bottomless pit of to-do’s. It’s easy to become overwhelmed, confused, or intimidated.

We covered four questions to help get your marketing done a while back, and some tips on creating your practice marketing plan, but I want to share with you three things we’ve done so far this year that have simplified our marketing efforts, which in turn has allowed us to get more done.

1. Create Marketing Themes
To make things a bit easier this year, we “chunked” our marketing conceptually over the four quarters of the year. We used part of the framework from The Practitioner’s Journey, but you could use anything that works for you.

The theme of our first quarter was about increasing new patient numbers (The River). The next two quarters will be about leveraging our existing patient base more – promoting existing products and services, adding new ones, managing patient flow and scheduling (The Boulder). The last quarter will have more emphasis on shifting from practice to business, and planning our eventual transition to new space (The Valley).

This “theming” has created some tangible advantages. It’s allowed us to:

Decide what to do next. Sometimes a huge task list just makes you want to bury your head in the sand and not do anything. The themes let us narrow the big pile down to just the tasks relevant to now.
Focus. It’s easier to defer new “shiny” marketing ideas to a later time if you know that there really is a defined later time.
Understand the big picture. Themes let you look at your entire marketing year in a sensible strategic way. Our themes for each quarter give us a “marketing plan in a nutshell.”

You don’t have to use the same themes we did. You could divide your year by marketing type, for example. Perhaps you want to focus on kick-starting your website efforts in one quarter, focus another on live talks or public outreach, and another on social media. It’s up to you. For us, the themes are just an effective way to stay focused and underwhelmed.

It’s worth noting that we don’t abandon one area of focus when we shift to a new theme. We didn’t give up on new patients after the first quarter, for example. But a lot of our new patient initiatives were kick-started at the beginning of the year, and then maintained or tweaked for the remainder. And we deferred a heap of new marketing and other practice changes and decisions to the quarters in which they belong.

2. Take Daily Action

A few years back Tara and I both experimented with exercising every day for a year. The objective was to do 30 minutes of something every single day. No misses. We’d always been active and healthy, but wanted to take it up a notch.

Not only did we feel great and never get a single cold or flu that year, it turned out that doing it every day actually made things easier. It just became a small thing to be done every day, like eating or sleeping. Taking the choice out of it seemed to simplify everything.

We’ve been applying the same strategy to our marketing efforts: Do one thing every day, no matter how small. The end result for us is the process is simpler, and the sum of all those small efforts is far greater than before. We’ve avoided the trap of “when I have time, I’ll do this big marketing thing”–we all know how that ends. Rather than have a “marketing day”, for example, we just do steady, tiny bits.

Unlike the 365 days of exercise, we’ve limited the daily marketing to 5 days a week, not seven, but the results are the same. Slow, steady, improvement, without the overwhelming dread of trying to take over the universe in one afternoon.

3. Track Your Efforts

It’s not hard to make a list of things that you need to do in the future. No shortage of those. But what about tracking what you’ve already done? There’s real value in seeing your progress, but it’s hard to “see” that progress in one place.

Tara has started to use a really simple tracking method–putting everything in the calendar on her mac after she does it. She uses a couple of specific colors to identify marketing tasks and, in our case, referrals into one of our treatment tools.

Here’s a quick peek at what I mean. The green entries are marketing tasks. The red entries are when we started tracking prescription rates for one of our therapies. It’s not rocket science…but it gets the job done, and I’m pretty sure it’d be just as easy to do in Outlook, or with a monthly paper calendar and a couple of highlighters:

This has a number of distinct benefits:

Awareness. It’s easy to see with a click that things are moving forward. And we have a basic history of marketing efforts on one place all the time.
Motivation. Once you get a steady streak of green bars, or red entries, it starts to become a bit of a game to keep things going.
Reward. It’s remarkably satisfying to see all your marketing in one place. It’s something you don’t get from scattered entries in a daytimer, or random to-do lists.
Results. The work’s getting done, and it’s is paying off in terms of better patient numbers, etc.

These strategies are all designed to do the same thing: to simplify the giant pile of stuff that is practice marketing. Our experience? If you can make things easier to grasp, then you make them easier to do.

5 Essential Presentation Tips for Wellness Practitioners

Dan — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:32:28 +0000

We wrote recently about how to grow your practice with public speaking. That post focused mainly on finding places to speak, and how to turn speaking opportunities into paying clients. Since then, however, I’ve had a few discussions with practitioners who want more help with the actual preparation and speaking part.

If you’re nervous about the idea of speaking, remember that it’s normal to be scared. Maybe even helpful. The key is to understand that great speakers are built not born. Are some naturally more comfortable? Innately better communicators? Born storytellers? Undoubtedly. But anyone can learn to engage an audience and deliver a presentation that gets results. Here’s how.

1. Outline First

To beat an old analogy to death, it’s hard to build a decent house without a blueprint, and the same goes for presentations. The structure is everything. It defines what you’re trying to say, and creates a logical flow. It’s also a huge help when it comes to creating great presentation materials.

Mostly, though, it helps create the story. You need structure to tell a story, and story is what makes it all work.

Story doesn’t necessarily mean “interesting anecdote” though. Here are the elements I consider important for your outline:

One clear message. In one sentence, why have you brought everyone here? The story of this blog post is: Anyone can become an effective presenter by following a few simple rules. I like a clear objective that says, “Here’s why you’re all here. Here’s what you’re going to discover.”
Clear structure. Think of the outline as your table of contents. The map. It says, “Here’s how we’re going to get to our destination.”
Flow. Do the pieces fit? Does it make sense?
Novelty or surprise. What have you got for your audience that’s new? Surprising? Did you know that it’s wheat, not fat, that’s driving obesity? Did you know that the antibiotics you’re using to fight infections might be helping to create them? Remember that these ideas might be old news to YOU, but for the general public, they help create that sense of curiosity that all good stories have.

Outlining this blog post, for example, I get something like this:

Intro

Anyone can be great. Speakers are made not born.

Principles

Outline first
Rehearse early
etc.
etc.
etc.

Closing

Leveraging your work
Resources

There’s no rocket science here. It’s just simple clarity. Once sentence, plus a bullet outline. That’s all you need to get to the next step…

2. Rehearse Sooner

Once I have the outline, I’ll turn that into a few very quick PowerPoint slides, without any regard for appearance, concise wording, spelling, images, etc. And then I start rehearsing. Yep – right away.

Once the blueprint from Step 1 is in place, I can launch the slide show, stand up with my remote in hand, and start speaking as if I’m doing the talk live. Then I just make notes along the way.

To clarify, you don’t have to use PowerPoint to actually present. For me, it’s simply a tool at this point to start to develop the presentation and to start rehearsing as soon as possible.

Is it messy? Absolutely. Embarrassing? Definitely. But no one’s watching at this stage. And early rehearsing does a few critical things:

Gets you comfortable speaking. The more you practice, the better.
Generates new ideas. Speaking out loud brings new insights, phrases and related ideas out into the open that might never have come to conscious thought otherwise.
Improves flow. Often, what seems like the right sequence or combination of ideas and slides in theory doesn’t work as well when you speak. The sooner you start speaking, the sooner you find the gaps and inconsistencies that only show up when you speak aloud.
Gives you a feel for timing. You’ll start to get a sense as the presentation develops of how long it takes to cover certain areas. That’ll help you refine your presentation to the right length.
Improves improvisation. Trying to fumble my way through my bare-bones outline creates more comfort with having to wing it when things go off the rails. Last summer I spoke to at a conference and my presentation files were corrupted. I had to speak for an hour and a half with no resources at all. S&*$ happens, and practicing sooner pays off when it does.
Helps memory. The sooner you start rehearsing, the better you’ll know your topic, the less content you’ll need on your slides, and the less you’ll need any kind of memory aids.

The key takeaway is this: the best oral presentation is created orally. Sure you can write the whole thing down and read it. But you’ll get a better outcome if you build it in the same way you’ll be delivering it. It’s not about how soon before the event you start rehearsing. It’s about how soon in the process you start.

Use your outline, and start speaking. Then stop and jot notes each time you fumble or come up with something brilliant. Eventually, you’ll have a great story.

3. Do PowerPoint Right

Once you’ve got your presentation refined to pretty much it’s end form, you can start to refine your slides into something more presentable. (Assuming you’re going to use them at all.)

If you’re going to use PowerPoint or Keynote slides for the actual presentation, though, then use them well. The best single piece of advice I’ve heard is to pay by the word. Imagine you have to pay for every word you put on a slide. You’d almost certainly use fewer words and more images. You’d be less tempted to just put up slides and then read them to your audience. You’d be able to use larger, more legible fonts. You’d be less boring. And you wouldn’t insult your audience by reading to them like children.

In short, “paying by the word” drives great PowerPoint. Remember:

Your job is to tell a story that engages and inspires an audience, not read PowerPoint slides.

Some great resources for slide design:

4. Skip The Handouts

“The audience will either read your slides or listen to you. They will not do both. So, ask yourself this: is it more important that they listen, or more effective if they read?” – slide:ology

I don’t like handouts at all anymore – at least, not ones that are just printouts of slides. I send that out after by email or using slideshare.net so people can reference it, but I encourage people to just listen, think, and interpret, and then write down any key “a-ha’s” only.

Are there things worth printing on paper and handing out? Sure. But not your slides. Consider instead sending it out as a resource after.

Not printing handouts also is the single best way to encourage people to give you their email address so you can follow up. ’nuff said.

5. Respect the Audience’s Time and Physical Presence

Remember that you need to justify that there are many people burning time and money to be in the same physical space with you. Ask yourself, “Is this worth the audience showing up?”

Could this presentation have just as well been a blog post or an article?
Could I just email my slides to everyone and they’d be just as far ahead?
What’s the benefit to the audience of being in this room together? Can I connect them to each other?
What am I offering, right now, that they can’t get online or from a book?
What is the audience gaining by being here in person that they couldn’t get in a webinar or teleconference?

Presentations are resource heavy. If I assemble 50 health care professionals in a room for two hours, I’m burning at least $10,000 dollars in billable time. Make your presentation worth it. I think This Dilbert cartoon says it far better than I ever could.

To sum up, presenting is something you can do, and do well. And it can be worth it. To get the most from your engaging talk, though, you’ll want to follow up. You can use the tips from our previous post for ideas. And if you’ve got ideas from your own experiences, let us know in the comments!

Help for Your Practice in 2012

Dan — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:54:17 +0000

Even the most devout anti-resolutionist has a tough time not thinking ahead at this time of year, and we’re no exception. If you’re like us, your thoughts are turning toward the New Year, and how to improve your practice.

Here are three upcoming happenings here at TPJ for 2012 that we think will make a difference for you, including a way to get The Practitioner’s Journey for just $5 if you haven’t already got your copy.

1. How To Make 80K in Your First Year of Practice
We had the pleasure of interviewing a fantastic new practitioner who took home $80,000 in her first year of practice. I’m going to share her story early in the New Year. It’s interesting stuff. Her story should be required reading. And you can all do what she did – even if it’s not your first year of practice.

2. The Practitioner’s Journey Workbook – NOW AVAILABLE! Click here to order

We get a lot of feedback on The Practitioner’s Journey, but it’s the framework – the figurative journey that helps people better understand their practice growth – that gets the most comments.

What we’ve been asked for is a way to better put that framework to active work in practice. Enter The Practitioner’s Journey Workbook:

Some 30 pages of exercises, assessments and tools to help find your difference, attract new clients, and leverage your existing ones
Print it out as a paper workbook, or fill it out the interactive PDF right onscreen on your computer or iPad.
We’ve also added an easy to use, but powerful spreadsheet tool for tracking your practice statistics. You can easily track your numbers, and watch your practice grow in vivid color. You just enter the basic data, it cranks out simple metrics that give you insight into your progress.
If you haven’t yet read the book, you can get the original eBook, and workbook/stats package for a reduced price.

Click here to order your copy!

3. Our New Book: The Go-To Guru
After all the websites and business cards, the tweets and posts, the speaking gigs and networking, all practitioners are really trying to do the same thing: get attention.

We’re all clamoring for attention, and the truth is that attention (and the business that comes with it) flows to those best able to establish themselves as what we call The Go-To Guru. That’s the title of our new book, and it comes out in 2012. Woo! It’s based on our experiences and interviews with dozens of successful “G2G’s”, and the principles they use to become the practitioners of choice in their area. And, of course, like The Practitioner’s Journey, it’s not quite like other books… Pre-order info and reader discounts to follow!

Here’s to 2012!

Thank you all for reading, sharing, and spreading the word.

-Dan

How to Grow Your Practice With Public Speaking

Dan — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:34:46 +0000

Hi All,

In related news, I’m opening up more speaking dates for 2012. If you’re looking for an engaging speaker at your conference, convention, or classroom, you can learn more here. Thanks in advance for spreading the word to your schools, instructors and association leaders! – Dan

A reader recently asked me:

What is the best way to arrange speaking arrangements or workshops, etc. and where is the best place to do them? I’m starting a practice and haven’t done any of this yet. Any insight would be much appreciated.

This is definitely not the first time I’ve had this question–there seems to be a lot of mystery surrounding the idea of speaking to groups.

There are really two ideas here, though. The first is how to actually find the opportunities. The second is how to turn those opportunities into paying clients. You can tackle both of those with these four steps.

Step 1. Prepare…But Just a Little

Don’t fall for the trap of preparing a talk before you have anyone to talk to. This is most certainly a ready, fire, aim type scenario.

“But wait,” you say. “Before I go looking, don’t I need to prepare my keynote, and shoot some video of me speaking, and create some PowerPoints, and do some research, and find some funny cartoons on the internet?”

No. Don’t do a SINGLE BIT OF WORK on any type of presentation until someone actually wants you to present. The closest you need to come at this point is to ponder a list of topics you might like to speak on – stress reduction, fertility, improving your golf game, boosting energy, treating IBS. Whatever fits your game and floats your boat, with the knowledge that you might well speak on something else if someone asks.

The key: These topics aren’t about what you DO. You’re not going to speak about massage per se – you’re going to speak about stress relief. It’s not about acupuncture, it’s about how you can remove years from someone’s appearance using acupuncture. It’s about your potential audience’s problem first, you second.

Step 2. Find Speaking Opportunities

It turns out there’s a special technique to arranging speaking opportunities. It’s very advanced, and highly secretive:

You have to tell people you want to speak.

Really. There are speaking gigs waiting to be found, and there are ones waiting to be created, but they all come out of the same basic idea–you need to put it out there in the world that you want to speak. (In fact, this applies to most things. Tell people what it is you’re looking for, and you’ll be surprised at how few people you need to tell to find help.)

But…who to tell? Here are a few ideas from our experience:

Service Groups. Many non-profits and service groups, like Rotary, have a steady stream of speakers for their meetings. Your local clubs aren’t hard to find.
Special Interest Health Groups. There are support groups for everything from diabetes to cancer and MS.
Schools. You can often land a gig speaking to teachers on professional development days. (And in our world, they have great benefit plans.)
Local Business. Corporations often offer learning opportunities for staff. Particularly if they think it’ll reduce sick days and increase productivity.
Grocery Stores & Restaurants. Our local grocery store has a community kitchen space for lectures and cooking classes. All you have to do is make up a topic and submit it.
Health Food Stores. Health food and supplement stores would love it if you could speak to a group in their space who might then buy a bunch of product.
Partners. Why not team up with a complementary practitioner or business (like the health food store above?). You can both spread the word twice as far, and tap into each other’s client base. How does it work? You call up a practitioner and say, “Hey. Do you want to do a public talk together? Let’s get together and discuss.” Then the details have a magical way of working out. It’s just the call that needs to happen.
Existing Clients. Don’t forget them. They might not need you to speak, but they almost certainly know someone who does. Email them all. Put a sign at the front desk.
The Rest of Your Local Area. Put a page on your website that says you’re available for local speaking engagements. Post it on Facebook. Tweet.

Sidebar: The Big Secret to Having the Guts to Book Speaking Gigs

Here’s what’s important for you to remember: you don’t need guts or sales skills. You’re doing a favor for most of these places by offering your services. You’re helping them out–I promise. Many service clubs have mandates to bring in speakers, and the poor sucker saddled with the job is always on the lookout for someone. Many workplaces like to offer lunch-bag learning options. Many health support groups are desperate for someone to speak to their members.

You don’t need to feel like you’re asking for a handout. You aren’t. You’re offering a valuable service.

Step 3: Speak. (And One More Thing That’s More Important)

Do your thing. And do it as well as you can. Don’t read slides to people. You can use slides, but remember that most people in attendance already know how to read. The goal of speaking is not to present PowerPoint slides. For a better set of tips than I could ever create, check out Seth’s post.

Here’s the important part, though: your job is to somehow get permission to contact the people you speak to. Not everyone–sometimes not anyone–is going to become a client right away. You need to capture their contact information–likely an email address–so you can continue to speak to them. Here are a few suggestions:

Offer a takeaway. When we’ve done cooking classes, we’ve sometimes given the recipes out to people. But other time’s we’ve passed around an email signup sheet so we can send the recipes after. That’s smarter.
Offer a prize. A door prize or draw is often enough to get people to offer an email address.
Offer a free consult/service. We do free 15-minute “meet the doctor” visits. You can do what works for you, but if you ask for email addresses so you can contact people to give them their free service, you’ll usually get a decent response.
Offer your slides/handouts. If you’ve got useful content–which I’m sure you do–then offer to email it out, rather than printing it on dead trees.
Just ask people to sign up. Just pass around a sheet of paper and a pen and just ask people to sign up. They will.
Give people your blog/Facebook Page/Twitter name/ etc. At the very least, make sure you tell people how they can hear more from you.

The key here to just do it. You only need a piece of blank paper and a pen. Write “email address” at the top and pass it around. It’s that simple.

Step 4: Follow Up

Contact participants. Contact everyone within 24 hours. Thank them for coming. Fulfill whatever you offered, and ask them to call if you can help in any way. Suggest they take some action – call, like you on Facebook, subscribe to your blog, etc.
Contact the host. Thank them, too. And…here’s the important part. Ask if they’d be willing to write you a one-sentence testimonial. You can even offer to write it for them. I find that hosts tend to thank you right back, and offer positive comments. If they do, just ask if you can use their kind remarks on your website. That’s it!

Tips:

If your clinic/office space works, consider offering some public talks in your space. It gets people in the door. Beyond that, try your local library for space, or just ask three people. Someone will know where to find something cheap/free.
Don’t make this bigger than it is. Just tell people you want to speak to them, and then speak to them. If you’re nervous, then good. You’re supposed to be. The only people who aren’t at least a little nervous are narcissists and people with a lot of experience. You likely aren’t either.
If you’re really nervous. Or you think of yourself as a practice introvert, then you have a choice. You can decide that’s just how it is, and market your practice in other ways – you don’t have to speak. Or you can decide that speaking is a skill like anything else and get on with learning it. Including maybe screwing it up a couple of times just to speed up the learning.
You might also consider getting someone else to do the speaking. We brought in a guest speaker this year who spoke to a full house on a topic relevant to our clinic. It took some work to fill a whole theater, but we didn’t have to do the lecture.
Focus on illness, not wellness. You’ll get more interest in a talk focused on problems, then one focused on “optimal health”.

5 Free Sources of Writing Inspiration for Your Practice

Dan — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:06:49 +0000

Creating content is becoming more and more essential for practitioners. It’s hard to create a website that gets search traffic without good words on the page. Newspaper ads work better when you also write articles. It’s easier to engage your clients in the long run when you communicate with them regularly, and that, too, takes content. Even a 140-character tweet or a Facebook update takes the same thing: content.

We’ve written about creating great content to market your practice. but we heard from people who felt they were stumbling before the start line–they didn’t know what to write about.

The good thing is that inspiration isn’t as far away as you might think. We write a lot, and we get our inspiration from some sources that are both free and easy to digest. Here are five of them.

1. Google News
We skim the Google Health News most mornings–I’d say it’s the one source we track regularly. It’s an easy way to get ideas, and it also gives us a heads up about what patients might be asking about. They’re getting the same news from one source or another, and that often leads to questions. Being prepared to answer them is helpful.

It takes me less than a minute to skim the headlines, and perhaps another minute longer once in a while to read a news story that catches my interest.

2. Google Alerts
Instead of searching on Google for your area of expertise every time you want to write something, wouldn’t it be great if Google just kept tabs on that for you? Enter Google Alerts, a free service that will search Google for terms you specify–like “infertility” for example–and deliver you a daily, weekly, or as-it-happens list of the latest relevant Google search results.

3. Alltop
Alltop is an amalgamation of top news stories from blogs and websites in a huge number of categories. You can find the health directory here. Pick a category, and you’ll find dozens and dozens of news stories and articles. Whenever you need inspiration, just surf over and skim the headlines.

4. Twitter Searches
Even if you’re not a Twitter user, you can still skulk around and follow the action. You can search tweets here to find everything from news and research to success stories and more. You may have to sift through a few personal tweets, but it’s fast, easy, and free.

5. Journals & Publications
Many medical journals have open access options, email summaries, or blog or Twitter feeds that let you stay up to date on research and best practices without paying a subscription fee. Check the website of your favorite journal, or if you want something broader, try a journal watch service like Galen’s Watch. You’ll get bit sized research summaries you can easily skim to find something relevant for your prospective clients. (For a free option, you can read the Galen’s Watch blog here to get a feel for it.)

There are plenty more sources of free inspiration – Facebook, association websites, blogs, article directories and other news aggregators. But any one of them will take you a long way.

Here are the two important parts:

1. When something you read inspires you, infuriates you, or otherwise sparks something in you, pay attention. It’s a sign that a) it’s relevant, b) you have something to say and c) you’ll find saying it easier than when you’re trying to simply fill a page. Writing’s a lot easier when you actually care.

2. Capture the idea. You don’t need to write anything now. You just need to capture the source so you’ll have it when you need it. Collect your inspiration in one place–it only takes a second to bookmark a URL, or paste it into a document on your desktop. That way, the next time you need content, you’ll have something to say.

How (and Why) To Set Up Facebook Places for Your Practice

Dan — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:59:51 +0000

Hi all – if you want to skip the ‘why’, just scroll down for the how-to part. It’s easy. There’s also a clinic sign we made at the bottom that you can download in PDF… -Dan

Facebook has become one of the largest sources of traffic to our clinic website. And the more traffic we get from it, the more we play with it. And the more we play with it, the greater the potential seems.

We recently set up the clinic as a Facebook “Place”. While a “Page” is like a Facebook profile for your business, Places is a location-based side of Facebook. It lets people use their phone or mobile device to “check-in” – to say to their other FB friends, “Hey – this is where I am, right now.”

How Places Can Help Your Practice

1. Traffic and Awareness

When someone checks in to a Place, an entry goes into their FB feed. It look something like this:

My FB friends (or friends of friends, etc, depending on privacy settings) can then click on the clinic link to take them to our Page, or they can comment on my location, or Like it. I can also tag any FB friends who happen to be with me at the time – all of which serves to basically send the clinic name and link spinning around Facebook in one form or another. That brings people to our page, where they can Like the clinic, or visit our website. All of which trickles down into someone eventually showing up.

2. Deals

Places also offers you the ability to create “deals” – essentially rewards to your clients for checking in when they arrive at your practice. There are four kinds:

We haven’t used any deals yet – I’m not sure they’re a fit for every practice – but we may test it out. Regardless, I’m intrigued – if anyone’s tried it, let us know in the comments.

How To Set Up Facebook Places

This is one of those things that’s really easy, but isn’t necessarily intuitive. You’ll need to be at your practice with your mobile device to get started. Here are the instructions I used. They worked just fine, although the last step of merging our clinic Page and Place seems to be taking awhile. But it only took a few minutes to get it all up and running.

(For those of you really into this stuff, merging Places and Pages seems to be in flux, with various pros and cons, including problems with multiple locations. Might be worth waiting a little while to merge, but there’s no reason to not set up your Place anyway. If this all seems like Greek to you, just go ahead and set up your Place, and forget about the merging part for now. )

A Sign for Your Waiting Room

I’m not convinced that there’s a heap of traffic in our waiting room that will check in via phone, but I’m curious. I thought I’d put up a sign in the clinic letting people know they can do it. Here’s a generic version of the one we made – you can download the PDF here if you want to print it out and do the same, or drop in your own name or logo.

Failing Faster: How To Avoid the Trap of Practice Perfection

Dan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:27:00 +0000

One of the barriers to practice marketing is getting caught up in trying to make things perfect. You put things off because you need to figure out X, or get just the right Y, or get some advice from Z. And the time ticks by.

And, of course, you really can’t get things perfect. Trying to hit perfect is a recipe for a) not getting anything done, and b) feeling like a loser for not getting anything done. It turns out, aiming for perfect is really just afraid to screw up in different clothes.

To beat that, we’ve been trying to, in essence, fail faster. Essentially the opposite of getting things perfect.

Really?

Yes. Really.

What The Hell I’m Talking About
This idea can be a hard sell, so I’m always on the lookout for…well, failures. As it turns out, there are all kinds of them once you start looking.

Here’s one:

Each year we try to connect with our best referrers. Some of them are patients who are real champions of the clinic, others are health care professionals who tend to send people our way.

Connecting helps us discover why people refer. Or how we can do better. But always, it’s just nice to show our gratitude.

To shake things up this year, we decided to offer our best referrers some certificates for a free initial visit that they could give away.

We’d never done that before, but we have extra help at the clinic and it seemed like a good experiment to try. It gave our referrers a way to give something in turn to someone else, and a way to reduce the barrier to entry for what is a costly service for some.

Rather than spend a whole bunch of time figuring out the best way to do it, though, we just…did it. Just pulled the trigger with limited prep.

The Results

FAIL.

So far, it hasn’t worked out. Last time I checked, not one of the certificates had been redeemed. Nice.

But of course, the best part about screwing up is what you learn.

Lesson #1: Be Specific

There were a couple of simple mistakes we made.

1. We didn’t put an expiry date on the gift. I wouldn’t normally do that for gift certificates that people pay for, but why didn’t we do it for one’s we’re giving away? Oops. We should have limited the time frame. Never even crossed my mind, though.

2. We didn’t tell our referrers what we were looking for. This became clear when one person said, “Thanks. I know just the person. They’re really active, healthy, and into nutrition. I’ll give it to them.”

WTF? Someone who’s active, eating well, and healthy has no reason to come to us! We’re looking for sick people who can barely function, not healthy ones! We should have said something like:

Do you have a client, friend or family member with a chronic health problem that no one seems to be able to help? Please pass on this certificate with our compliments.

Or we could have gotten even more specific, identifying three health concerns that we have the most success with. We did neither, and as a result our gifts are now languishing in desk drawers, glove boxes and under fridge magnets filled with grocery lists and kid’s schoolwork.

Both of these mistakes were simply problems with not being specific. Easily fixed for next time. But of course, there’s a larger lesson here. (Isn’t there always? )

Lesson #2: Failing Faster Works

Part of sharing this with you is so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes, but also to point out something more important: that we were better off screwing this up, then not doing it at all.

Here’s why.

The stakes in health care are high. People are trusting you with their most important asset. Most regulated professions have a whole infrastructure to protect the public – accredited schooling, ethics and jurisprudence training, licensing exams, continuing education. There’s a lot that goes into making sure you screw up as little as possible.

Here’s the thing, though: the stakes in marketing your practice are low.

Marketing a practice is mostly cheap. A bit of time here, some paper there, a few bucks over here. Even in a fledgling practice, a lot of it is small potatoes – mostly time. But your training makes you risk-averse. And that can bleed into your practice marketing efforts.

It’s okay to screw up. In fact, it’s essential. When you try to not make mistakes, you start looking for perfect. But Perfect is a distant destination, somewhere out beyond Never and Ever. Looking for it is a recipe for not getting anything done.

Our whole experiment cost a few dollars and a few hours. It didn’t work – at least not yet. But who cares? It’ll work next time, because we failed forward. Now we can do it again, better. If we had waited for perfect, we’d have nothing done, and still not know how to get it right. And in the meantime, we’ve connected personally with our best referrers to say thanks. And that definitely works.

Been wanting to start a Facebook page for your practice? Just do it. It’s free.
What about that email newsletter? Just do it. Screw it up if you want – it’s free.
What about your Google Places page? Who cares if you make a mistake – it’s free.
Twitter? Why not? How badly can you go wrong with 140 characters? And it’s free, too.

Not all these may be a fit for your practice – that’s fine. But if they are, don’t let fear of failing hold you back – the stakes are low.

Next time you think perfection is holding you back, ask yourself, “What’s the real cost of screwing this up?” Most of the time the true cost is a lot smaller than you think, and what you gain in experience is well worth it.

No related posts.

How to Manage a Long Absence from Practice

Dan — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:29:39 +0000

Reader J. writes:

“…how do I revive my practice after leaving it for a 6-month maternity leave? I took on a locum and I went from seeing 30+patients a week to her seeing a mere 10 patients per week at best.

I know many of my patients wanted to wait until I got back, but I also know that many will have dropped off the planet unless I am proactive about generating new business and reviving my relationship with past clients.”

Whether it’s a maternity leave, a sabbatical, some down time, a return to school, or any other reason, a long absence has the potential to wreak havoc on your practice. We’ve been there. Here’s what we did, starting with the year leading up to our sabbatical.

I: Before You Go

Absences are a bit like prevention – you get the best results from starting early. You might not always have the luxury of planning in advance, but if you can, it’ll pay off.

a) Reframe Success:
A big turning point for us in the sabbatical planning process was to reframe what we were expecting from the practice. We started out this way:

How do we lose as little money as possible while we’re gone?

And one day we reframed the question this way:

How can the practice make a profit while we’re gone?

That may seem like just semantics, but it changed the way we looked at things. And that, it turn, changed what we did before we left. That simple shift led to adding new people and services that enable the practice to be profitable during a 5-month hiatus.

b) Diversify
Those new services were really about diversifying – about ensuring that less of the practice revenue was coming from one person’s efforts. If you have some lead time before your absence, now’s the time to start planning. What can you add to your practice? New people? New products? New services? Focus on things that can deliver revenue beyond what a locum can generate by working with your clients.

c) Get More Help
If you’ve been running a one-person show, it may seem counter-intuitive to hire office support when know you’re leaving. But it’s worth considering. If you feel like you don’t have time to expand your practice before you leave, perhaps you need more admin help – paying a receptionist part-time, for example, might free up the time and head space you need to diversify, or spend more time marketing your practice. Plus when it comes time to leave, you’ll have someone ready to fill your shoes on the administrative side.

II: While You’re Gone

a) Stay in Touch
It’s just not that hard to stay in touch with your client base any more. If you haven’t already, now is the time to get that free MailChimp account and get your email newsletter started.

If you’re already using email, a blog, social media, or print to keep in touch, keep it going while you’re away. You’d be surprised at how interested your clients may be in what you’re doing. You don’t need to do a lot – just share, encourage, and educate people like always.

b) Don’t Completely Bail Out
You may well be in a place where you want to completely abdicate all responsibility for the practice. That’s fine – sometimes that’s what you need. But understand completely disengaging will come at a cost without some amazing people and processes to fill your shoes. If you do decide to fully leave, just give yourself permission to change your mind. It’s hard to predict how a long absence feels until it’s happening.

III: When You Get Back

When you return, energized and ready to tackle practice again, here are some things to consider.

a) Go One-to-One
Now’s the time to pull patient files, and pay attention when clients pop into your mind. People love being personally contacted for legitimate reasons – our experience is that they particularly like email. Keep up the email newsletter and other mass marketing, sure, but it’s time to start reconnecting personally.

It may help to break it down into small actions. Everyone has time to email one client every morning. If that’s easy, step it up to three or more. Just start building the habit. Do it every single day.

b) Leverage Your Experience
Is there something about your time off that you can bring back to your practice? Your newfound experience with infants? Your expanded education in a new modality? Can you share your experience in another country in the form of a public presentation, or other speaking gigs? It may not apply to every absence, but almost every change in life brings new wisdom – why not share?It’s a great way to create marketing opportunities without really feeling like you’re marketing.

c) Reconnect with referrers
Despite your best efforts to stay in touch, your biggest fans still may not even know you’re back! Get in touch with them – one-by-one, in whatever way seems best. Again – turn it into something small you can do every day.

One Day, This Will Be a Small Deal

Leaving your “baby” seems like a big deal – and it is. But one day you’ll look back at it as less of a big scary deal, and more of an amazing experience that you’ll remember forever. And perhaps one that changes your practice for the better.

While it may be easier said than done, try not panic. Figure out the worst-case financial scenario for your absence. Decide if you can accept it, then get on with building your practice, and enjoying some amazing time away.

Growing Your Practice With Words: 6 Steps to Great Writing That Gets Done

Dan — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:56:09 +0000

It’s amazing to me how many of our practice building efforts involve writing. Blog posts. Website content. Articles for newspapers and magazines. Fliers. Patient forms. Letters. Facebook posts. Email newsletters. The list goes on.

Of course, we like that medium, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture. I see writing as crucial for any practice. From the signs on your walls to the content of your website, your clients are experiencing your practice not just through their interaction with you, but through the written word.

For some, though, the importance doesn’t matter – the empty page is still a source of dread. It’s too big, too hard, too overwhelming. Many a blog, website and newsletter never see the light of day because of that dread.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

I want to share with you our basic process for writing short-to-medium length content like a blog post or article. I’ve broken it into multiple steps for simplicity, but the truth is you can do all of these in a very short time. (Total time for this post: Under 40 minutes)

Before we get to the steps, though, two principles to carry along the way:

Aim for Short

Long is too hard, too scary, and too costly. Most of all though, people don’t read long – if anything, it scares them away. We think long because we spent years in school being taught to write a certain number of words instead of just trying to deliver the message. Time to start losing that programming.

If you’re struggling with getting started (or getting finished), help yourself by deciding that you never need to write more than three paragraphs. That’s it. You might write more, but don’t set yourself up for failure at the start.

Eliminate Yourself…at Least at First

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to talk about yourself and what you do when you really should be talking about other people’s problems and how to solve them. Yes, you do nutritional counseling. But there isn’t a client in the world who has a nutritional counseling problem. Nor do any of them have a gluten or lactose intolerance problem. They have digestive pains so severe they can’t work. Or a skin condition so bad they can’t go out in public.

If you struggle with this, try simply refusing to use words like “I”, or “we” or mentioning your tools or modalities in your first draft (more on first drafts below). Focus on the other person’s problem, and only mention what you do in the context of solving it.

Now for the writing. I’ve listed some rough times for this post, just to give you a sense that the process is actually fairly brief.

Step 1. The Outline – Put 1-3 Ideas on The Page (2 Minutes. Plus pondering over breakfast.)

I’m big on outlining. Once the actual writing starts, I’m easily distracted…oooh! shiny!…by other ideas. For this post, I wrote down six phrases to help with the first draft:

Short
Not about you
First draft free-flow
Wait
Rewrite
Help

That’s it: that was the skeleton. It changed a bit, as you can see, but that’s all you need to get started. If you have trouble with a skeleton, try this generic one to start:

A health complaint and its symptoms
What causes it
Solution(s)

Step 2. Write The No-Editing Allowed Draft (20 minutes)

Using your skeleton from above, just write a couple of sentences in each part of your framework. That’s it. If you need more, write it, but don’t be obsessed with quantity. Remember: short is usually better. Just fill in the blanks.

Also, do not edit what you’re writing. Give yourself permission to just free-flow it right from your brain to the page. Fear not: no one is going to see this draft. Get over it.

Step 3.Wait (Optional, 0 minutes)

Ideally, I’ll wait at least overnight after a first draft. I count that as zero time, because there’s no work involved.

What’s going on here is you’re creating a fresh perspective. A new set of eyes. It’s hard to rewrite and edit what you’ve just written. You can’t get a good sense of flow, and you skip over the same errors time and time again without seeing them.

So take a break. You don’t have to, but it’ll make your next step easier, and your final product far better.

Step 4. Rewrite (10 minutes)

With your fresh eyes and a good night’s sleep, take a spin through what you wrote. At this stage, I’m mostly looking for flow – does it make sense? Is there a clear idea? Is it useful?

This is where things start to stitch together. A clunky bunch of sentences starts to tell a story. You can’t write well without rewriting – don’t skip this part.

Step 5. Get Someone Else To Read It (Optional, 0 minutes)

It’s hard to see your own mistakes. Get someone to take a spin through and point out obvious errors and stuff that just doesn’t make sense.

Step 6. Polish (5 minutes)

Do a final tweak based on comments from step 5. Read through, do a spell check.

That’s it! Not counting the optional overnight waiting and your friend’s read through, you should be able to do a short piece in under an hour. If you want to go shorter and faster, you can use steps 1, 2, 4 and 6, and do even briefer post or email newsletter content in just 15 minutes.

The real key parts for moving forward, I think, are the outline and first draft. You need to give yourself permission to just go. Write it down like you’d say it aloud. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or about self-editing. That voice in your head that’s saying, “You suck at writing,” is in everyone’s head at some point. Forget about it. It goes away as you work through the steps, and as you write more.

Writing is, like everything else, a skill. It’s a muscle that grows with exercise, and the stronger it gets, the more power it has. Give yourself a chance to build it up.

Quick Builders: How The Fastest Grow Their Practices (Part 1)

Dan — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:46:08 +0000

As I start the early stages of our next book, I’m becoming more and more intrigued by practitioners who grow their practices very quickly. Sometimes it’s right out of the gate, other times they seem to limp along for years, until something changes and they take off.

I think there’s great inspiration in these stories – they’re worth sharing. I’ll break this into at least a couple of parts, with more CAM professions to follow. Regardless of the modality or profession, though, like always the advice is readily transferable.

Many of the people I’ve spoken to were seeing one or two patients a month for a long time, then took off. Take heart…

Happy New Year, everyone.

-Dan

Brooke Thomas, Rolfer
New Haven Rolfing

Many of you will know Brooke from this blog, and from our last book. She grew her third practice from zero to 15 clients per week in a month, then went on to start a great program for wellness pros. She’s an amazing model for the power of building a few key relationships.

Specifically the thing that helped the most was by connecting with, and offering free work to, the holistic community in New Haven. There was going to be a lull period of a few weeks before I received my new license to practice in the state of Connecticut, so I couldn’t charge for my work. I figured instead of sitting on my hands, I could put them to use by running what I called my “Help for the Helpers” promotion.

I put out word to the holistic community (mostly by introducing myself to the owners of a couple of big wellness hubs in town- a yoga center and some wellness centers) and let them know that I had this lull where I couldn’t charge.

Lots of people came, many of them are still my long term clients and many have also been my biggest advocates in town. It’s been the best thing I did for sure.

Laura Allen, Massage Therapist
Thera-ssage

Many massage therapists will know Laura. She’s very active in the profession, and very supportive of practitioners. She took her practice from zero to $300,000 a year in 5 years, and put her advice in her book, One Year to a Successful Massage Therapy Practice.

The one thing that makes the biggest difference for me is that I SCHEDULE my marketing time. Every single day I specifically devote a half hour to doing marketing activities for my business. It is scheduled just like a massage appointment.

I might be working up a new ad, calling clients I haven’t seen in a while, sending out birthday cards with a discount coupon, or anything else that seizes me on that day.

Tonia Winchester, ND
Arbour Wellness
Tonia’s first naturopathic practice was, in her words, a “flop.” She was seeing less than two patients a day, on average, but she tripled her practice in a six month period and is still growing steadily.

I followed a link to Brooke’s blog, and really connected with her style and approach. So in a blink I signed up for her course.

And then did nothing with it until after my wedding.

Then in August 2010 it was like a switched turned on, or the faucet started dripping, and then pouring. I did the first module of Brooke’s course, she calls it The Cleanse. The reframe of “my why” was probably the most vital thing I have done in my practice building journey so far. I realized that I don’t NEED patients so I can pay my bills, but I know patients will benefit from my unique, amazing, gifted me. It would be a pity not to share the goodness that I can bring to the world.

Things were differently immediately. There is still lots of room for growth, but the trend is stupendous and I know it will continue until I’m at a place where my schedule is filled. Patients are starting to refer, people who see my talks are starting to book, people who see advertisements for my talks are starting to book.

In sum, in all honestly, my progress has been due to a mental / spiritual re-understanding of my place in this world.

Ann Ross, LMP
Urban Healing Arts Studio

When she first opened her doors, Ann was seeing only 2-3 clients per month. After vowing in the new year of 2006 to make it happen, she grew in that year to 8-15 clients per week, and has grown every year since. She’s now on track to earn six figures this year with the addition of three new therapists to her business. She helps other therapists do the same at her blog Massage Marketing Mentor.

I recommend that therapists team up with other health care providers in attracting clients. If it had not been for renting space within a chiropractic clinic I don’t believe I would have grown my business that quickly. The exposure I had was incredibly valuable.

Therapists need to seek out relationships with complementary businesses. Chiropractors, Acupuncturists, Yoga Instructors, PT’s, Naturopaths etc. are great resources when looking to gain exposure. I recommend therapists create some type of offer to the customers of the other business. Because the other business already has created a trusting relationship with their client base, those clients will be more likely to book a massage appointment with the therapist.

I love how each story is a little different. At the end of this series, I’ll share some common threads that I’ve seen.

If you have a story of turning your practice around that you’d like to share, feel free to get in touch – it might seem to you like it’s not important, but you’d be surprised at how one little idea can change someone’s life. – Dan