By Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN
What has been my biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Being able to assemble and train a core team of staff and executives that consistently deliver quality services that exceed our clients’ expectations (primarily natural and nutrition-oriented health care providers). I have been able to step out of operations and focus on the management aspects of health care practices.
Along the way, I realized that most health care practitioners – despite high purpose, good education, and high levels of technical and clinical skill – often know next to nothing about their practice as a business. They tend to think that “clinical” solves everything. And that is not true.
An effective health coach or any other natural health care provider who doesn’t know this will never be able to expand their practice to a level where they can make a real difference in their community. A small health care practice that remains small will, despite great clinical successes, sooner than later sadly become extinct.
The Challenge
One of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner is trying t
o operate long term without formulated goals and purposes and policy. Any business owner must have clearly stated goals and purposes and workable policies so that administrative support will benefit the practitioner’s healing purposes and not be a distraction.
You have to put those in place to act as a constant reminder of why you are there and what you are working to achieve. You need to provide a framework that will ensure financial viability while expanding the practice to meet the growing demands for your services. That can be a daunting task at times.
The last thing any of us in natural healing want is to have any attention at all on money. We didn’t go into this business because we were money motivated. We did it out of a sense of caring and duty to share our knowledge and help with others. Therefore one must ensure their practice remains viable to expand and persist through good times and hard times and always be there for those who need us the most.
The Keys to Success
The key to my success has always been “results.” Results produce good word of mouth, which is the secret to a stress-free self-regenerating viable practice. After a while, every new patient or client is someone who knows they are in the right place because of what others have told them. To achieve this success, you must have certain elements in place, which consist of,
1. A proven workable system of analyzing the body, so you know what it needs and what sequence its health challenges need to be addressed in, when there is more than one health challenge. The system needs to include a method of determining whether or not the body is responding and how to correct and fine-tune the program to ensure success.
2. You must have access to time-tested and proven products you can count on (batch to batch and which not only help the patient over the hump initially but which can be used in lesser amounts for as long as needed as part of a health maintenance program).
3. You need a “patient management program” that gets the patient fully on board and fully committed to doing their personalized health improvement program before starting them on a program.
4. You need a proven practice management or administration system that ensures smooth and lowest possible costs of operation and the potential for unlimited expansion that aligns with your goals for the practice/business. These will produce in each patient/client: a) commitment, b) compliance and follow-through, and therefore c) retention and d) results.
This is the key to automatic referral generation that makes your practice a joyful business activity for years to come, adding health and joy to your life in geometric proportion to the hope, health, and joy you are providing to others.
Re-post from June 16, 2022
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