By Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN
What’s the most critical ingredient of a successful nutritional cash practice?
I’m giving you the basic office management principles, by the way. Those are it in a nutshell. We can expand on those and we do in a three-day workshop, with all the forms, all the procedures, all the patter, everything having to do with personnel, everything having to do with charging fees, schedules, how it is that we get a very high percentage of pre-payments without ever selling anything, without ever pressuring a patient to do anything. It’s a total low stress practice.
In this three-day workshop we expand on this and give you a book that’s thick with all the forms and everything. But I’m telling you, with what I’ve given you, if you just take those principles, you can create your own forms, you can create your own Report of Findings, you can create your own script. It took me a few years to accomplish that. I’m willing to share that with you over a weekend workshop we’ve made available. But the point is, I’m giving you everything that I figured out that enabled me to then evolve the system.
Now, as we’re teaching it to more and more doctors, they’re getting the same result. But what degree of results do they get? It depends upon the most critical ingredient of a successful nutritional cash practice. What is the most critical ingredient of a successful nutritional cash practice?
You are the most critical ingredient of a successful nutritional cash practice. I’m going to give you a couple examples of that. One of them is, for example, in the subject of compliance. Whenever I have a doctor tell me that they’re having trouble getting their patients to comply, you know how I handle it now? Because I used to work with the guy and see what he was doing wrong with the patient and I finally undercut it. I found the absolute undercut to why the practitioner is having trouble getting the patient to comply.
Here’s what I do. He calls me up, he says, “Freddie, I’m having such a hard time getting my patients to comply. I really want to improve my compliances.” I say, “Great. What program are you on?” Half the time, they don’t even know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, “What’s your nutritional program? What’s your nutrition schedule? How compliant are you to your nutrition schedule?”
Because here’s another thing that should be axiomatic. It should be written in as an axiom. You’ll never have a patient who is more compliant than you are. So how important are you to the compliance? Total importance.
Have you ever had a patient whom you recommended a program to them and they came in a couple weeks later, whatever and you checked and said, “Are you doing the program?” And they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, pretty good. Pretty much.”
“Pretty much? Well, how much is pretty much?”
“Well, pretty much.”
“Well, how much?”
“Well, I sometimes forget my lunch supplements.”
Anybody ever have that happen? And you say to them, “You do? How often?”
“Practically every day.”
Now you have two ways to answer him. And I’ve seen doctors do this; “I can understand that. It happens to me all the time.” Anybody ever have that experience? Is there anybody here who forgot to take their lunch supplement?
Well, guess what? You’re going to have plenty of patients who forget to take their lunch supplements and you’re not going to be able to do a thing about it until you start taking more responsibility for your program. Sorry, but that is the truth.
There are many other examples that I could give you…many other examples I could give you how you are the most critical ingredient in a successful nutritional cash practice because it has a lot to do with your communication skills.
How well can you communicate with the patient? I’m not talking about how well do you talk “at” a patient. When I talk about communication, I’m talking about achieving understanding. That’s the purpose of communication. Not how well do you speak. But how well do you achieve understanding? There’s skills to that.
And by the way, it’s not something you’re born with. Can you imagine if there was some gene, a communications gene? You child was born and the doctor said, “I’m sorry Mrs. Jones, your child will never be able to communicate. He’ll be able to talk, but he’ll never be able to get somebody to understand him.” I don’t think so. There’s no gene to this. I’m talking about skills. How well do you communicate?
And again, when we say communication, the product of communication is understanding. If I’m failing to get anybody to understand me now, that’s my responsibility because I’m not communicating well enough. Those of you that are understanding me, we’re having great communication. Would you agree to that? That’s how well you know if I can communicate with you. You’re understanding me. That’s good. So the most critical ingredient in a successful nutritional cash practice is YOU. It has to do with your personal integrity. It has to do with your ability to communicate. It has to do with your ethics level. You know, how honest are you.
It has to do with your ability to cope with the stresses that will come into your practice because anytime anybody starts getting real successful, there will be people and challenges that will occur to try to knock you off your success. Anybody ever experience that one? You know, every time you start doing well, something happens. There are people who go through life like that.
So there are three major areas that we address in our training program. In addition to giving you the tools so that you don’t have to go through a two or three year program of figuring out all the forms and all the exact procedures (because we’ve already done it), in addition to that, we also make available to people specific training in areas that they need to improve their abilities so that they become more effective as the most critical ingredient of a cash practice.
For more information on Nutrition Response Testing call 866-418-4801 or email us at [email protected]. You can also download our FREE Nutrition Response Testing E-Book here.
