always Great Healthcare!

 

[Credibility reference for visiting professionals: Hal is the author of DOCTOR BUSINESS for physicians and DOCTOR SHOPPING for consumers. As a 30-year advocate for both, overlapping his business consulting career, Hal served on national healthcare committees, won national awards and worked with over 1,000 physicians.] 

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Without some major government changes on November 6, we in America are headed down an astronomically-expensive healthcare road of no return for small businesses and professional practices. So NOW may be the best time to share some critical business insights with medical and allied health professionals.

And if you’re in any way involved with sales TO doctors,

stay with this post (and tomorrow’s, and be sure

to check out the link in the next sentence).

First, you do not know it all. Second, if you’ll pay attention to this short post (and tomorrow’s), you will know enough to get you through the leading edge of the oncoming mandated healthcare storm. Third, if the storm can in fact be sidetracked or beaten back, you will gain even more by digesting and using this information now.

Like it or not, the key to your survival and growth is rarely the medical training, skills and experience you offer… these great strengths of yours are merely “features” that patients will use to justify choosing you. With mandated healthcare, there will be no real choices to retain your services, but there may be choices to avoid your services.

More often than not, your success as a healthcare professional is tied to that word you may dread: marketing… but NOT “marketing”‘ as you have come to know it: office popcorn, candy and sub deliveries, event tickets, dinners, golf.  (Effective marketing that creates sales is the only way your practice can keep pace and grow right now!)

Most medical marketing is either noncommunicative because it’s too technical for the target audience or it’s too verbally bland, too visually sterile, and utterly meaningless — like virtually ALL hospital advertising messages!

How does this happen? Most medical skill development is rational, logical, analytical, unemotional left-brain activity based. Most effective marketing (which includes advertising, promotion, sales, and public relations) works because it appeals to right-brain emotions.

To achieve improved musculo-skeletal balance, physical therapists tell us a commitment to training, retraining, and ongoing exercise is required. The same kind of commitment is needed to achieve right brain/left brain balance… the root of stress management, self-control, self-esteem, and trust.

Trust is every patient’s

cornerstone of confidence.

                                                                               

No more than a radiologist is a good first choice for surgery, a technical thinker/writer cannot be expected to write marketing content that triggers emotional buying motives. Though I would hardly endorse the specialty, many cosmetic surgeons get it. They market benefits and results instead of features.

Someone seeking results (and in medicine that almost always means reassurance in some form) is not the least bit interested in what technique or instruments will be used. That person will want that information simply to justify the decision, but it is not what will ultimately “make the sale.”  Having a sense of trust makes the sale.

HOW to market your trustworthiness? Tomorrow. Here. The answers.

                                                                       

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Hal@Businessworks.US   302.933.0116

Open  Minds  Open  Doors

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

                             

“Nuttin’s Happenin’”

                     

. . . is to ACT NOW!

                                 

NOW, while we’re on the cusp of

The Great American Work Slowdown.

 

Christmas is Sunday. Everyone (except for rambunctious entrepreneurs–there’s some other kind?) is moving more slowly at work. The rank and file are increasingly preoccupied with office and neighborhood parties.

Could this be true? Is it just my imagination? Are you grinning nervously at that thought or at what I might be tossing your way in the next couple of paragraphs?

 

Well, if you’re in that “rambunctious” crowd I mentioned, you probably wait ’til the last minute to shop, hate to waste time making the festive rounds but find that a couple of stiff drinks help make those swashbuckling business status-climbers and oozy neighbors a little more tolerable . . . and it’s all good practice leading up to that big week of dysfunctional family gift-giving gatherings!

Put your mouse down for a nap.

                                            

Get up from your desk or work station or laptop, and stop reading this blog (I trust you that you’ll come back). Now, DO SOME thing. ANY thing! It doesn’t matter what you do. What matters is that you do SOMEthing.

Take a walk around the block. Eat a cookie. Take a bathroom break. Turn the music on or up. Draw a picture. Get away from the monitor and keyboard and take some deep breaths. Shake your head like a wet dog. Clap or briskly rub your hands together. Take a slug of cold water.

Appreciate that by breaking your concentration, you are also breaking some element or accumulation of stress.

Don’t quit yet. Don’t rush back to the screen. Gently close your eyes and take ten seconds to massage your temples or the back of your neck (counter-clockwise stimulates more blood flow).

Pick up a pen or pencil (you DO still have one?) and a piece of scrap paper. Write or draw or diagram the first thing that comes into your mind . . . like a creative branding theme exercise!

It absolutely doesn’t matter what you record (and no one but you will ever see it anyway).

Go ahead. I’ll wait. ………. Good!

Next, draw or write or diagram the first thought you have about something you can do at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning to pump up or booster-shot some part of your business into action right away.

Maybe it’s a new direction. Maybe it’s solving a nagging problem. Or it’s reviewing reports or articles you’ve been shoveling around, or checking websites you’ve been intending to visit, or having coffee with the new (or oldest) employee (or supplier/vendor/sales rep) and listening?

Perhaps you haven’t made enough time lately to initiate collection of customer feedback?

No matter how small a step, just make it an ACTION step. SOME action always beats NO action! I hear from blog visitors all the time that success comes from having a bias to action. Do you?

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302.933.0116    Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

The question that haunts business owners in desperate times–

                                                                

Are you making the sale

                   

. . . or making a customer?

 

Cultivating relationships among others with whom you have no shared interests –especially in this day of technology-induced dwindling relationships and global economic demise– is harder, takes more time, and is often distasteful. But does swimming upstream pay?

                                                            

Now I find these little tidbits of news – the products no doubt of fastlane lifestyles and lazy learning attitudes– to be outright shell-shocking! Growing up, I remember book purchases as major events and what seemed like the threat of going straight to hell for not reading even a miserable book all the way to the end. Yes, ancient times.

Well, aside from the obvious conclusions to be drawn from these book reading and purchasing enlightenments, that books ARE judged by their covers (and the covers had better be as smashing as the first 18 pages), there is an underlying and discouraging sign of the times suggested that the faster society moves, the lazier it gets.

Is it no wonder that technology advances have rendered us into handheld-device-carrying vegetables with no greater regard for the flow of thought process brilliance than some instantaneous, impersonal, ungrammatical, third-grade reading level txtmsg? Still puzzled why agents and publishers only want to see a writer’s first 20 pages? 

How did we get here? Leaderless government that talks education but fails to deliver or understand that self-esteem, authenticity, stress and time management, communication, innovation and motivation skills are what will ultimately determine life and career success. And that these come from reading more than 18 pages of any book.

How do we change that?  1) Work within your business to cultivate these life and career success strengths with training and incentives and support. Nurture and promote take-home values and structures that enable and empower your people and associates to “pass it on” at home and in their communities. 2) Vote November 6, 2012

America’s small business owners make our nation go.

America’s military gives us the freedom to keep going.

                                         

 

 

DID YOU KNOW THIS?

       [Source: www.cnsnews.com 11/17/11]                          

• Three weeks ago, the U.S. Treasury Dept. reported that the federal government’s debt had exceeded $15 Trillion for the first time in the history of America, hitting $15,033,607,255,920.32 and safe to assume that it’s higher yet as of today.

•  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just estimated that there were 93,641,000 full-time private sector workers in America in 2010 (and 18,073,000 full-time workers in federal, state, and local government.

• That means the $15.0336 Trillion federal debt equals approximately $160,545 per full-time private sector worker.

• Given that the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were approximately 76,089,045 families in America in 2010, the federal debt equals approximately $197,579 for each and every American family. 

                                     

Besides your vote on November 6, 2012, is there no escape? Well, you could close up shop, grab your piggy bank, and head for some remote island, getting sunburn and mosquito bites and drinking piña coladas and coco locos until you can’t walk or talk — not to mention that there’s just so much coconut milk your system can take!

OR, you could –what did Grandpa used to say?– buckle up, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, put your shoulder to the wheel and your nose to the grindstone! Not a pretty picture. 

You COULD simply make productive use of this traditionally slow business time (unless you’re in retailing, in which case you’re not taking time to read anything right now, least of all a blog post) by doing a little introspection and a quick reassessment of your year-end and new-year goals. Are your goals ALL 6 OF THESE? . . .

Realistic? Specific?

Flexible? Due-Dated?

Written on paper?

In your pocket?

                                                                      

If your goals don’t meet ALL of these criteria, they are the stuff of wishlists and fantasyland. Don’t kid yourself into thinking they’ll work if you skip a couple. But if you follow all six, and keep adjusting them as you go (Flexible, remember?), you will have insured yourself of the best possible outcome. Why settle for less? It’s a choice.

What’s the single most important thing you learned about your SELF in 2011? What’s the single most important thing you learned about your BUSINESS in 2011? How can you combine these two revelations to do a better job of protecting your self and your business in 2012? Roadblocks? What? Detours? Where? Solutions?

Why all the hoopla on goals? Because we’re all in debt up to our ears and there are no miracle prospects on the horizon, so the best solution is to take what you have and work your butt off to make it better, to make it work in spite of what union/government/corporate giant muckity-mucks do or don’t do. It’s all about YOU.

With 30 million small businesses in America, and you as part of that universe, there is untold opportunity for moving forward as a free spirit entrepreneur, and there is untold opportunity for moving forward by working in concert with other like-minded small businesses. Call it collaboration, strategic alliance, whatever works.

In the end, Business Works. Does yours?

 

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Hal@Businessworks.US  302.933.0116

Open  Minds  Open  Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!