I WILL BE STARTING A NEW FREE SERVICE FOR CHIROPRACTORS. CAN’T TELL YOU YET, BUT IT WILL HELP YOU MAKE MORE $$$. JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE I DO FOR YOU. TO START RECEIVING THE NEW SERVICE, YOU MUST BE SIGNED UP.  

IF YOU ARE ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER TO THE FREE CD’s OF THE CONFERENCE CALLS THEN YOU DON’T NEED TO SIGN UP AGAIN, AS I WILL BE USING THIS DATABASE. 

 IF YOU HAVE NEVER SIGNED UP FOR THE CD’s THEN YOU WILL NEED TO   SIGN UP NOW  IN ORDER FOR YOU TO RECEIVE THE NEW SERVICE. (HINT-IT INVOLVES ATTORNEY MARKETING) 

 
“Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish.” –Albert Einstein

Building Your Perfect Practice

 

It’s no secret. Being in private practice is more challenging than ever before.

Declining reimbursements, rising overhead, staffing and regulatory compliance, to name just a few of the items you juggle in every practice day. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t have at least several calls from doctors about some new procedural, reimbursement or regulatory headache, demanding record requests, nasty insurance reps, billing disputes, not to mention the extreme pressure to maintain, let alone build a practice, with patients who just don’t understand.

 

Unless you are very careful, this mountain of “stuff,” will consume your energy and staff, depriving you of the real joy and satisfaction in practice - helping sick patients get well. After all, that is your purpose. So why has it become so difficult for so many offices?

 

The answer lies in not having tested systems. Sure, you can go to weekend seminars, spend a small fortune, and end up a month later never implementing anything of help. Most offices who try a coaching program spend into oblivion and end up just like that. But not MY practices. MY program works, and I invite you to see for yourself. There are now only 10 spaces open for the April program. I increased the capacity to 12. The program costs me more then the $100 a month you pay me. The materials alone that you receive monthly are worth more then the $100. And if you feel that you are not getting your money’s worth, you can stop at any time. No contracts, no BS. My goal is to help as many DC’s as possible without ripping them off.

 

At the same time I do need to cover some expenses. The overhead of maintaining a website, the research and writing time for newsletters as well as mailing costs for 100’s of CD’s every month run into big bucks, but I feel a calling so I do it. The problem is that many of you need the one on one personal attention I can give you, not the cookbook procedures that other coaching programs, which charge $500-$2000 a month give you.

 

It always amazes me how a doctor will spend thousands on a program to enhance their practice, but when it come to spending the cost of a movie and dinner for two they hesitate. So if you are still “thinking about it” then you need to re-read my article on procrastination. Remember how quickly my January class filled? We turned people away, why, because they waited. They procrastinated.

12, 10, ONLY 8spots left for April

So if you are interested and want details, click here.

 

 

Learning To Cooperate

Cooperation, sharing and working together sound like ideal aspirations in a perfect world but it seems far from a solution to age-old business questions such as: “How do I attract more patients?” and “How do I make more money?” However, these simple lessons may be just the perfect solution. Cooperative marketing, an often spoken about but more often unused form of marketing in chiropractic, offers a number of great benefits to the small-business owner who correctly utilizes it as a part of his or her overall marketing plan.

In my coaching class I teach about the benefits of joint ventures, which is a form of cooperative marketing. I define cooperative marketing as an arrangement where two or more organizations work together to combine assets for the objective of reaching a defined market segment for a benefit they individually desire. In plain English this means you and another business owner work together or share in the cost of marketing to potential patients to make more money. Cooperative marketing provides business owners with a very unique advantage over other forms of marketing as well as improving your odds of running a successful marketing campaign.

For example, in a traditional marketing effort such as a local advertisement, a doctor might choose a publication that reaches a very large audience in many areas of your community with no guarantees of exactly who will see it. With that ad you would hope that a potential patient who lives close enough and has an interest in your services would notice and respond. In addition, you also would hope that enough potential patients’ would react to make the ad worth the cost of running it in the first place. Consequently, in this example, the practice owner is taking a financial risk without much assurance that the effort is reaching the target audience.

Conversely, in a cooperative effort, a doctor almost can guarantee that the vast majority of the audience will notice the advertisement as well as become potential patients. In addition, by virtue of your relationship with another successful business you also will cut your costs for the effort and increase your chances of success by combining your resources and credibility.

For instance, you might establish a relationship with a local gym owner who has a large membership database. Each of the gym’s members is a potential patient for your practice as would your current patients be a potential customer of the gym. By coming to an agreement to develop a direct mail piece that features both of your businesses and offering a promotion for members of each of the businesses when they use the other’s services, you have completed a cooperative ad. In addition, you also would then split the production and postage cost of this venture.

What you effectively have done now is reach an audience of potential patients who you know live close by virtue of their membership to a nearby business. Additionally, you know the people you have reached might have an interest in your services by taking into account their fitness habits and you have gained their attention because of your relationship and endorsement from a business they already use. Now I know that the gym is the example that all marketers use when touting chiropractic and cooperative marketing, however there are literally dozens of potential joint marketers. In previous newsletters I have given you examples of how to joint market with attorneys.

Cooperative marketing efforts do not have to be limited to such obvious examples. By virtue of the definition, any arrangement you can think of that mutually is beneficial to two or more parties is considered cooperative. The objective is to look for relationships that will yield the greatest benefit for both parties. Moreover, you want alliances that will help you reach a more precise target audience and the one that will be most receptive.

Expanding upon our previous example, put aside the obvious benefit the gym owner would receive if they used your database in an effort to attract new patients. If a practice owner approached the gym owner with the goal of helping them increase goodwill with his current patients while potentially bringing in more business and the promise of no out of pocket expense, you probably would find the gym owner extremely interested. You might offer to pay all the costs of sending out a mailing to the gym owner’s clients in exchange for the right to use the gym’s membership database in your own mailings along with the gym’s personal endorsement.

What you then could do is send a variety of greeting cards commemorating special occasions such as birthdays or anniversaries to the gym’s clients offering special promotional gifts for your services using a personal endorsement. What you effectively have done is reach a highly receptive audience at a time when their anti-marketing radar is down. You have slipped in an advertisement to a potential new patient, garnered goodwill for two businesses and increased your chance of marketing success for the cost of a postage stamp and a handshake.

Still not convinced that cooperative marketing works? Think about how many examples are around you everyday and perhaps have persuaded you to try something new. For example, when a credit-card company offers you a new card with the promise of frequent-flyer miles on a specific airline. When your favorite professional sports team invites you to a game with the promise of receiving a free Chase Bank® calendar, Oscar Mayer® seat cushion or fan appreciation Beanie Babie®, those are proven cooperative marketing promotions which benefit both the team and the company who is supplying the give-away item.

Cooperative marketing efforts do not have to be limited to relationships between small businesses. Your small business has assets that potentially are valuable to large businesses as well. In addition, by partnering with a large business most times it will make the effort even less costly to the practice owner.

While it sounds like a very attractive proposition, the biggest stumbling block to a cooperative marketing effort usually is narrowed down to one thing–you. Typically, the practice owner, the doctor, is the one who is standing in the way of any successful marketing campaign, but even more so in the case of cooperative marketing.

Is it self-sabotage? Why would it be that the doctor themselves would cause a cooperative marketing campaign to fail? Simply, it is fear, mistrust and in most cases, passivity that most often destroys a potentially successful campaign or never allows one to get started in the first place.

All marketing takes effort and a certain amount of guts. Effort to put the whole project together and guts enough to take a leap with your checkbook and ego to see if it will work. Cooperative marketing just takes more of these aspects as well as taking an agreement between two different business owners, each with their own selfish goals and steadfast beliefs in their ideas.

It is understandable how, as doctors, we would fear a cooperative marketing effort because we want to avoid conflict with other strong-willed business owners. It’s also understandable how we might be paranoid and mistrustful, worried that someone is going to steal our database or other valuable ideas. Finally it is understandable how we might just be too caught up in our other obligations to try and establish a relationship with another business owner and convince them of the idea of sharing the cost as well as the benefit of a cooperative campaign. It simply is easier to continue doing the same things we have been doing and getting the same results.

It is this reluctance that never allows a potentially great idea and valuable relationship to start, let alone work. You are guaranteed to get only what you already receive if you don’t strive for more.

Don’t be afraid to take the first step. Only you can help yourself become more successful. Use this time tested and proven method of marketing and I promise you will be satisfied with the results and probably even more satisfied with the invaluable relationship which you will establish.

I wrote this article prior to Hillary’s win this week in NH, however the message and the point remain important.

Stay with me, like always I have a moneymaking lesson.

Obama is a perfect example of STYLE over SUBSTANCE and the bandwagon phenomenon. If you watched any of the debates you saw that saw Obama had problems answering many of the questions. He is very polished and bright, and no doubt in a few years, he will be qualified to be President but right now, I don’t think so.

But then why is he doing so well?

Dan Kennedy gives an example, which, to most DC’s will seem a little extreme, over the top; nonetheless, the point should be noted. Kennedy says:

The key is to “dress up” your product or service and give it some style and then deliver the best product or service on the planet. Dr. Charles Martin is a PERFECT example of this. When you walk into his dental office, you are blown away by the piano, the computer stations, the Italian cafe (yes, you read that right) and a myriad of other touches that gives his office an amazing style.

When you get treatment from him, you are getting the BEST treatment in the world. He is one of the TOP dentists in the country.

I worked hard and not smart for over 25 years. I now have a thriving practice having with more fun and profit than ever. I learned how to work smart, not hard.

I always wanted better ways of dealing effectively with challenges, without sacrificing a rich private life. Like you, the last thing I want is more weekends away from my family and fun. That’s why I spent the last five years developing and testing my coaching program.

“Why would you pay another consultant thousands of dollars, plus travel expenses, for you and your staff, lose income being out of your office or quality time with your family (weekends, vacations, etc) when you can have all the Practice Building and Marketing information you need at an affordable rate with? There are no hidden expenses, no upsells or $3000.00 boot camps to push, because I give it all to you for one very low monthly price of just $100 and you get 100% of my support. My January 2008 class is sold out. In order for me to give you the personalized attention that most of you need I only accept 10-12 people a session, so please if you are interested in joining me for the April 1^st class, let me know now, it will fill up very quickly. If your situation is truly desperate and you truly (don’t BS me) can’t afford the money right now but would like to be part of the April program, contact me and I will defer you monthly payments until you start making some money. But please, don’t take advantage of me, if you can afford it don’t tell me you can’t. CLICK HERE if you want more info.

PLEASE MARK YOUR CALENDARS TED KOREN CONFIRMED

I have spoken to my friend Ted Koren, DC, he has agreed to do a conference call on MONDAY JANUARY 17^TH AT 9 PM (EST). Ted will be discussing how to successfully market your practice using printed materials. For those of you who think this will be a sales pitch for Ted’s products, you’re dead wrong. There will be no sales pitch; Ted will discuss the issues of vaccination, government regulation, cash practices, and much more. People pay a great deal of money to hear Ted; he is a featured speaker at the Masters Circle and other state and national meetings. I guarantee that you will leave the call with at least 2 great ideas that will make you money the next day.