Aug
23
I’m an Acupuncturist, Not a Business Person
Filed Under Blogging, Business Planning, Getting Started | 2 Comments
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This is the first in a series of three by Natural Medicine Business Success contributor, Bonnie Koenig, writer at the Acupuncture Marketing Blog, among other sites. You can view her short biography by clicking here.
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The business of being an acupuncturist is very different from practicing acupuncture. This is often the reason that those students who are the stars of acupuncture classes achieve only mediocre success in their personal practices.
Successful business people have one set of skills and this particular skill set is not necessarily the same skill set required to be an exceptional acupuncturist or other healthcare provider. Additionally, it’s human nature to absorb more from studying those things we love as opposed to those things we are told we have to learn. This means that people who love the business end of running their practice often learn more far quickly than those who run a their practice business rather under protest.
I checked out the school of business at my undergraduate alma mater. They have a total student body of approximately 2500 students. Their business school has 480 students. There is a requirement that in addition to the regular core undergraduate classes that 49 semester hours (students normally average 16 to 18 credit hours per semester, with 20 credit hours being a doable but heavy load) of business classes. This means that if you only studied the business courses, you would need an additional 3 semesters, or a year and a half minimum to learn what this college feels is appropriate to someone who wants to manage a business. This is for an undergraduate degree. The masters level coursework is an additional two years (assuming mostly full time enrollment).
Acupuncture students are lucky to get two business courses during their entire education.
Certainly you don’t need a business degree to run a business, nor am I suggesting this. I point out the fact that business majors get this much subject matter because as new practitioners we often expect ourselves to just know this information. Many business people say that most business information is just common sense. Most of our life lessons apply to business. The problem is that many people who are new to running a business don’t realize what they already know and even if they do, they don’t really know how to apply it.
Initially, I had thought to make this point and offer suggestions in one post, but it’s gotten ponderously long. I’d like to tackle a couple of points in future posts.
In the first post, I’ll discuss the need for finding good help. Good help may start with finding people who can offer some basic business advice to those just starting out. Additionally very few practitioners are strong in all aspects of running a business so at some point we’ll need to find help. Part of this post will focus on the types of help we may need, from deciding if we need a book keeper or legal assistance or maybe we just need someone to do our laundry.
In the second post, I’ll discuss some of the places practitioners can go to find assistance in starting their businesses. Some of these resources are online and some are offline. I’ll offer some potential pros and cons for the different types of services and try to help practitioners set appropriate expectations for the type of help they receive.
Starting up a business requires a lot of effort and energy. Very often, as healthcare providers who have just come out of school we tend to minimize the amount of work starting a business requires. We also like to just push through this part of creating our business because suddenly our student loans are going to come due. However, creating our ideal healthcare business takes time and effort. Thinking carefully about exactly what we want can lessen headaches in later years.
Bonnie
Aug
8
Getting started in the business of natural medicine : Our story, part 1
Filed Under Blogging, Our Story | Leave a Comment
Thanks for hanging in there while we get content production up and running on the blog. I wanted to start out by catching you all up to speed with how Amanda and myself got where we are today. First, it might be nice to know where we, in fact, are today. 
My name is Eric Grey and I’m a 4th (and last) year student of Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) at National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, OR. I am a blogger at popular Chinese medicine site, Deepest Health and I also have a personal blog over at Ericgrey.com. My passion for natural medicine was probably partly given to me by my mother who was always trying little home cures when I would get sick. I also developed a very close relationship with plants at a young age, which made me interested in using plants for healing. It’s no surprise, then, that my one true love in Chinese medicine is the use of Chinese herbs. I started blogging about Chinese medicine because I saw that there wasn’t much good information out there about the medicine, yet there is an incredible amount of information that could be useful to people. This blog was born out of a similar realization. While there are many (some good) websites out there about business, there are relatively few about the business of natural medicine.
My partner, Amanda Barp, is a practicing massage therapist at Harmony Therapeutic Bodywork in the Kwan Yin Healing Arts Center in Portland, OR. She has been practicing in the Portland area for three years and has only recently combined forces with Harmony. She will be writing on the blog, though I am a more obsessive-compulsive writer than she has shown herself to be.
Amanda and I are planning to open a natural medicine clinic in the Sellwood area of Portland, OR in September 2009. We began planning our business about a year ago, and the process has been an interesting one. Because we are taking so long to work on our business plan, we have been able to go deeply into various elements as well as work out our relationship with regards to business. All of this information can be of use to other people, thus the creation of this blog. We hope that we can share our ups and downs, our research and our questions, our confusion and our a-ha moments with you and that in conversation with you, we can all come to understand how to be both integral healers AND savvy business people.
My first question - how did we ever start thinking that those two (healing and business) were polar opposites? What a self defeating idea!
It will take us a while to catch you up to speed with where we are and our process up until now. We will release a series of posts this upcoming week that will seek to do just that. We are also fortunate and excited to offer a series of posts from Bonnie Koenig of Quantum Lifestyles that will start us off on the right foot in talking about important concepts in natural medicine business.
Thanks for reading, we look forward to interacting with you for years to come.
Eric and Amanda
Jul
23
Hello everyone,
My name is Eric Grey, author of the leading Chinese Medicine blog - Deepesthealth.com. In writing to Deepest Health, I found that there was a lot I wanted to share about the business of Chinese medicine but didn’t feel comfortable doing it all the time on that site. Add to this the fact that my partner and I are in the throes of building our business - Watershed Community Wellness - and you have a great recipe for a helpful, informative blog.
The basic idea is to document our process - from building the business plan to making relationships with vendors to finding a space and business partners to getting a loan to decorating rooms and everything in between. Along the way we’ll review products, discuss issues concerning natural medicine, consider different personal productivity methods and sometimes invite other folks to write. We’re interested in having natural medicine professionals of all levels of experience write for the blog - if that description matches you and you’re interested in having an outlet for your thoughts - please contact us at naturalmedicinesuccess@gmail.com.
There will be a lot of design flux and new features added in the next couple of weeks. By early August, you can expect to see a stable posting schedule, settled design, newsletter subscription availability with lots of exclusive content and much more.
Thanks for joining us. You can go ahead and subscribe to our RSS feed by feed reader or by email by clicking on the orange box in the right sidebar or in the address bar at the top of your browser. This will bring Natural Medicine Business Success content directly to you as it is published so you don’t have to miss anything. The newsletter, to be launched shortly, will contain different content - so you’ll want to get in on that as well.
Thanks again and welcome!
Eric
