Nov
11
The early stages of business planning : difficulties and strategies
Filed Under Getting Started, Our Story, Vision and Mission | 1 Comment
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Amanda and I have been working on our business plan for our center for natural medicine for a while. We started planning long before I had any business classes in my program at NCNM. In fact, we’ve been planning since I started school! However, we still have a lot of work to do. Why?
I believe that the early stages of the business planning process are the most difficult. We have had multiple meetings of 3-4 hours where we did nothing but flesh out the basic idea behind our business model. We’ve revisited notes from these meetings several times, only to come back at some later meeting to rehash similar ideas. This process is slow and sometimes frustrating. Every once in a while I despair that we are making no headway at all!
Still, I think this is all a very important part of building a sound business. While we haven’t done all that much that could be put in an official business plan and submitted to a bank for a loan review process, our work has been extremely valuable. There are three major reasons I believe it’s important to take plenty of time to ruminate over the most basic elements of a business plan.
- Good ideas take time : Just like cramming for an important test doesn’t leave you the time to comprehend the material, trying to cram for a business plan will find you in a business to which you do not feel passionately connected. When you first start conceiving of your new clinic, your ideas will be rough and disconnected. As time goes on, you start to see the relationships among your various ideas and new ideas are born from that fertile ground. Further, as you accumulate experience simply by going through your normal days you will be better able to refine your current ideas and come up with new ones. All this time spent will pay off with handsome dividends in the end
- It’s more complicated than you think : While your clinic idea may seem simple, with enough time you begin to see the complexities involved. If you don’t leave yourself enough time to fully explore the plan, you may end up rudely awakened by some unexpected difficulty. Failing that, you may simply miss out on a great opportunity that you would have been able to take advantage of if you had fully comprehended the intricacies of your situation earlier.
- It’s more fun / less stressful if you take your time : It’s simply more fun to have big ideas and work out their implementation when you have time. Trying to cram a business plan into the last 6 weeks of your schooling is only going to stress you out. That’s pretty contrary to the spirit of natural medicine, isn’t it? Give yourself a break!
Anyway - our business plan is really coming together and with every meeting I get more and more excited about our basic concept. I’d like to explore that concept in future posts both here and at Deepesthealth.com. Until then, thanks for reading.
Eric
Aug
25
Open For Business…I Think
Filed Under Business Planning, Getting Started | Leave a Comment
This is the second of three articles written by Bonnie Koenig about the first steps in starting a business. You can read the first in the series by clicking on I’m an acupuncturist, not a business person! You can find Bonnie’s bio here.
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Starting a business after having been a student for years can come as a shock. Instead of being told what to do and what to study, now you are in charge and have to start figuring out what to do and what to study. It seems like there is so much to do starting out that it can feel overwhelming, particularly because there is always the fear of forgetting an important piece of legal work.
The first step in creating a business is creating a plan. Creating a plan can be as formal as writing up a formal business plan or as simple as creating some goals. In either case, it’s important to have a vision of what you are doing in the business and how the business looks. For instance, are you working with other practitioners? Are you the one running things? Are you just a partner who does your own work and someone else takes care of most things? Are you renting your own room from someone else? Is there someone making your appointments or are you doing it yourself?
The clearer your picture of your ideal practice, the easier it will be to create that ideal practice. For instance, if you see yourself in charge of others or intend to start out with an employee, such as a receptionist, you will need to find out minimum wage laws and OSHA laws, whereas if you are going to begin by doing everything yourself or working in someone else’s office, you don’t have to worry about those things.
If you have a hard time envisioning your ideal practice, it might be a good idea to find help. Business coaches abound and many specialize in helping small business owners understand their vision. If you know what you want to do when you start up your practice but don’t know how to get that done, there are places that can help you with that too and not all of them are expensive.
The government offices you work with can also be very helpful when they understand you are just starting out. I’ve had to do this for a small company I worked for. This was a huge advantage because I was far less nervous when I did the same thing for my own business a few years later. Yes, the government does want their cut, but the people working in these offices understand it’s far easier to train someone right than try and correct mistakes and misperceptions later on.
After you have set up your business and know what it is you want to do, you may need help with running your business. What sorts of help depends upon your own skills and what you like. If you aren’t sure but are feeling overwhelmed with running the practice, you may again want to seek out a business coach to help you define what roles you really want to play (in addition to healing) and what roles can be given to others.
Office help can range from someone who just answers the phone and appointment scheduling to hiring someone to take over all the administrative tasks. Obviously you need to pay someone who is doing your bookkeeping, phone answering, insurance billing and overseeing other employees more than you would someone who just answers your phone.
If you aren’t ready for an employee you can still find help. You can hire out your accounting to a bookkeeping firm. You can hire insurance billers to do your insurance billing. There are companies that will come in and pick up your laundry. Cleaning people are typically hired as contractors rather than as direct employees.
Every time you hire someone, there will be a cost. Very often we only look at the dollar amount. However, you also need to factor in your time. Money is wonderful and in the beginning we are often struggling and have to maximize our financial income. However, at some point, we need to create a life not just a living wage. At that point we can think about hiring or contracting help with the tasks that are the most burdensome to us.
Some people really enjoy the day to day challenge of running a business. Ultimately being in charge means that if you have extra space you can rent out that space or take on associates, thereby increasing your income further. The more amenities you have in an office, (such as a receptionist), the more you’ll be able to charge for others to use your space.
Some people think the idea of setting up and running a business seems overwhelming. The money isn’t really that important and all they really want to do is practice their healing modality. That’s a valid practice vision as well. There are practitioners who have run their business for awhile and who want assistance in their practice, taking the overflow and allowing more patients to come through the doors. There are many models, some of which include just renting space and assisting in paying any employees. There are also more formal models of working as an associate, which is basically becoming an independent contractor to a practitioner who pays you per patient.
The challenge in all of this is finding the people who can help you with the areas you are less comfortable with. In the next post in this series, I will point out some good places that you can look up in your local area and online.
Bonnie
