Aug
27
The power of networking in natural medicine
Filed Under Networking, Our Story | 2 Comments
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Last week I was approached by the owner of a Portland owned coffee shop with a proposal to offer massage as a benefit to her employees. She borrowed the idea from Portland’s own Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Stumptown offers their employees massage as one of the benefits of working for their company. The important thing about this interaction that I’d like to convey here is: I met her at my weekly networking meeting.
I’m learning, once again, the power of networking.
I started going to an early morning networking meeting at the beginning of August. It was a safe bet for me, as the group was just getting started. The idea of walking into a more formalized group of people and being the new kid doesn’t really appeal to me. The first meeting I attended only had two other people there. As the month has gone on, we have about six regular attendees and are always trying to recruit more. The goal is to create a strong network of business entrepreneurs who strive to get to know one another in the hopes of creating a referral base for the clients of our various endeavors.
I am usually not one to put myself out there in a business sense. I still struggle with the act of presenting myself as someone who has something to sell. I’m in the business of selling healthcare, more specifically, massage. Massage can act as an option for a range of concerns - someone experiencing acute pain, preventative medicine, palliative care, stress - you name it, massage can probably help in some capacity. I’m learning through networking that selling massage has turned out to be something more complex than I thought it would be. I have a serious need to refine my thoughts about just who it is that can benefit from my style of massage. What am I calling my style of massage these days anyway? I’m taking all of my education and experience from the last three years and turning it into a session that I don’t know how to describe anymore. I do know that I have pretty good results and that people come back to me, so it must be working.
I know that my sessions are effective, the trick is how to get clients in the door in the first place. Massage, like many other health care practices, is a very personal thing. It often strikes me as bizarre that I am a massage therapist. People hand over the care and trust of their bodies - in such a way that I can’t think of many other situations in which that would occur. Because the work I do is so personal in nature, I believe that networking is an integral part of my marketing plan. It allows a person to become comfortable with me on a one to one level before entrusting me with the care and keeping of their body for an hour. If I am successfully able to convey that I am a trustworthy, professional person at these networking meetings, the chances that I am going to be the go-to for a massage referral is pretty high.
In the month that I have been attending these meetings, I have made several connections with some of Portland’s long-time residents and entrepreneurs. They will help to support me as a burgeoning entrepreneur, as well as help to supply me with referrals and some business acumen. I can only imagine what will come of my success as I continue to make these connections.
Amanda Barp, LMT
Aug
20
Natural medicine business planning : Start Early!
Filed Under Business Planning, Our Story, Vision and Mission | Leave a Comment
All of the advice I’ve ever been given about business planning boils down to one essential truth : the early bird gets the worm! Business is as complicated as healing - when we think it will be quick, it’s slow. When we think it’ll be slow, it speeds up! When we think we have a handle on something, a new permutation crops up. When we believe that something is way too complicated, we find it to be fairly simple when we get down to it. These contradictions stymie many people who are trying to plan their business. This is why starting as early as possible is such a sound strategy.
Amanda and I have been working our business model seriously for about six months. We hope to open in just over a year. So, we’ll have seriously worked on our business for a little over 18 months by the time we open our doors. At first, it was a hazy dream - and it stayed that way for a long time. At this point, we have a fairly good idea of what we’re doing, and have already pre-hired our first employee! I want to mention the decisions we’ve already made and the process we walked through to get to where we are right now.
1. General vision and mission : This is always the first point in any business planning model, yet is one of the most frustrating things to work on. I think a lot of people’s business planning careers start and end at the vision and mission. While it sounds fun, when you get down to it this part can be pretty frustrating. The majority of the six months above has been taken up by hammering out our vision and mission statements.
What is a vision statement?
I don’t like to talk about “vision statements” as much, because while it is important to have a boiled down sentence or two to work with, far more important is the process. The vision is the more ethereal part of the mission/vision pair, and often authors talk about it as the ultimate goal of the business that, if you were to achieve it, would be really “something.” It is the guiding principle of the business, not necessarily something to set goals around and tirelessly work to achieve. Instead, everything that the business does is related to the principles set out in the vision. It can be used in making decisions about the business (should we expand? should we hire these new practitioners?) as well as making sure you keep on track with your original ideas. While in the early stages of business planning, we have referred to and revised our vision statement OFTEN.
Sometimes the process of creating our vision statement(s) has been pretty frustrating. Just when we though we knew what we wanted, we’d visit someone’s clinic or hear something from a mentor that would totally change our thinking. This is why it’s so crucial to work on, explicitly, WELL in advance of the time you plan to open. With our vision intact, I feel much more confident about moving forward with decisions about concrete things like building leasing and employee hiring, because I know that we have already made the decisions about the kind of business we want to be.
For our natural medicine clinic, our principles rest on three pillars: Community building/interactivity, Environmental and social integrity and dedication to the deepest principles of our medicine (this includes things like continued scholarship, personal cultivation and the like). Your principles will differ, but it’s important that you figure out what they are as soon as you are able.
What is a mission statement?
The mission statement is different. It is here that you answer the questions about what, exactly, you will be doing and on behalf of whom. In other words, here is where you talk about the actual modalities you are practicing and who you are hoping to serve. In our case, we will be using Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, Qigong, Swedish and Deep tissue massage, Shiatsu and Lomi-Lomi Hawaiian massage. We have a couple of foci when it comes to demographics. We really want to serve people experiencing cancer, but also will specialize in the treatment of mental and emotional maladies. Finally, we have an interest in promoting “every day” health, helping people to overcome the seemingly minor diseases (like the common cold, basic aches and pains, etc) that, in our opinion, eventually accumulate to bring about the major diseases.
Having clarity around these issues really helps us to focus our studies and our thinking around business strategy. There is more you can put into a mission statement, but these are the basic ideas. I love having this figured out while already in school, because it helps me choose the doctors I want to work with in clinic as well as focusing my non-school related research. It has directly shaped the choices Amanda has made about her continuing education.
2. Where you will be practicing and the size/type of practice you will have
Because this post is already getting dreadfully long, I will just focus on one more point Amanda and I have worked very hard on. After establishing our vision and mission, we started to figure out what our actual practice is going to look like. This includes WHERE we will practice (country, region, state, city, part of the city, etc) and the actual form of the clinic itself. Of course, all of this presupposes that one will have some version of a private practice - perhaps in clarifying mission and vision you will find that you don’t have a particularly strong one and would prefer working under someone else’s vision and mission. This is certainly 
okay to do!
Deciding where to practice
I really don’t believe there is a “best” way to decide where to practice natural medicine. Some people say you should do it based on economic information - where are there fewer practitioners, but plenty of patients? Some people say you should just go where your heart leads you. I figure you need to use both of these methods to find the perfect place to practice. Amanda and I knew that we didn’t want to leave the Portland area. Our life is here, our daughter is established in her friends and school, and we love the many features that Portland offers to people like us. There’s the heart connection.
Knowing this, we began to look deeply in the city and find areas that are still under-served by natural medicine practitioners. We looked for parts of town that we could see ourselves living in happily, places well served by coffee/tea shops, natural groceries and abundant open space. We also had to consider property values as well as the availability of leasable space that we could afford. Ultimately, we narrowed it down to a couple areas of town. We’re pretty clear that we’re going to choose one particular area, which I won’t reveal here.
Many students at my school (National College of Natural Medicine - NCNM) have revealed to me that they’re not sure where they want to practice. I think this is a crucial thing to figure out as early as possible. If you don’t know WHERE you’re going to be, you can’t even begin to figure out the needs of the place or your economic needs (like, do you need to be saving money because you’re going somewhere with high property values?). These things can be stressful to consider, but the decision isn’t going to go away just because you don’t think about it! 
Finally, discussing the basic structure of your practice is also important. Will you be a sole practitioner or have a group? Will that group be separate partners or employees with you at the helm? Will you be part of an integrative health center, involving many Western practitioners, or would you prefer to stay with other natural healthcare providers? Are you interested in being part of a hospital or other Western clinic? Are you thinking about integrating spa services into your clinic? How big are you hoping to get? All of these questions are important to start thinking about early on. Your last year of school is a great time to network and find other graduating students who have similar ideas to your own. Don’t put this off until tomorrow!
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All of these concepts are important to start thinking about early on in the business planning process. This is because all of these questions have huge ramifications on the rest of the business planning process. How will you know what equipment you need to buy if you don’t know what services you will be providing? And then how can you start to understand your pricing structure and expected profit margins if you don’t know what you need to buy when you start out?
They’re also important to think about early because they’re often difficult to nail down. If you wait until 6 months before you hope to practice, you might find yourself barely able to articulate your vision by the time your student loans begin to come due. Not a comfortable position.
Offer up your ideas about the beginning of the business planning process in the comments! Also, look for increased frequency of content starting today!
Eric
