After being in business for over 20 years, I wish it was an easy as opening the doors, being good at your job and the customers will come. Unfortunately, it’s just not as easy as that. This skills of running a business are just as important as being a great technician, however there are 3 major skills that are the cornerstones of getting your business off the ground.
Knowledge of marketing
This is one of the most underestimated and important skills in business. If you can’t reach your customers and they can’t connect with your company and you, you have no business, just a nice idea. One of the biggest issues with all the dot.com businesses at around the turn of the century and a lot of start-up businesses is that they had an idea, but no concept of how to market themselves (at least as a reasonable cost).
Even if you rely on word of mouth to grow your business, this is not a passive process and has to be facilitated to gain enough traction to actually grow. One of the best investments you will make when wanting to start your business is the learn more about marketing. Even taking some short courses to start is a beginning.
Marketing means understanding your service from a customer perspective, not from yours as a technician. Customers don’t buy your service because you are a great technician. They buy because your skills/services will make a positive impact on their lives at a reasonable price.
The first step in marketing is understanding your customer. Take your favourite customer out to lunch and find out exactly why they buy from you and what they really love about your service (you’ll be surprised)
Knowledge of people management
Unless you are going to only work by yourself, you will really have to learn about how to manage people. However, in a service business, as you are often selling your time and your time is limited, hiring staff often happens faster than you think.
There are 2 really important aspects to managing people. Firstly, the hiring process. Having a good understanding of who you need to hire and for what purpose is extremely important. We rely strongly on appropriate profiling of potential candidates to understand their personality types and values, to determine their fit for both the role and their fit with the rest of the team. A particular candidate may be a great personality for the company, but a poor fit for the role. We have previously hired a staff member who would be great for the company, but not for the role she applied for. We had a conversation with her about an alternate role and as an outcome, she has thrived in the new role. This was a huge win, win for both parties.
Secondly it’s about building a great team and culture. We invest heavily in building a team culture and re-enforcing our values of customers, teamwork, professional leadership and practice leadership. In a last couple of years we have implemented the “Culture is everything” system, described in Tristan White’s book (Culture is everything), especially the steps in the “show more love” section.
For us this was a game changer, especially during the tough times, allowing us to come together with the uncertainty of illness in 2022
What are you doing to build a strong culture of values in your company? Use the Culture is everything framework as a place to start
Knowledge of accounting and finance
Accounting and finance is the language of business and everyone is business needs to understand the basics (sorry, that’s the rules). It’s not your accountant’s responsibility, it’s yours.
With all of our branch managers (and aspiring branch managers), they have to do their own bank reconciliations on a daily basis. This is not a cruel and unusual punishment, but so that they understand and get a good feel of the numbers. In addition, we review our financials (profit and loss) on a regular basis to ensure that we understand our cost of running business. If you don’t know your costs, you don’t know your targets and whether your business is actually making any money.
Unfortunately, of your business is not making money (positive cash flow), you can’t provide services to your clients and make a living doing what you love.
You don’t have to love numbers, accounting or finance, but you do need to understand it in order to grow your business and make good business decisions.
Do you understand you profit and loss, your budget and how your business actually makes money?
Every Wednesday
What is the next thing you will try if you don’t hit your target number?
Group Mastermind – Do you want to get involved ?
Every Wednesday at 11.15am – 12pm, we hold a group Mastermind session to:
- Brainstorm strategies
- Discuss marketing ideas
- Work on each other’s business problems
It is FREE of charge and a great way to interact and pick the brains of other allied health business owners.
Join the discussion and have your say?
- Comment below!
- Call us on (03) 9857 0644 or (07) 3505 1494 (Paddington)
- Email us at admin@mdhealth.com.au
- Check out our other Health Business blog posts here
Our clinical staff would be happy to have chat if you have any questions.
