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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Building a Brand for Your Acupuncture Practice

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors. Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi there, my name is Michelle Grasek and today we will be talking about building a brand for your acupuncture practice. If we have not met before, I am a practicing acupuncturist. And marketing strategist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. Excuse me. And before we dive in, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to teach you these concepts about marketing.

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I love teaching marketing and I believe really strongly that excellent marketing, really helps us reach new patients and have a bigger impact in our community. So I’m looking forward to talking with you about branding today. So let’s jump into the slides.

Let me just test out my slides. There we go. We got it. A quick overview of what we’ll be talking about today. First, we’re going to talk about why branding matters. I am the kind of person where if you give me instructions, I like to know why I’m being asked to follow them. It makes me much more likely to follow through.

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And if you are also one of those people, I think this section will be helpful for making you really commit to doing that. creating a cohesive brand for your practice. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about the psychology behind branding, which I think you’ll find a little bit fascinating.

And then we will get into some of the nitty gritty about how to actually construct a brand for your practice that brings in the kind of people who have the symptoms that you really want to treat, right? Like your ideal patients.

And let me see here. I’m having a little trouble with my arrows. So let’s start out with what is branding. Sometimes it’s called building a brand. Sometimes it’s called building a brand identity. Branding is Really, all of the visual pieces that make your business stand out from the acupuncturists down the road.

So that if they saw your brand they would know that it is your business and immediately and not the other acupuncturists down the road. For example, if they saw a flyer in a coffee shop for a Qigong class, they would know that it’s you who’s teaching the class. Okay, so it makes your business distinct, it makes you easily and quickly identifiable to your customers, and really it includes anything that represents your business visually.

So that’s usually things like your brand colors, your logo maybe the fonts that you use, the images that you use all of this comes together to make your brand recognizable. And something that we don’t talk about a lot with branding is the idea that branding also represents your business’s personality and allows you to share your values and to really connect with the people who resonate with that personality and those values.

And this is actually the Part of branding that makes it the most effective. It’s the part of branding that makes your audience or the people in your community feel like they can relate to you and your brand and take an action. And. Pretty much whenever I talk about taking an action in marketing, we’re talking about calling you to make an appointment or emailing you with questions or clicking on your schedule now button.

So when people feel like they can relate to your business, they are much more likely to take those actions. And so that’s, that piece of branding is essential and we don’t want to leave that out and only focus on the visual. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about why branding matters. So when branding is done well and it’s consistent it looks very intentional because it is intentional, right?

Having a consistent appearance for your business across all of your social media platforms, across your website in all of your print materials that people might find at your office, like your brochure and your business card, all of that is intentional and takes Effort and energy, right? And whether people process that consciously or unconsciously, they are processing it.

And it comes across as extremely professional, which builds credibility and which builds trust. So if you think about marketing as an opportunity to build trust with your audience, having consistent branding. Everywhere that people might run into you is very trust building. Okay, again, I can’t overemphasize how professional it makes your business look, and then people are going to extrapolate that to the kind of business that you run, the kind of acupuncturist that you are, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit.

But this is a really important reason why branding is worth the effort. And then of course, branding will hopefully grab the attention of your ideal patients. So if you think about the symptoms and conditions that you really love treating, the types of patients that you love to treat, whenever you’re creating marketing, you are always focused on their perspective and how can you position your marketing.

in a way that attracts their attention, that appeals to them. And this could be visually in a brand, choosing colors and logo and even font that you think might come together in a way that is appealing to your ideal patient. And it could also be, the way that you talk about your business and acupuncture on your website.

All of that comes together to create your brand. in an effort to attract the type of patient that you’re looking for. Okay. And then as I mentioned, branding makes your business recognizable compared to other businesses or other acupuncturists that are in your community so that if they see a brochure of yours around town, they know that it’s yours, right?

And it, the reason that matters is that now they are thinking of you and maybe they don’t recognize the brand from the person down the road because They never put a brand together, right? Maybe they’re the images and the visuals that they’re using are not consistent. And so they’re not recognizable, but if you are, it really gives you a leg up because it puts your business into the mind of your audience right away.

Okay. Now they’re thinking about your practice and not the other person’s practice. And then branding, as I mentioned, There’s this really important piece where it’s not just the visuals, but it’s also about helping people understand what you stand for as a healthcare provider and how you’re going to approach taking care of them, how you approach health and wellness and this medicine.

And that is what’s going to allow them to perk up and say, That’s what I’m looking for. I feel the same way about XYZ, whatever it is that you shared, or I’m looking for a healthcare provider who will listen to me in this way. Okay. So, branding is also the opportunity to share that personality and your values like we discussed earlier.

And again, that’s what makes people deeply connect to your business and be more likely to take action and call you for an appointment. Okay. And so I keep repeating this, but it’s so important that branding is not just about the visuals. You have these two pieces, you have the appearance of your brand, and then you also have how it makes people feel.

And of course, that is the part where you’re connecting with them deeply and you’re sharing your values. And then again, this just helps build connection and trust. It makes people take action more quickly. Another reason that branding really matters is that as humans, we are hardwired to make immediate judgments based on appearances.

And so I’ll acknowledge right away, this is frustrating for most of my marketing clients and my marketing students. I totally get it, but it is built into who we are as humans and how we’ve evolved, right? So if you imagine back many years ago, if you were living outside in a forest and you had something approach you, whether it is another person or an animal, you needed to be able to assess very quickly.

Is this a threat? Is it safe? If it’s a threat, how much of a risk is it? Basically fight or flight. Should I run or can I stay? And so That is based largely on. visual appearances. And we haven’t really lost that as humans, but now we’re not necessarily assessing, is this pterodactyl going to attack me or not?

We are using that instantaneous judgment mechanism for things in our everyday life, and that includes deciding Whether or not a business is trustworthy and whether we feel safe giving them our money or if we feel safe sharing our personal health information with them. So I want to share with you this really fascinating study that was done by Stanford called the Stanford Credibility Study.

You can Google it. Basically what they did is they wanted to know how much is, design impacting whether people trust a business. So they had a lot of volunteers comb through different websites and give them a rating based on its appearance and attractiveness, its ease of use, et cetera. And, also give a rating for how well they thought the business was going to follow through on their promises as a result of just visiting their website, clicking through the different pages.

And so what they found was that good design that the individuals found attractive meant that people trusted the business. Much more, right? Like statistically significant that if someone found a website attractive and easy to navigate, they scored that business as being much higher on the scale of going to keep their promises, going to follow through and basically like worth Feeling safe investing in whatever this business offered.

Okay, so In a nutshell, I mean i’m reducing this incredible study that Stanford did into just a couple sentences, but the bottom line here is that fortunately or unfortunately People are judging your business by its appearance, and in the world, in the digital world, that really is your brand. What does your website look like?

What is your social media presence like? Is it cohesive across all of these platforms? And again, I think this is certainly unconscious in most cases, but if people are looking at your website and they decide oh, this is attractive, it’s not. They are also extrapolating that to the kind of acupuncturist that you are, right?

And we talked earlier about how good branding looks intentional, which people associate with professionalism, right? So it’s like they can tell you’re making an effort in your brand. And so that means, consciously or unconsciously to them, you are going to make an effort with them as your patient.

In some ways this is really unfair, imagine if you have a website that hasn’t been updated in a long time or it’s hard to navigate, that would mean, the opposite is that they are assuming less of your abilities as an acupuncturist or a business owner. Let’s acknowledge that’s no fun, right?

Judging a book by its cover is always cruddy, we are taught not to do that. But in this case, the best we can do with this information is to use this deeply ingrained concept to our advantage, which means creating a cohesive, attractive brand, specifically attractive to our ideal patients, so that they just have more trust in us.

from the moment that they meet our brand. Okay. So that we are not only attracting them to us, but we’re connecting with them deeply and making them more likely to take the action of setting up an appointment with us. So how do you do that? It’s, it’s not as simple as it sounds, right? Or maybe it doesn’t sound simple, but I I’m gonna break some things down for you to get you started.

So we have talked about how branding is by and large these two different pieces. You have the visual piece and then you have the the personality and the values piece that connects with people deeply. So Today, just to keep things simple and get you started, we’re going to discuss the visuals, okay? So if you don’t really have a brand, or you have one and you don’t feel confident about it, or you’re not sure it’s really attracting the right patients, or you want to rebrand, then this is a great place to start, okay?

So we’ll begin with the visuals, and before we even get into things like colors and fonts and logo, The most important thing here is that you feel like you know your ideal patient deeply. And last month I gave a presentation about target market and ideal patient and how to identify those and why it matters.

So if you missed that, I definitely recommend checking it out. It will help you understand how to define your ideal patient and then also how to use it practically in your marketing. Once you know your ideal patient really well, you’ve made them feel real to you, like you could have a conversation with this person, then you can ask yourself, what what visuals would appeal to them?

What would grab their attention? Okay, and one way that you can start this process is to ask yourself, how do you want your brand to make your ideal patient feel? So a couple different ways you could approach this. You could also ask yourself, when a patient visits my office, how do I want them to feel?

Or, what do I want the experience of interacting with my business to feel like? Whether they’re interacting with it on the phone, or on your online schedule, or if they’re like really in person in your office, what do you want that experience to feel like? So I recommend choosing three descriptive words and you can take your time with this.

I always tell people there’s no need to rush through the branding process. And, if you construct a brand and in six months you feel like, I’m not really sure I hit, hit the nail on the head. You can always go back and adjust. Okay. Your brand does not have to be permanent. It can be flexible.

The same way that your practice is flexible. I think most of us, As we mature as practitioners, the patients that we like to treat kind of shifts and changes and the way we approach the medicine changes. That’s normal. And so your brand can also shift and change with you. Okay? So take your time and come up with three descriptive words.

Maybe the words you choose are how do you want people to feel after they leave your office? Calm, refreshed, happy, something like that, right? It could be anything, okay? And so you’re going to use those words to help you pick the visuals. Okay, and so here are the visuals that I’m going to ask you to identify.

So the first thing you want to start out with is your color palette. So typically, I recommend choosing two bold colors and two dark colors. Softer or light colors. If you think about this in terms of building a website, your bold colors would be for things like headings and buttons, and then the softer colors would be for backgrounds and for layering text on top of.

So one thing you don’t want to do is have a very dark background, And then layer like white or light colored text over it. That can be hard for people with visual disabilities to read. It can be hard for older people to read, like the elderly. It can just be hard to read on a computer screen in general.

So that’s why I really recommend making sure you have some pale light colors. that still fit in with your bold colors, right? But something that you can easily put text on top of and have it be very just easy to read, right? Because there’s no point in building a beautiful brand if people cannot, Read the words, okay?

And I acknowledge that sounds very obvious, but I have seen some truly beautiful brands that people spent a lot of time and energy and money creating only to have it be actually difficult for their ideal clients. or their ideal patients to process. Okay. And one thing I would add is that in the bold colors, let’s say that you chose for your color scheme, think of like a mountain theme.

Forests at dusk, so like slate and dark purple and dark green, but then you need some lighter colors. So maybe like light blue, that sort of thing. You want to have a contrasting color for your calls to action. So in most cases, the calls to action on your website, for example, are going to be buttons. So you could choose a contrasting color of like bright green, or you could pick any The idea here is that it is literally contrasting with the bold colors that you chose, because those buttons are what you really want to draw people’s attention to, right?

The button that says, schedule now, you want to make that obvious. So on my clinic website, my brand is Red, pink, yellow. I know it sounds crazy, but part of the words that I use to describe how I want people to feel one of them was fun, right? I wanted it to feel interesting and different. And so the contrasting color that I choose for my buttons is the bright yellow.

Okay, so just to give you an idea. And of course, this is something you can play around with, right? You don’t have to be married to anything. You can install colors on your website, and then you can change them if you like. And think about, Through all of this, we are always thinking about what would appeal to our ideal patient, okay?

So same thing for the fonts. You want one bold or interesting font that you would use in headings and a logo, and then one very simple font like Times New Roman or Montserrat, Sans Serif for The text, okay? And for your bold or interesting font, don’t choose something too interesting. Again, it has to be legible in a very small version, if it was printed on something, and large, okay?

So Interesting is relative, right? Just compared to very basic text. And then of course you would use your colors and the fonts that you chose to create a logo, whether you do that on your own in Canva or you pay someone to create it for you, you can now provide them the color palette and the font that you want.

And then when you are building out the visuals for your brand, you also want to think about the images. If you are using your office photos, what are the colors that you have in your office? Those might end up being the color palette that you go with, right? Because if you are, if you have a blue treatment room and a green treatment room, those photos are going to be all over your website.

And so you might as well, Surround center your brand around those colors, okay, because they are going to be a huge part of your brand, the photos, okay? You can also get photos for free from a website like Pexels. com or Unsplash, that you could use on your website, or that you could just use as part of your brand identity to guide you.

And so let me give you an example of pulling this all together in one place so that you can assess if you have created the visual feeling that you intended. Okay. So this is called a branding style sheet where you can see we’ve brought together The logo, the fonts, the colors, and some images that represent the colors and also the feel that you want to generate for your patients.

Okay, so again, This is the very beginning of building a brand, and we’ve really only touched a little bit on that idea of connecting with people through your brand’s personality, but it’s a very good start, okay? So I recommend spending some time with this, creating something like this, like your Sorry, there we go.

Your brand sheet and then presenting it to some people that you consider to be your ideal patients and just getting their feedback. Okay? So this is a lot. Putting together a brand is a lot. I hope you have fun with it. It can be a really fun exercise, something to do if in, in all of your free time, it’s something that you can percolate on.

And of course, if you have any questions at all about ChiroSecure, Branding about marketing your practice. I am more than happy to chat with you. You can send me an email at michelle at michelleGrasek. com My website is michelleGrasek. com. I have lots of free marketing worksheets and some free PDA classes and before I go i’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council one more time for the opportunity to be here with you today Talking about these concepts.

So I really hope they help you get more patients in your practice and I’ll see you in the next video.

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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Make Your Marketing More Effective

And that is part of what I wanted to talk about today, is not just why is Target Market worth your time, but how you can use the information from a Target Market worksheet or activity and apply it to your marketing in a very practical way.

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Hi there, my name is Michelle Grasek. I am really excited to be here with you today to talk about some core concepts in marketing if we haven’t met before. I am the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast and I’m a practicing acupuncturist. In upstate New York, and I’ve been teaching marketing in our industry for about nine years.

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And today we’re going to talk about how to apply the concepts of target market to make your marketing more effective. Before we dive in, I’d like to take a moment to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today, talking about marketing. I really believe that Effective, excellent marketing is a really important way that we can reach more patients and have a much bigger impact in our communities.

So let’s dive into this topic. Let’s go to the slides.

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So the reason that I wanted to start with a discussion of target market there are several reasons. The first is that whenever I teach marketing, I like to do it in a very linear fashion, right? Each piece for really effective and holistic marketing. builds on the piece before it, right? And so Target Market and a concept called Ideal Patient Avatar, which we’ll talk about in a moment, are the first steps in really good marketing.

Okay. So I wanted to start at the beginning with this core concept. And I also wanted to talk about Target Market because I understand It’s a very unsexy topic that really doesn’t get a lot of love. Most of my marketing students and marketing clients let me know that they feel like target market is a purely theoretical exercise and they’ll do a target market worksheet, but then they have no idea how to actually apply it when they go to put together their marketing.

We’ll talk about some target market basics. So we’re all on the same page. We’ll discuss why it’s so important and why you should spend some time on it, even if it seems like a kind of dry theoretical exercise. And then I will share pretty quickly. Basically my number one practical tip for actually being able to use what you discover in a target market exercise in your marketing to make your marketing so much more effective.

So let’s cover some definitions. You might already be familiar with this, but again, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, target market, of course, is a Big picture description of a population of people that you would really love to treat, right? These are the people you want to become your patients and Target Market is generally very broad.

It’s typically a lot of demographic information age, sometimes gender, location, etc. And we’ll talk about some of the details of that later on. But the most important thing is Target Market is it’s a very broad description of a group of people. Whereas Ideal Patient Avatar, which sometimes I’ll refer to it as IPA just to save some words, is a very detailed description, like nitty gritty details of a single person who fits into any The bigger picture of your target market, right?

It’s one person who is within your target market population. And this could be a real person, it could be imagined or some combination of both, but this is again, just a very detailed description of this person. Okay? So just, So that we have both of those concepts in mind. So let’s talk about why target market matters, even though it can feel just like a dry exercise that’s theoretical, right?

Like, why is it not just theoretical? When you do it right, target market should really determine the direction of all of your marketing, right? Once you’ve identified the people that you’re speaking to, then you know what images to use. What messages to share with them, what tone of voice to use, sometimes even what vocabulary is going to resonate with them.

And so it’s really helping you make all of your marketing decisions. So in that way, it should certainly make your marketing easier, right? If you are sitting in front of your computer screen and you don’t know what to type for an Instagram post, knowing your target market is certainly going to help with that as well as many other types of marketing.

And. Target market also makes your marketing so much more efficient and effective because you are going to be speaking directly to the people who you want to be your patients in a way that gets them to sit up and take notice because you understand them and their needs. And so that will make people take action at a higher rate.

And so as a result, Your marketing should be more effective overall, and it’s more efficient because that means you have to spend less time doing marketing because the marketing that you’ve already created is working harder for you. And Target Market also helps you create really beautiful, authentic marketing because once really once you know your ideal patient avatar, you can get into the head of your ideal patient. Then you understand their goals and their values, the outcomes that they would like from treatment, and you can really speak to them on this deeper level in your marketing. And help them understand, what can you do for them that’s going to bring them towards their goals?

And that is going to really, oops, sorry about that. That’s really going to connect with them deeply. Okay? And that connection, again, is what makes people sit up and take notice and makes them take action. much more quickly than responding to a broader, more vague message, okay? And when I say take action, I’m almost always talking about either clicking your Schedule Now button, or calling your office, or setting up a free consult.

Whatever it is that’s the first step in working with you. And there’s this concept in marketing where we always say if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re not really speaking to anyone. So what does this mean? It’s just referring to the idea that if you have a really broad, vague marketing message, something that’s very watered down, then it’s not catching the attention of any particular person or group of people.

And As a result, people might not know if what you’re saying actually applies to them. So a big example could be saying that, having marketing about pain management. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, right? But it’s very vague. We know that there’s so many different.

Conditions, and symptoms, and specialties within pain management. And what’s more effective, for example, is if you talked, we’ll say, you’re creating an Instagram post. If you discussed carpal tunnel, or knee pain, or runner’s shin splints, right? Then you’re getting much more specific, and the person who has runner’s shin splints is going to sit up and say, Wow, I had no idea that acupuncture could help with that.

That’s what I need, right? So it’s resonating with them deeply. Whereas if you just say you write a post about pain management, they might not connect that to their specific symptom or experience. Okay? So if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re not really speaking to anyone because your message

And I have a friend who is a marketing copywriter, excuse me, in Australia, and she always phrases it like this. She’d rather be someone’s piña colada than everyone’s cup of tea. And she’s assuming that everyone likes tea. I think, I guess they drink a lot of tea in Australia. But the idea here is that it’s better to attract a specific person, right?

Cause not everybody likes piña coladas. It’s a specific group of people. Then to just blast out a broad message that doesn’t really make anyone pay attention. And again, the result of all of this is that it helps the people that you really love to treat, the ones who have the symptoms and conditions that you’re passionate about, it makes them feel seen and heard and understood.

And this creates that connection and builds trust. And a huge part of what we’re doing with our marketing is trying to get our audience to trust us enough to Let us put needles in them, and to make a financial investment in acupuncture. Okay, so this trust is really what makes people more likely to take that action, right?

Make an appointment, give your office a call. So all of this is how Target Market and your ideal patient avatar come together to make your marketing more effective and more efficient. So that is really why it is worth your time and your energy. Okay. And so typically first, when you are doing these exercises, you would define your target market.

It’s very broad. And then you would decide on an ideal patient who would be your avatar. Okay. And you would typically give them a name and your goal is to make them real to you. Okay, so some concepts that I’m sure everyone is pretty familiar with. Target market is mostly demographic information, right?

You’re describing a population of people. And I would add to this, at the bottom, I would add symptoms or condition as well. Okay. Because that kind of helps make this exercise less sometimes students tell me defining their target market feels very kind of cold. They’re just listing this demographic information.

Try to think about what do all these people have in common? It’s probably the symptoms and conditions that you’re passionate about treating, right? So make sure you put that on there. And then get into the nitty gritty and define your Ideal patient avatar. So this is the most perfect patient you can imagine for your practice.

They are they listen to your advice. Maybe they’re curious about Chinese medicine. They feel better when you give them a treatment. They come back for their wellness visits. They’re willing to invest in their health. They’re willing to make the financial investment in you, as well as to make the personal investment in themself to follow your instructions so they can actually feel better.

Whatever it is that is the perfect patient for you you’re imagining and describing that person. Okay? So if 40 patients for you would be full time in your week, imagine 40 of this person, that’s who you’re trying to describe. And of course this person could be real or imagined. I find that most of my Marketing students come up with some combination of a real patient who has these extra imagined characteristics that really make them perfect.

So you’re getting into the nitty gritty and making this person feel real to you and if you look up Ideal Patient Avatar or sometimes it’s called an ICA, an Ideal Client Avatar. If you look up those workbooks online, they’re going to ask you very specific things like, What does this person like to read?

How do they spend their disposable income? Do they have pets? What are their pets names? What charities do they donate to? What do they do in their free time? Et cetera, et cetera. Go really quite detailed. And the reason that we’re doing this is because you want to give this person life inside your mind, right?

Your ideal patient avatar is the person that you are speaking directly to in all of your marketing. Okay? So whenever you sit down to For example, write a paragraph for your website, or write an Instagram post, or put together a reel, whatever it might be. You are holding an image of this ideal patient avatar in your mind, and you are answering their questions in the way that you would answer them in real life.

You are thinking about, what are the questions that this person would have? What are the Doubts and barriers that prevent them from making an appointment and how could I address them to specifically motivate this person to make an appointment and sometimes when I discuss this with my marketing clients their question is Won’t that only attract a very narrow segment of the population or just this one person?

And the answer is, the beauty of this whole exercise is no. What happens is you end up attracting anyone who shares the values, the goals and the outcomes that they want from treatment as your ideal patient avatar, right? Anyone who has the same symptoms or condition and really resonates with the the ideals of your avatar is going to hear that in your marketing.

Okay. So I hope this is making sense. You are. Thinking about your marketing in terms of answering questions and writing text, creating marketing that resonates with this ideal patient, this single person, but it’s actually going to resonate broadly with anyone who has anything in common with your avatar.

Okay. And so that really makes your marketing effective. I can’t I can’t Emphasize that enough that is really what shifts your marketing from being like good or really pretty good to being Excellent. To being very effective. That’s what shifts it from from, it makes it that you have to do less marketing overall, which is what we talked about in the beginning, right?

So the marketing that you’ve created in the past continues working hard for you. because it has this specificity, right? Because you are really connecting with your target audience connecting with their values, with the outcomes that they want from treatment, et cetera. Okay. And so the most important practical tip that I want to share with you today is how do you use your Ideal patient avatar that you just spent all this time creating and making real in your mind.

So what do you do with that information? Because often I’ll tell people like, oh, use, imagine your IPA and use that to write your website. And people are like, that’s great. I don’t know how to do that in real life. What does that mean? So I have an exercise with you and it’s It sounds silly.

I promise it is effective. It works so well. So the exercise is simple. Make sure that you’ve named your ideal patient avatar. I find that is helpful for most people. So let’s say that your avatar’s name is Sam. You and let’s say you are writing the Frequently Asked Questions page on your website, and you’re struggling with some writer’s block, you don’t know what to say so what you’re going to do is you are going to imagine in your mind this fully fleshed out ideal patient avatar, Sam, as if they were sitting in front of you.

Try to really sink into not only like yourself and you’re listening to Sam, right? If they’re sitting across from you, but put yourself in that person’s shoes and think about what are the questions that Sam would ask you based on, the symptoms and conditions that, Sam has, and their, again, their values their goals for their life, their the outcomes from treatment that they would like.

Based on that, what would Sam ask me about acupuncture? What would be the barriers that are preventing Sam from getting acupuncture? What might be their doubts or their worries? And then how would I answer Sam in a way that is compelling specifically to them to help them understand how acupuncture can be effective?

is worth their time and their energy, right? Like why should Sam specifically get acupuncture for XYZ condition? Okay. And when you do this exercise, as goofy as it sounds, what’s going to happen is you are going to write marketing copy that is incredibly compelling just for Sam, right? But it’s going to resonate with Sam.

Anyone who shares SAM’s values and goals, and it’s gonna speak really deeply to them, okay? And again, that’s what gets them to take action. Okay, so I only wanted to share this one tip with you today because honestly, the whole exercise of Target Market and Ideal Patient Avatar and putting it into practice with this tip, it is a little bit of a project.

And so I think it’s best to spend time focusing just on this for now and you’ll get a ton of value out of your Target Market exercises with just this one exercise.

Thank you so much for being here with me today. You are always welcome to send me questions about your marketing. My email is michelle at michelleGrasek. com and if you’d like you can check out my website. I have some free PDA classes as well as lots of free worksheets on marketing. My website is michelleGrasek.

com and you can also check out my podcast, which is Acupuncture Marketing School. So thank you again to the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you. Have a great day.

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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Is Your Clinic on the Right Side of the Tracks?

Today we’re gonna be talking about tracking for success. So is your practice on track? What stats should you be tracking? Are you tracking or aren’t you?

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Hi, and welcome to another episode of To The Point. I am Dr. Nell Smircina with American Acupuncture Council, and let’s go to the slides. Today we’re gonna be talking about tracking for success. So is your practice on track? What stats should you be tracking? Are you tracking or aren’t you? What’s really interesting about this topic is I would say out of the practitioners and students that I coach when we talk about stats in clinic or stats in their practice, over 90% don’t track anything.

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So the little bit these nuggets that you’re going to get out of the presentation today, you’re already gonna be way ahead of the game just by going over these three top things that you wanna make sure you’re tracking in your business. So really things to think about. Like I said, most of practitioners out there, at least in the acupuncture industry, are unfortunately not tracking things.

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This can be really problematic because not only is it not allowing us to be really intentional with what’s going on in our practice, but how are we comparing how we’re doing? If we’re growing? There are a lot more things than your bottom line revenue that we need to be looking at because it’s one thing to say, Hey, I need to bring in more income every month.

But it’s very different when you then wanna dive into where is that revenue coming from? Is it mostly new patients? Is it returning patients? Is it supplement sales? If you’re not really sure, then that’s gonna be really problematic when you are trying to decide what steps you wanna take next to continue growing your practice.

So the first thing you wanna think about is are you tracking to begin with? If you’re not tracking, why is that? Is it because you’re just not sure what stats you should be tracking? Is it because we get so swept up in the day-to-day, which is entirely possible, especially since most of us start out as solopreneurs.

You are the only one who is working all of the levers in your business. So I wanna help with some of those. . Maybe why not today And give you just some really easy things that you could take away and say, all right, this feels really feasible for me. I can at least get started with these three things.

And if you are tracking, that’s awesome. I just told you the stats on people I talk to, how often people are not tracking in their businesses. But if you are tracking, what are you tracking? Is it again, just that bottom line what comes into your practice? Is it the top line when it comes to sales before you take out all of your expenses?

Because what we’re looking at from patient count perspective and revenue can make a really big difference in the decisions that we make. So I absolutely want you to be looking at your finances. We need to budget, we need to plan accordingly. But when it comes to those first steps to take for what we’re gonna track when it comes

Two patients. Let’s take a look at these three today. So the first one, . I’m new. How many new patients are you bringing in? We wanna talk about you and your practice. So we’re gonna close up by saying how important it’s to talk to colleagues and how important it’s to compare you to you. But if you brought in four new patients last month, we wanna do better than that this month.

If you brought in 40 patients last month, we wanna see how to do better this month. We wanna start tracking these things so we can make informed decisions, not only when it comes . To how well is the practice doing, but we wanna talk about capacity. When is it important to bring on another practitioner?

When do you need to bring on office staff? When do you get to the point where you say, Hey, I’m doing too many patients. I don’t have time to run the back office at this point, and somebody really needs to help me. And the first easy one to do is just tracking the amount of new patients that come into your practice.

And I really like to look at this on a weekly basis. If you’re, just getting started with it and that feels a little overwhelming. Monthly is great as well. But really to have that weekly check-in and say how many new patients this week. What’s also great about tracking things is you start to identify trends.

When I had my practice and that was in la it was very, seasonal. I had a lot of parents in my practice, so people would be going away during the summer, they’d be going away during holiday breaks. And you need to be able to plan for that and start to see trends. But when are your new patients coming in?

How many new patients are coming in? Is the main thing that you wanna start with? The second thing is looking at return patients. Now I’ve seen this tracked a couple of different ways where I think it’s most meaningful for you to take something really tangible out of it and say to myself, wow, I really learned something from this process.

How many of those new patients are coming back? That doesn’t mean, all right, what percentage of my patients are returning patients? I think when you first start tracking metrics in your practice, you wanna look at . It could also be referred to as your conversion rate. So you have a new patient. How many of them are turning into a patient with an active care plan Who’s coming back for that next treatment?

That’s really important to know because if we look at that kind of staying at the same level, I. That that’s not improving. We wanna then be looking at, okay, what are ways that we can improve that conversation around why someone needs to go from that initial consultation and exam into an active care plan?

And so we can’t really start looking at what are the main things that cause that performance to increase if we don’t know what that baseline number is. So we need to know how many new patients are turning into return patients. And again. Get grounded in a weekly cadence of this. You can just look at a few things per week and that will start to give you a few metrics that make it really evident what’s going on in your practice, and you can always go from there.

I. All right, the last one with all these numbers this is one people don’t often think about, but it’s very important when you’re looking at planning your income and predicting out what your scheduling is going to look like. What is the average number of sessions that a new patient. Who then gets into an active care plan?

What does your active care plan session wise generally look like? And depending on your specialization, depending on the amount of days that you practice depending on, if your cash or insurance a lot of these things shouldn’t make a difference in this number, but realistically they do. It’s a little easier to have a conversation with a patient who’s paying with their insurance that they need to come three times a week.

Maybe that’s not as easy when you’re in a cash practice. I will say, and I’ve done shows on this before, I think that management of expectations and that communication is critical. You need to be telling your patients first and foremost what is best for them, what’s best for their health. And you can always come back to, okay, that’s not feasible for you.

Then this is how we can adjust. And then if that’s not going well, you can revisit. This is why I said this is what the frequency should be. But you need to look at what is that average number of sessions that you are prescribing someone as part of a treatment plan. Is it six for an additional an initial round?

Is it 12? Is it 10? So that when you know how many new patients am I bringing in and that what percentage of those patients are coming back and what is the average number of sessions that those returning patients are going to be engaged in? That really allows you to plan things ahead of time. So you start to see those trends in when new patients are typically coming and the activities you’re engaging in around that.

You get to see, all right, this is my conversion rate. This is who I’m bringing in as a new patient who then becomes a returning patient who’s engaged in an active care plan. And then, okay, what does that care plan look like? Now that they’re converted, and I know that . 50% of my people or 80% of my people are going to be engaged in an active care plan if I know that’s generally sessions.

Those three things allow me to plan very well and have a really good baseline for starting to look at my practice and how it’s doing, how it’s growing and when I need to bring on more help. . Again, like I said, the majority of people are not tracking. So if you just start with these things, you’re really going to have an incredible opportunity to be ahead of the game, like ahead of 90%

Of the practitioners that I talk to just by starting these. And you wanna compare you to you. So I think sometimes when we’re at the beginning of practice or when we’ve been stuck at a particular cadence and we’re trying to grow out of that and not be at a plateau, it can feel a little challenging.

We can play that comparison game with other people. It is important to measure growth. Also U to U. So if you were doing four new patients last month and you’re doing eight new patients this month, maybe that is not the same cadence as the acupuncturist down the street who’s been in practice longer.

But that’s a huge increase. That’s a 100% increase. So we should be excited about that and be able to then look at that and say, okay, something’s working. What are those things that are working? And also this can be a very isolating profession. So you wanna ask your colleagues, you wanna see are other people tracking things, what’s been really helpful for them?

People who are able to convert most of those new patients who do consultations or exams into returning patients. What are things that they’re doing? So really trying to leverage the people around us and create that support system is key. I love talking about this stuff. And this is always fun bringing you guys these bite-sized nuggets for your practice.

But if you ever have any more questions, please feel free to reach out to me at aac and don’t forget to tune in next week for another episode of To the Point. . .

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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – An Associateship vs. Starting a Private Practice

And so we’re gonna go over the idea of employment versus private practice. And so I don’t mean just employment as employment in a hospital.

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of To The Point. I am Dr. Nell with American Acupuncture Council. Let’s go to the slides.

So today we’re gonna go over a topic that, again, every time I bring these to you guys, there seems to be a theme where many people are coming to me with these same questions. And so we’re gonna go over the idea of employment versus private practice. And so I don’t mean just employment as employment in a hospital.

We could talk about . Contract work synonymously. Really the idea we wanna dive into is the idea of growing your own business versus being a part of someone else’s business. And what are some of the pros and cons there? What are some of the considerations and things we need to go over? Why this is such an important topic to me is I have done all of these different variations of this.

I’ve done the cash practice, the insurance practice, I’ve done contract work worked in a medical facility, been part of a group practice, . There’s many different ways that you can build your career in this profession, in the clinical space, if maybe this’ll be a future one that we do. Talking about all the other different revenue streams you could potentially have, and ways that you could make impact or be employed in this industry beyond the clinical space.

But today we’re really going to hone into the clinical aspect of this. So with that, what are we thinking about today? What’s the considerations that we wanna have? We wanna talk about the risk reward ratio. . There’s nuances with that. If you’re on your own versus working for somebody else, same thing with costs.

The costs are gonna be drastically different. And even within those two different options, they’re gonna be different cost considerations, and then the benefits comparison, because of course, whatever decision we make, we always wanna be coming from. A really informed place and making decisions out of having substantial information rather than making a decision based on, oh, insurance feels complicated.

I don’t wanna deal with that. Or, I don’t know anything about owning my business, so I’m just not gonna do that. So we wanna look at what’s the benefit for us but also what are those risks, those costs, really the overall considerations that we need to have when making this informed decision. So let’s look at the risks and the rewards of both of these options.

Like I said, in that employment independent contractor piece . First and foremost, you wanna have malpractice insurance. Whether you’re working for yourself or you’re working for somebody else. You are gonna have the flexibility of how you manage risk when it comes to your own private practice.

You’re gonna have a lot of autonomy when it comes to deciding what is your environment going to look like? How am I going to control all these different variables around me? You’re not worried about, . Potentially other providers causing issues or sharing patients. If it’s you get to make the rules, right?

You also get to make decisions around what type of malpractice coverage you’re going to have. The limits. If you are working for somebody else, they are going to make a lot of these decisions. So that environment, if it’s a shared environment, you are not an autonomous entity there. I’ll give you an example.

When I first started my practice in Beverly Hills, I was sharing a medical space. So it was amazing for a new practitioner because I was in an environment with a neurologist, a chiropractor, massage therapy, Ayurvedic care nurse practitioners. Really loved that multidisciplinary approach. However, . We shared a waiting room.

We shared office staff, and even though we were all running our own businesses . When Covid happened, there were certain risks and, rules that were in place. And I got really concerned that, okay, what if these other providers aren’t following the rules? Could I get fined? Could I get in trouble?

And so there is an additional risk at having this multidisciplinary kind of space and not having that autonomy over your own space. Also, if you’re working for someone else let’s say you work at Modern Acupuncture. . They are going to determine what your limits of liability need to be. The the type of policy that you need to have.

They are going to have the setup of their physical space, right? So you are not going to have a lot of decision making power when you are working for somebody else. There are things you can do. Of course, you’re gonna be practicing clean needle technique. . You’re gonna make sure that you keep your risk as low as possible.

But at the same time, there’s only certain things that you can control when it is not your space. The rewards of that though, we’re gonna get into, and some of that has to do with the cost. So let’s look at that. It’s very interesting to me that, over 90% of acupuncturists are sole proprietors.

So running our own businesses going out on our own functioning as entrepreneurs. And yet, like 2% of our education is focused on business training and most small businesses fail within their first few years. . There is something really interesting about how that is set up and certain realities that we need to be aware of with that.

And cost is really one of those. So when you’re looking at the cost of starting your own business now, yes, we are in an industry that has pretty low overhead. We don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to get really dramatic results for patients. We need our needles, we need our basic tools. For CNT, we need a treatment table.

If you’re doing community acupuncture, you might not even need a table. You might need chairs. So there are ways to offset a lot of this cost. You can share space when you’re first practicing. You can rent a room, so you are operating as an autonomous entity, but you’re minimizing the cost of your initial investment in your practice and how that looks.

Obviously if you’re working for someone else, a lot of that might even be taken care of, that already low overhead could get even lower. So I had done an employment agreement with another acupuncturist when I was first starting, and I worked with him two days a week, but. He paid for all of the supplies.

He was, doing all of the insurance billing. He had a scheduling software that he was paying for. He had office staff, so all I was doing was showing up and treating. And so when we think about cost, we also wanna think about what does that mean? For what it’s potentially costing us as well, right?

So if you are operating in your own business, you get to determine what that fee schedule is. You get to determine what your take home from your business is going to be. Whereas if you’re working for someone else, you’ll see a lot of these jobs advertised online and sometimes it is nowhere near what you could make in private practice.

And that’s because. This entity that is employing you or contracting you is taking on not only a lot of that risk, but the cost as well. And so they have to offset that in some way. But I do really wanna talk about the benefits because this is going to look a little bit different depending on not only like what your risk tolerance is, what your interests are, what you genuinely want to spend your time doing.

So like I mentioned with private practice. You get to determine what your fee schedule is. Nobody is making that decision for you. You can do your own market research. You can say, I’m going to have a relationship based practice and I’m going to go out and make friends with other healthcare providers and make sure that I have a ton of referrals coming in and I keep my patients really happy.

You could have a FI high volume insurance practice where you are in network with a lot of companies that are essentially . Pre-qualifying people for you who are on those websites looking and saying, oh, hey, I’m interested in acupuncture. Where is there an acupuncturist in my area? So that flexibility and the autonomy that you will have in private practice is really your major benefit.

You get to make. All of the decisions that for some cannot feel like a benefit at all. Some people, and I would venture to say a lot of people in our industry did not get into this medicine to run a business. They are not interested in being entrepreneurs. That is not, top of mind. It’s that they wanna be incredibly cli, clinically competent, which most acupuncturists are who are licensed and they want to deliver incredible patient results.

And that’s what we like to do, right? The benefit of working for someone else, when you give up some of that autonomy, you get back a lot of that focus on being a clinician. So I loved at that point in my career, when I was first starting out for two days a week to be able to show up in an office and just treat and have a full schedule and never worry about recruiting patients or what the overhead was, or was my, business license renewed.

Did I pay my taxes, did I get my articles of incorporation in ? All of those things were taken off my plate as an employee as a contractor as well. Like I’m not worried about those things. I get to show up and do what I wanna do best. So when we are looking at . The benefit analysis here that is going to be highly individualized depending on who is looking at this.

I personally see so much benefit in running your own business and getting to determine what your marketing strategy’s gonna be. Who are those partners you’re going to bring in? . But a lot of people might not feel that way. I have a provider who works for me in my practice, and she is incredible.

She’s been licensed for 12 years and she, the entire time has only been interested in employment opportunities or contract work because she is very clear that she wants to spend every hour possible in her day. Focusing on patient care and treating patients, and she has absolutely no interest in running a business.

So looking at benefits that is highly individualized. There are certain things that you’re gonna say, oh hey that sounds really good to me. That will not sound good to somebody else. So just like our medicine is so highly personalized, this decision is as well. But I think the important things with this to remember are you have tons of flexibility.

. You get to decide if you want to only run your own business, if you want to work for someone else, if you wanna work with someone part-time. If you wanna have multiple locations, that is a really beautiful thing about not only the personalized aspect of care that we have, but the personalized aspect we can have with our clinical setup and the way we deliver that care.

It’s very important though to know your state laws. So for example in California it is very difficult to contract people. A lot of those laws were built around trying to protect independent contractors like Uber drivers that type of thing. And. The side effects of that have permeated into the healthcare delivery system.

And so you need to be knowledgeable about, okay, am I even allowed to have independent contractors? Am I allowed to be an independent contractor? If I’m an employee, who do I need to be employed by? Another California example you need to be employed by a professional corporation. So if you don’t, your employer doesn’t fall into that category.

They’re not supposed to be employing you as an acupuncturist in that state. So there is nuance there and workarounds for all that too. That’s where the flexibility comes in. That’s where talking to an attorney comes in. That’s where talking to me, letting me guide you and send you to the right people to help with this setup.

And the last thing I wanna end with is that. As a, not only a medical provider, but a provider of acupuncture and traditional medicine who is working in such a highly specialized area of healthcare. yoU are your business. So whether you are, presenting yourself and saying, Hey, like I have my private practice, but I also work here and I work here and I work here many times, we become the brand for our own entity.

People are drawn to you a lot of times, even more so than the medicine. People get very attached to their providers, and so while that provides a lot of . Flexibility. There’s also a ton of responsibility that goes along with that, and I think that’s, I wanna link that back to the risk management piece at the beginning that we really need to be mindful of.

Because even if we’re out there, we’re, posting on our own personal social media, we’re still representing ourselves and our business, whether we are employed or whether we are practicing independently. I love talking about these different options. I’ve been able to help a lot of providers navigate that landscape that’s my happy place.

So please feel free to reach out. We definitely have the risk management piece covered, and don’t forget to tune in next week for another episode of To The Point. Thanks for tuning in. .

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Acupuncture Malpractice Insurance – Safety Misconceptions: Are You At Risk For a Claim?

We have certain misconceptions around safety that we’re gonna go over today and really what puts us at risk. And I wanna be sure to hit on some things that will not only help keep you safe in practice, but are gonna help you build your business as well.

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Hi everyone. I’m Dr. Nell with American Acupuncture Council. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of To The Point. Let’s go to the slides. Today we’re gonna be talking about something that. I don’t always go over in such a straightforward way. A lot of times this topic is interwoven into some of the the themes that we have throughout our different broadcasts, but it’s something that has been coming up a lot for me lately.

Not just in my own practice, but in things I handle in my day-to-Day work at AAC, and I think it’s really important to note that. We have certain misconceptions around safety that we’re gonna go over today and really what puts us at risk. And I wanna be sure to hit on some things that will not only help keep you safe in practice, but are gonna help you build your business as well.

All about that efficiency. So when we’re looking at this, I think there’s a few reasons why we miss the mark when it comes to safety sometimes. So I think when you hear the word safety, it’s very easy, particularly in our industry to think, oh, that’s OSHA related. Or that’s clean needle technique.

And I think that buzzword of safety makes us think more about occupational hazards when it comes to keeping safe with our needles, with our cupping supply. All of those things that of course we’re running into in our day-to-day when it comes to practice. But there’s a whole other aspect to keeping ourselves safe, not just the materials we use or the patients we use those materials on.

But also how we’re operating in our day-to-Day, and how do we keep our practices safe as we’re growing them. And I think part of this is due to another myth, this misconception that acupuncturists don’t really get in trouble, that we have such a safe medicine, which we do. And compared to other healthcare providers it is very safe.

We focus a lot on preventative health. We have obviously a more holistic and natural approach. So there is going to be some built-in safety to the way that we practice. . However, there’s also built-in risk. And so I think sometimes we focus in on these ideas of clean needle technique or osha because we think this idea of managing risk outside of those very straightforward things feels maybe too overwhelming.

Or like we don’t have a how something to really latch onto with that. And so I wanna demystify a little bit of that today and just give you one really easy takeaway, the main thing that you could take away from this to potentially avoid a claim coming through your office. So when we look at this misconception around safety first and we think about the occupational safety that we need to take care of, I think.

That makes us forget about all these other aspects of risk. So a big thing board complaints, for example. That’s something that could happen even if you are a hundred percent with your OSHA standards, your clean needle technique. That’s something that we don’t even think about when it comes to just the safety of protecting our practice.

If we hear the word malpractice, we’re thinking that’s okay. Yes. Directly related to patient care. Nothing on the periphery. So we really need to reevaluate what’s coming to mind when we think about safety. And that other piece about, oh, our medicine’s really safe. This is a problem for . Other healthcare providers?

No. There, there’s a real truth here that acupuncturists can have claims coming in. And even though our medicine is very safe and it might be obviously more risky to be a surgeon, we still have to look at what our normal is, what our risk tolerance is the things that we’re gonna encounter in our day to day.

When we look at what a patient experience looks like for us specifically, there’s a lot of risk that’s just baked into our normal day-to-day. We have a one-on-one relationship with our patients. There’s not a scribe. A lot of times there’s not office staff. There’s not. Witnesses to things that could potentially happen.

So that puts us at a little bit of increased risk. And because of nuances like that, that are not cut and dry, it’s not like we’re performing a surgical procedure and there’s either a favorable outcome or not. There’s either a complication or there isn’t. There is nuance to how we need to think about safety in our practice.

So the number one thing that we can do, and I want you to see this stat, over 90%. I am wondering if you have any idea what comes to mind or what comes to mind for you individually when you hear this over 90% with regard to claims. So this is actually, a colleague of mine uses the stat when we speak in the different acupuncture schools that over 90% of claims in acupuncture could be avoided if there was proper communication on the front end.

And that sounds really scary because it’s scary to even think about claims in our practice or something going wrong, especially because most acupuncturists are very well-intentioned and wanna do really right by our patients. But to think that I. The claims that do come through that, a lot of times there’s a breakdown in communication that should actually feel really empowering.

That’s something that we can get better at. That’s something that can help protect us in practice as well as help us grow our businesses. So just like when people say things, it’s very cliche, oh, if you invest in yourself, you can never go wrong. If you invest in your communication, your ability to manage expectations on the front end, that is a great way to bridge that gap between thinking about safety from a, how do I protect myself, my practice, my patients.

Managing expectations is a huge part of lowering that risk. And so this 90% plus for you to think about how powerful you could be and how safe you could be in practice with that effective communication for you from a business building perspective is going to help with patient acquisition.

It’s gonna help with patient retention because you’re managing expectations better. It will absolutely help with referrals because if we’re effectively communicating the value that we provide, so if you’re. Invested in becoming a stellar communicator. Not only are you gonna lower that risk but you’re gonna bring your business to a new level as well.

To wrap this up, I wanna bring all of these together focused on what we talked about at the beginning. So if you take anything away from this, just know that there’s more to safety, so don’t hear that safety buzzword and think, oh, I just need to get my N-C-C-O-M PDAs and knock out that one class. I already did clean needle technique.

I don’t need to think about that. No. Safety is something we need to think about every single day in our businesses, and we need to expand beyond that, that safety net of just checking the box that we’re doing clean needle technique or effective OSHA practices or even effective HIPAA practices. We need to think about how

Every little bit of communication that we have, every action that we make absolutely falls into that safety category. And the reality is we’re licensed providers. So licensed providers, regardless of what your day-to-Day looks like, there’s an increased risk because you have a license, it’s. Stake and you have certain standards that need to be met to maintain that license to help the public be protected to be a fiduciary.

And so we need to think about safety a little bit differently within the context of being licensed. And the last thing is. Safety doesn’t need to be a boring thing or a check the box thing. It can be a really interesting thing. It can be a really exciting thing because it does help you manage risk, but also build your practice.

We have another previous show where we went over the fear of, in a discussing informed consent. Informed consent is my favorite business building tool. So there’s a lot of overlap here between keeping yourself safe and making sure your business is going to continue to grow. Thrive. I appreciate you all listening today.

If you have more questions, always feel free to reach out to me at aac and don’t forget to tune in next week. We’re gonna have, of course, another episode of To The Point. So thank you so much and see you then.

Top 3 Things to Never Say When Networking

Today we’re going to be diving into one of my favorite topics because it’s the most heavily asked thing that people come to me about is networking.

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I am Dr. Nell with American Acupuncture Council, and welcome to another episode of To The Point. Let’s go to the slides. Today we’re going to be diving into one of my favorite topics because it’s the most heavily asked thing that people come to me about is networking. And we’re gonna go specifically over things that you do not want to say when you’re networking.

Things that could be damaging could prevent you from accomplishing what you wanna accomplish when you’re either . Networking with other providers, trying to get referrals, trying to build more people in your community. And so we wanna make sure that we’re not doing these three things that we’re gonna go over today to get the most value out of that experience.

First, let’s just address something real quick. Why do we get this wrong? Those harsh truths when it comes to why are we saying potentially the wrong things when we’re engaging in something like networking? First of all, we’re human, so let’s acknowledge that we’re not gonna get things right every single time.

But a lot of times when it comes to networking in general, the issue is we’re so focused on our needs and not about providing value for the person that we’re talking to. So we can be selfish by nature. A lot of times when people think about going to a networking event, they’re thinking, oh I’m going here so I can get more patients or, so I can find more referrals or, so I can meet somebody who’s gonna be part of my care team.

. A lot of times we’re focused on, yeah, what is the bottom line for us, rather than what is the value that we can provide? And then of course there’s a fear component, right? Again, that goes back to we’re all human. Fear of, I don’t know exactly what to say if I’m too forthcoming with why I’m going to this networking event, how is that gonna come off?

Am I ? Going to feel confident enough to accomplish my goals when it comes to talking to complete strangers, that’s not an easy thing to do by any means, and it’s something that does require a little bit of practice. So what I wanted to do with this presentation really nice and quick today and value driven is just go over.

The commonly heard things that don’t provide a lot of value for people. The biggest one that I hear, and I’m gonna put it first, is people say, I want to pick your brain. This is one of the most. Common things that will come out of somebody’s mouth when they go to an event. When they call up somebody as a follow-up.

I get this all the time, people I know a lot or don’t know very well. Now granted, if you know somebody really well, you have an established relationship with them. Let’s say you’re a former student of mine that I’ve met several times, I don’t mind someone saying, I wanna pick your brain. The mistake that gets made however, is, we are excited to meet someone.

We admire that person. We feel like they would provide a lot of value for us, and then we shoot them an email to try to set up a meeting and we say, I wanna pick your brain. The reason that this is problematic is, First of all, there’s an assumption here that person values their ego more than their time, right?

So you’re telling them, oh, they have something to offer, and just assuming that they’re gonna give up their time in order to share that with you. So it’s not a value driven statement to make. So we wanna do something else. We wanna shift the focus so it’s more value driven for them, something that we can provide, something that we wanna share.

Being more specific about what we wanna talk about, saying to them. You know that they’re the person who could answer X question for you and you’re going to do X, Y, and Z. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be transactional. Really, though, we just wanna make sure that we’re providing value anytime we speak to somebody.

And so you never wanna say to a perfect stranger, oh hey, I wanna pick your brain, and just assume that they’re going to be able to make time for that or want to make time for that. The second thing that I hear a lot is whenever you have time, This goes a little bit into that third piece, that fear component that someone would say no to us.

Not wanna hop on a call with us, not wanna have a follow-up conversation to one that we had when we are unspecific like this and say whenever you have time Everybody feels like they’re busy and they don’t have time. So we wanna shift this a little bit to say when you can make time, when it’s convenient for you give them specific times in the next week or so.

I’m available Tuesday through Thursday at these times. People do need guidance and you wanna make this process as . Easy for someone as possible. So if I get an email from someone and they say, Hey, I wanna pick your brain whenever you have time. To me that ends up being a lower value email. It’s one of the last things I’m gonna get back to because I have all of these more specific requests from people.

I think generally people do wanna help. They do wanna engage, they want to cultivate community and cultivate relationships. But it can be really difficult in the society that we live in the day and age that we live in where people are generally very busy and they need a little bit more specificity and a little more guidance as to what that ask is.

And this one I put in very specific for our industry because as much as . I love the acupuncture community. I love our profession. We have a tendency to engage in medical jargon. And when I say medical jargon, part of that tradition that we hold so dear in our medicine, things like. Chi Blood Yin.

We’re so eager to talk about how we can help people. We’re so eager to educate about how incredible and effective our medicine is that sometimes we tend to. Overwhelm people with information and overwhelm people with information that is not particularly valuable to them or relevant to them at face value.

So if I’m someone who’s never heard of this medicine before and you’re talking to me about chi or blood, I might have an idea of what I think blood is. And that’s very different than what we mean about blood from a clinical perspective. So when we’re trying to . Cultivate a relationship with someone or provide value to someone.

We wanna make sure that we’re meeting them where they’re at. So if someone is a very busy, stressed out business person and we’re talking about how we can provide them value rather than talking about cheese stagnation that they may be having, we wanna talk about stress relief better sleep, things that are gonna be a little bit more relatable to them.

So at the end of the day, the things we wanna remember, ’cause we’re going back to the don’ts. Why we don’t do this right all the time. Yes, we’re all human. So that is the truth. Whether, we’re saying something like, I wanna pick your brain. Just think if you would wanna hear something like that.

Or whenever you have time. . Not specific enough for me or the person that I’m talking to. So you wanna remember that? Yes, we’re all human, but you wanna first and foremost focus on the needs of the person that you’re trying to reach, that you want to take time out of their day to have a conversation with you, to network with you, to build a relationship with you and.

Let’s get rid of the fears because if you are coming from a good wholehearted place, if you’re coming from a place of wanting to provide value, there is never any reason to fear that connection with someone, that conversation, or that desire to build your network. So again, I told you it was gonna be nice and quick and value driven.

If you have any questions for me, you can always reach out. I’m at the American Acupuncture Council and be sure to tune in next week for another episode of To the Point. .