Why Waste Your Time Marketing if You Don’t Know What You Need?
Many of the mental health private practice business owners we work with come to us initially to work on a marketing strategy and process for their business. The first thing I always ask is “Do you really understand what you need in order to meet your goals for your business?” This typically creates a bit of a pause in the conversation. Often we have no clue what it would look like numbers wise to meet the goals of our business.
You can spend a ton of time, energy, and money on your overall business marketing strategy, but if it is not going to help you meet your goals then why bother? The point here is to really get clear about what you want and what you need for your business. In our blog last week I mentioned that marketing starts with niching down your private practice in order to get clear about who you are going to serve and engage in your marketing message. While that is true, it is also true that this whole strategy should be built around what will serve the goals and vision you have for your business.
Depending on what your goals and vision are for your private practice as the business owner, it may take you in an entirely different direction for your strategies to reach and engage potential clients.
Spending the time getting to know your numbers before you commit to any particular strategy for marketing your business is very important. It really does help with clarity in the direction you will take your business and what you can expect along the way.
We use business modeling in order to help us with this in our private practice. Business modeling allows us to mock up our business and see what the numbers look like if we start to make changes to it long before we put our business in jeopardy mucking around with numbers in real life.
Business modeling helps us to establish session rates, gather information on overall session overhead, pay rates for our team, and delve into what benefits we can afford to offer our team. We literally can create a model of almost any business and make decisions on what real numbers would look like. It helps us to answer questions like should we hire? At what point do we start making money on a new hire? What margins can I expect for my private practice?
Business modeling allows us to get clear on what it will look like to achieve our goals for our businesses. Once we know this information we can then create a marketing strategy to achieve that. It makes everything so much better when you have the clarity to make the right decisions for your business. It will save you time, energy, and money. Getting clear on what you need will allow you to be more efficient in your business. It’s the old adage of work smarter and not harder.
We will work with you to create a customized business model for your business in order to explore your business vision and goals. It is probably one of the most empowering tools we work with when setting strategy for your business. The thing is long after we are done working together you can continue to use this tool for your business. It won’t go out of style and it will always be there to serve your business needs.
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