“It is not doing the thing we like, but liking the thing we have to do that makes life happy” - Goethe

From Dream To Reality

Do you remember what inspired you to become a Naturopathic Doctor? Can you recall your courage as you faced the challenges of getting your qualifications? Were you filled with idealistic enthusiasm as you envisioned building the practice of your dreams?

What is your experience now, as you deal with the responsibilities of running your business? Unfortunately, as time passes, endless details can begin to consume your life, and you may lose sight of your dreams. Your challenge can even become one of showing up for work, day in, day out.

Do You Have All The Patients You Want?

• Do you have enough patients, income and profit?
• Do business conflicts drain your energy at work?
• Do you have enough time to enjoy living a balanced life?
• Does today’s reality fulfill the promise of yesterday’s dreams?
• Do you feel isolated and alone at the heart of your enterprise?
• Are your hopes for tomorrow as passionate and empowering as your student visions?

If you feel content and fulfilled, congratulations! Stop reading now, and move on.

Build Your Business Faster

If you still yearn for more, continue reading. There is a remedy, a simple way to build your practice faster and improve the quality of your life.

The way begins when you realize that your business is like a body, and that you can apply your healing knowledge to your own practice. Although the way is simple, the journey is not always easy; it does require your persistence, commitment and courage.

When you see a patient for the first time, you listen to their story and observe their symptoms, but look deeper, into their systems and how they are functioning. Although you may notice tiny details, they do not sidetrack you. Instead, you stay focused on working at a causal level.

When the condition is chronic, you expect that the healing process will take time. You seek to educate yourself and your patients. You know that their willingness to be actively involved in the healing process is important for success.

Your practice is very similar. Your business is like a body, made up of systems, structures and processes that interact dynamically with each other.

Does your business suffer from a chronic condition? Are you sidetracked by details that hide the underlying issues? Do you blame circumstances for your business health problems?

Or are you willing to take responsibility for your business healing process? Are you willing to learn? Are you motivated to change your practice lifestyle? You can build your business faster, with the help of the insights of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

The journey begins when you take responsibility for your business identity.

Your Identity – Five Elements and Five Business Roles

The Five Elements correspond to Five Business Roles (Five Hats), each with responsibilities that you are required to manage and master.

You cannot delegate the responsibilities of ownership. It is a full time job that starts and ends with you. And if you dislike or avoid your responsibilities, your practice suffers.

How Many Hats Are You Willing To Wear?

Your practice will not thrive if you only wear the hat of the Naturopathic Doctor. If you want to be successful, learn how to wear all five hats. Typically, your education focused on teaching you Doctoring (your job, the technical aspects of treating patients), but did little to provide you with the attitudes, skills and knowledge required to wear the business hats.

Life sometimes demands that, in order to succeed in fulfilling our dreams, we have to be willing to master the roles that we most dislike and avoid. Each action is preceded by its opposite. Before we can breathe in fully, we have to breathe out fully. In order to be who we want to be, first we have to do the things we don’t want to do.

One student asked me how they could build a practice that allowed them to have lots of leisure time. The answer: “Start by working really, really hard, year after year, until your practice becomes a business that allows you time to enjoy the leisure you deserve!”

The University of Life has designed the curriculum. What lessons are you being asked to learn? How many hats are you willing to wear?

The Fourteen Channels of Professional Practice

Being, Doing, and Having: The Five Roles are about being – about who you are, your identity, character and personality. The Fourteen Channels are about doing – how you take action in the world, how you manage the flow of energy through your business. When you are authentic, being true to your identity and doing the right things, then you will start having your dreams fulfilled.

Chinese Medicine teaches that the fourteen channels are different parts of a single energy flow, and that a blockage or imbalance at any one point results in symptoms “upstream” and “downstream” as the body tries to compensate.

Your business is similar. There is a dynamic flow of life energy through your practice.

The flow begins with you and ends with you. The process begins with your Personal Attributes – your attitude, skills and knowledge, your willingness to learn and transform yourself. And the process ends with Personal Care, what you harvest from your work. What do you have to show for your efforts – at the end of each day, each week, each month, and each year? Was it all worthwhile?

And if your life and your enterprise are not balanced, where is the flow restricted? What part of your business process is not working? Let’s go through the sequence, one step at a time, and see if you can find out where to focus your business healing efforts.

Remember that this flow is an interconnected sequence, in the sense that blockage at one point will have consequences that impact all the other areas of your practice. For example, if you have a problem with process management, it will affect the way you plan, and so on.

1. Personal Attributes – the self-management system. This is what it’s all about – owning a business challenges you to master the skills of your life and your profession. Are you ready, willing and able to be an entrepreneur and wear all the hats required to build a successful enterprise?

Which roles do you prefer; why do you avoid others? How does this affect your practice?

2. Process Management – how you manage your business systems and procedures. If you have a problem, make it into a process and then you will have success! Organize your business into procedures to avoid being overwhelmed by details. Mastering your business systems will assist you to manage your enterprise.

What procedures in your clinic could be documented and improved?

3. Planning – how to organize the way you design, set up and run your business. It involves the elements that can make or break delivery of your services. Remember to plan before you act! Set up the structure of your practice in a way that prevents problems and fosters success.

How current is your written plan for your practice? How often do you update it? Who are the confidential business advisors (such as your accountant or business coach) that review your plan and give you advice and feedback?

4. Professional Awareness – understanding the opportunities and challenges of your profession, so that you practice legally and ethically, as required by the College of Naturopathic Physicians of BC. This overview of your profession gives an in-depth understanding of your obligations.

What can you do to improve your professional awareness?

5. Paperwork – jurisprudence and the administration system. How you comply with regulatory and professional requirements and manage the administrative details of your practice. The cost of doing administration (in time and money) may be high, but the price if you don’t may be even higher!

If you love paperwork, and hide behind it, how can you reduce the time you waste working on administrative details?

If you hate paperwork and avoid it, how can you implement simple, proactive procedures that enable you to organize and administer your practice effectively?

6. Professional Relationships – how to network and negotiate for business success with related people, organizations and sources of information. This is the domain of the BC Naturopathic Association. Good professional relationships help you maintain a high level of mastery in the dynamic world of your profession. This competency helps you negotiate effectively with associates, other practitioners, those who pay you for your services and those who supply you with products and services.

How can you improve the knowledge and skills you need to get along professionally with individuals and groups with whom you often interact?

7. Positioning – focusing your business by choosing unique specialties aligned with your vision. Learn to research and develop your professional and technical skills so that you have a successful enterprise that no one else can copy. Positioning used to be about “Location, Location, Location.” Times have changed, and now the way you choose your “Community, Community, Community” is critical.

What do you do, and whom do you do it for? Where do your prospective patients hang out together, and how are you communicating with them?

8. Packaging – how to create an image that matches your business identity. Does your look communicate who you are? Do you look successful? Do your patients value you and pay you what you deserve? Set prices that establish your worth and attract committed clients.

This is the look and feel of your business cards and stationery, your offices, your clothing, and you! You are your own best advertisement, and prospective patients judge you first by your appearance, not your healing skill, which they experience afterwards.

Times change, and your image must change with them. How current is your image? What can you do to keep up with the times?

9. Promoting and Prospecting – getting clients and building income using your sales and marketing knowledge. This skill involves understanding how professional marketing is different from consumer selling. Learn how to generate new client referrals and expand the impact of your work through product sales. Mastering this system results in comprehensive marketing and prospecting strategies for your products and services.

If you have more patients than you need, how are you going to change the way you manage and promote your business to increase your profits?

If you want more patients, how are you going to change your positioning, packaging and promoting to make your marketing more effective?

10. Performing – being a doctor and doing routine work – your daily responsibilities of seeing and treating patients. It is what you learned to do at your Naturopathic school. This area encompasses the professional talents of NDs. It embodies the knowledge and skills of managing patients. Personal skills, working with clients and communicating and delivering are the key components of this process.

How can you improve your patient management procedures to eliminate wasted time, increase your effectiveness, and make more money?

11. Product Development – extending your business so that you have income while on vacation! If all of your money comes from hourly bookings, you are going to burn out. Practitioners can extend their income beyond hourly fees through investment, authorship and product development. Mastering these skills helps you to successfully convert your knowledge into multiple streams of leveraged income.

If you like public speaking, how can you make this a source of income? If you enjoy learning, how can you get paid to teach? If you enjoy writing, how can you publish books and articles for profit? If you love creating new procedures or products, how can you build a new income stream? If you are good at buying and selling, how can you purchase business property and generate rental income?

12. Personal Care – nurturing yourself. This is what you harvest emotionally from your efforts. Healthy professionals lead balanced lives. Do you have time to enjoy each day? Are you fulfilled? Do you feel that you have made a difference in people’s lives? Are you getting the rewards you deserve for your efforts?

How can you actively develop and maintain your personal support systems?

Emotional Rewards and Financial Rewards

As with the Governor and Conception Vessels of Traditional Chinese Medicine, financial management concerns are different from the other channels of your business. Personal care is about the emotional rewards; money is about the financial rewards. It is another way of keeping score and measuring how your life energy is flowing.

13. Cash Flow – is King! Have a cash flow forecast and make sure it is positive.

How accurate and current is your cash flow forecast for your practice?

14. Capital Reserves – are Queen! Harvest what you deserve and keep an ample reserve.

How accurate is your practice balance sheet? How much is your business worth today?

Passion, Purpose and Profits

Your passion and purpose drive your business, and profits will result when you do the right things. Profits (what you have) are the result of who you are (being) and what you do (doing).

There is a useful distinction between a goal and a result. Goals you can control, results you influence. By following your behavioral goals, you get the results you want. Understanding the channels of your practice gives you a system for controlling your business, so that you get the outcomes you deserve.

Notice that “being a doctor” is actually the tenth step on the journey. No wonder it is difficult to succeed in your practice, if there are nine other steps to master first, many of which are usually learned “on the job.”

The Web That Does Have A Weaver!

Those of you who have read “The Web That Has No Weaver” by Ted Kaptchuk will understand how your practice is “The Web That Does Have A Weaver.” And, of course the weaver is you! What part of your practice could benefit from some healing remedies?

What are you doing that seems to make your business problems disappear, but will make them worse in the long run? In medical terms, this is suppressive. Business examples would be not understanding your finances or avoiding hiring an accountant.

What can you do for your practice that will give you relief now, and improve the quality of your life, without resolving the chronic issues? In medical terms, this is a palliative treatment. A business example would be reading this article, and feeling better, because you know you can build your business faster and improve the health of your enterprise.

Where is the critical place in the five roles and fourteen channels that is most in need of healing? How can you use the energy and resources made available by palliation to correct the chronic causes of your business pain? In medical terms, this is a curative action. A business example might be actively managing your finances and your taxes.

How can you proactively work to maintain the overall balance and flow of your practice? In medical terms, this is preventive action. A business example might be initiating a five-year plan to transform your practice into a thriving enterprise.

If Not Now, When?

If now is not the time to start transforming your practice, when are you going to begin?

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Doctor I. Johnson

“Your Business Health Is My Business Mission”

Ian teaches Practice Management at the Boucher Institute of Naturopathic Medicine and the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition. He is an author, speaker, business coach and marketing consultant. His clients include naturopathic physicians, lawyers, dentists, chiropractors, massage therapists, nutritional consultants, acupuncturists, family business owners, and other self-employed professionals. His textbook, Marketing Solutions: How To Grow Your Professional Practice, is used by hundreds of students across Canada.

For information about his programs call (604) 889-2566.

Enjoy Your Adventure!

Doctor I. Johnson
Author, Speaker, Consultant