This is a subject dear to my heart. If we want to grow the success of our profession, here is one good way many of us could help. Additionally, I know for absolute certain that many many practitioners have no one to answer their phone, clean the bathroom, make outbound calls, order needles, or do any of the other front desk jobs that WE should not be doing ourselves. So, if you are in practice but do not have an office staff or receptionist or anyone to put together formulas for your patients, consider making an offer to create a job like this for someone from the next graduating class at the closest acupuncture college. The advantages are more than they might appear to be on the surface of things:

Follow up:

1. Instead of just part-time office support, you get that support from someone who understands Chinese medicine and can knowledgeably answer your patients’ questions.
2. You get someone to manage your herb inventory and put together powder or bulk orders who understands Chinese herbal medicine and who is less likely to make mistakes or require extensive training.
3. You get someone to see your patients, answer the phone, fill patient prescriptions, and generally hold down the fort while you are on vacation without sending patients to another clinic.
4. You are freed up to see patients and not have to run the front desk, request payments, answer the phone, or manage herb inventory at least for a certain number of hours per week.
5. If your new assistant sees patients during hours you are not there, your clinic is open more hours of the week with more phone traffic and more foot traffic to buy products and spread the good word about your services. More traffic makes more business for everyone.
6. If you collect all or most of the profit from increased sales of herbal or other products, after a few months this could cover most if not all of what you pay your assistant. Then all the rest of the advantages they bring to your clinic are gravy.
7. If you hire someone whose specialty is different from yours, you can broaden the services you offer to your patients without competition between you. This can increase your clinic’s word of mouth buzz.
8. You are offering an invaluable service to the profession by helping train a new practitioner how to run a successful clinic. The more successful practitioners there are, the more political clout we have, the more public support we have, and the stronger all of us are as a group.
So as you can see, such an arrangement can be profitable and satisfying for all involved. We encourage both students and practitioners to create such mentoring partnerships. Depending upon your situation, and if both sides have integrity and work together, everybody can win with this one.

(The bulk of this post is taken from a chapter in Points for Profit: The Essential Guide to Practice Success for Acupuncturists, Fourth Edition, my book with Marilyn Allen and Eric Strand, available on this very website. Anyway, thanks for reading!)