In this 4-part blog series, we discuss the basic foundations of the why, how and the what of how to start a corporate wellness business, along with the when – benefits of when you achieve success. It requires no in-the-box thinking whatsoever. If you have ‘a box type of thinking mentality’, chances are this program isn’t for you. Working with corporations requires holistic and health care practitioners, to work in their own creative framework, versus following the crowds, and to be clear as to ‘why’ they want to, in the first place. For me, having a larger impact made sense. The old adage of ‘go big or go home’ had meaning, and I wanted to touch the lives of many, not a few.
Part 2 of our series, How to Start a Corporate Business is the ‘how’ to accomplish this. The ‘how’ is really about how you move toward making this decision – to working with corporate clients that is. This is the premise of this blog.
For most health practitioners, we are taught to engage individual clients to buy our services. I can attest to this. We promote, advertise, use social media, tell all of our family and friends, so that we can acquire one more customer. And we do this for months, even years, not thinking for a moment that there is another way to attract clients, or that there are any other types of clients to attract.
Even when I was teaching Business 101 at the Ontario College of Homeopathic Medicine, this is what I taught, despite already only working with corporate clients. I taught what I thought they needed to know, never thinking that my corporate practice may have also been of benefit to the newly graduating class of health practitioners. However, by the time I was teaching this class, I was already 10+ years in my corporate practice. Today, I think, what was I thinking??
It’s a relentless way to grow a successful practice. It’s this all-consuming venture of constantly ‘talking it up’, ‘sharing’, oversharing and ‘fingers crossed’ type of engagement. Every person you talk to could be a potential customer. You talk constantly of your health services, in the hopes that someone will feel just as passionate about it as you. This is hard work, and if you are good at making connections, you could be very successful at it, or you could try your hand at spending thousands of dollars on social media. Another endless, costly task to get more customers.
How I did it differs from how most health practitioners acquire customers. To be honest, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve tried to attract individual clients with homeopathy, reiki, and other energy work but to my disappointment, having paid customers was rare for me in my other smaller businesses. With Fournier Health (my corporate health practice), I was able to attract corporate clients for over 24 years, and still going. In fact, I have a new corporate contract starting this morning. She emailed me and I was completely surprised to have a signed and secure contract returned within 5 minutes. She heard from one of her colleagues, and signed right away because she knew this is what she and her company needed. Three months’ worth of work and a resource for continued work or another referral.
Making the decision to work with corporate clients was easy for me. It worked. It worked from day one and it hasn’t stopped for almost 25 years. And to be honest, it came relatively easy. Let me tell you how I did it.
I started off with a casual secretary who created a website for me. For 15 years it was a great website, that never got updated, and simple to use and I didn’t need to use it. Once I got my first 3 contracts within the first 3 months of being open, I kept getting work. Word got around that I did a great job. When one contract closed, another was waiting for me. Imagine ‘word got around’. Today our messages get so lost in social media, no one hears them.
Now the question is, how do you decide whether you should change it up a bit, and get a corporate client? Ask yourself these questions:
Are you happy with the growth of your health practice?
Could you use more clients?
Do you want to be busier?
Do you want to make more money?
Do you want regular, long-term clients?
Do you want to simplify, yet transform your practice?
Create a new way to attract business. Try attracting corporate clients. I can show you how.
Book a chat to find out more, and stay tuned for Part 3.
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