Why You Should Diversify Your LNC Business
Diversifying your services is critical now. New LNCs coming into the field, AI providing services LNCs offer, and doctors competing with LNCs for work (like life care plans) make it imperative that you keep an open mind about how you can help attorneys.
When you work shifts in a doctor’s office or clinical setting, you have limited opportunities to diversify. Unless you rise to a decision-making position in your workplace, you will work in a fixed area of health care.
Boredom with the routine of that kind of job is a key reason why people dream of having their own businesses. However, years of participating in that kind of routine not only limit your activities but can also narrow your mindset.
This means that, while new LNC entrepreneurs have the opportunity to create their own routines, that limited mindset keeps people from realizing both the necessity and the opportunities of diversifying what they do.
At the Beginning
LNCs have different ways of launching their businesses. Some stay with their regular full time job and start up their new business in their spare time. Others continue a job part-time and use the rest of their time for the startup.
I followed a different model. When I left my full-time job as a nursing quality assurance coordinator, I offered my services to a former employer to help them with their Joint Commission survey.
I also taught for a seminar company on the topics of nursing documentation and quality assurance. In addition, I worked as a staff nurse per diem and began to build my expert witness work.
Gradually, the medical-legal business pushed out most of the other activities. Also, this was in the early 1990s, when hospitals were cutting back on funding for sending people to programs. The seminar company that was sending me all over the United States and Canada saw declining enrollment. Once I stopped working for them in 1992, I was able to focus on expert witness work and supplying expert witnesses.
Diversification gave me the flexibility and income stream to allow me to build my LNC business.
Diversifying Clients
That saying to never put all your eggs in one basket may be a cliché, but that doesn’t make it less true.
Very often, LNCs fall into a deceptive comfort zone. They’re doing well; they have lots of business. They may tell themselves, “Thank goodness, I can stop marketing.”
Wrong. That’s exactly when you need to market. One reason involves psychology. When you’re doing well and not feeling desperate, you can market with much greater confidence. Your potential client will pick up on that confidence and think, “They must be good.”
In practical terms, the customers on whom you rely haven’t pledged their eternal fidelity to you. Nor can they promise that their businesses will last forever.
Always market. Accept that nothing is forever and that you will always want new clients. This keeps you from experiencing those demoralizing downtimes and helps your confidence level stay high.
The Danger of a One-Client Business
One law firm gave our company a tremendous amount of business. It was tempting to sit back and say, “Oh, he’s giving me so much business I don’t need to continue to exhibit or do newsletters.”
But I remembered the lesson that I had learned from watching my husband’s business develop a dependency on one customer. That customer found a different way to accomplish what my husband had been doing for him, and cut him out as the middleman. His business collapsed.
So, I learned not to rely on one customer. I continued to market while I was getting a lot of work from that law firm. Then, because of changes in the law in our state, many personal injury auto accident cases disappeared.(Restrictions were put in place to eliminate the number of suits that could be filed.) Had I been dependent upon this law firm, my business would have gone down just as the number of personal injury cases this attorney was handling went down.
I’ve seen changes happen literally overnight in law firms. Several of my clients experienced disruptions when the firm split into pieces and attorneys left over the weekend, taking the firm’s files with them. Come Monday morning, the remaining attorneys walked into a shockingly empty office.
Ways to Diversify
Seek out clients in all parts of the country.
Listen to what your clients ask for. They’ll tell you the new services they want.
Write articles and books. You may not get a big income stream from this, but you will get known. This kind of publicity demonstrates your authority.
Look for ways you can collaborate with colleagues. My legal nurse consulting company changed radically when I began working with expert witnesses to provide case review for areas that I was not qualified to review.
You’re not an employee anymore. You have so many more opportunities to make a good living. You became an LNC to expand your life. Look now for the next way in which you can expand.
Get the strategies you need to be successful in my book, How to be a Successful LNC: Tips for Your Business. Order it here.
Pat Iyer MSN RN LNCC is president of The Pat Iyer Group. She develops resources to assist LNCs in obtaining more clients, making more money, and achieving their business goals and dreams.
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