Tag: income

What would success look like for you?

Posted on by Dr Simon Wilson

What will success look like? When will you know that this new venture is working well and meeting your goals – be that financial, time, helping your ideal patient? Will it be the first billing of a particular item number specific to your niche?

Winston Churchill quote: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts

For me a feeling of success with my vasectomy work was when I was spending 20% of my time with my ideal group – men seeking vasectomy, either discussing and educating or providing vasectomy. It took a good deal of time, focus and work to get there however there are benefits. I can tolerate a lot of midweek GANFYD and declined referral from the big hospital consults with the knowledge that on Friday I have a solida day of procedures, helping couples out and practising a nice moderately technical procedure that I am good at.

So what is success for you? Maybe is is seeing your overall income increase by a certain%. Maybe it is seeing any income that is not from fee for service consulting but is from some one to many work you do – lecturing, downloaded assets you built, consulting to business.

Maybe it is seeing less of the wrong type of patient for you. Don’t fret on this – there is the perfect doctor out there for this patient that does not gel with you, now they are free to find them.

Depending on how granular you desire to be about this goals, some benchmarks or Key Performance Indicators might guide you. Such as the number of your ideal pt in a week, billing a particular item number a certain number of hours in your ideal work. Taking a snapshot of where you are now and where you aim for would help you feel progress is occurring. As we know without a goal we have not direction. By discussing with others we can make this goal real and bring some accountability to the process. Could you be part of a discussion/coffee group that are also working on their niche? This can bring accountability but also mutual support and encouragement.

What is the reward for this aimed for success? The satisfaction of a job well done? That bicycle/clothing/shoes you have been coveting? A special meal or bottle of wine?

If you would like a prompt to help think about your ideal niche, I have a three page pdf here to download

Niche case study – Skin Clinic Website

Posted on by Dr Simon Wilson

For us, our new skin clinic is inside an existing medical practice. This existing practice has a website. However for clarity, differentiation and SEO reasons, we created a standalone website for the skin clinic.

We are doing this as owners for these reasons however if you are not an owner then setting up your own website is still an excellent idea for a number of reasons: You have control of design, you have control and ownership of intellectual property (check any work contract!) and it gets you familiar with working on websites. You need some basic skills, even if you have the website built for you.

Next you have to decide about self built, self built using a theme or paying to have it built. I have done all three. The first version of my vasectomy website was built from a theme and worked okay, once numbers built up a bit and I wanted to compete with the big players however I paid a decent amount of cash ($7000 four years ago) for a great looking site. I built the first version of our practice website from blank WordPress, had it re-built professionally which did not help and now run a slighly improved version of the re-built website. For our skin website I paid for it to be built from a company suggested from social media.

Image of our skin clinic GP niche website
Our new skin clinic website home page

Which option is right for you? If you have the time, creating the website, even one that uses a template like WordPress, Square or Wix will give you the best understanding of how a website works. Like knowing how to use Word or Excel, I think these are great basic skills.

For my first vasectomy website, I went to a conference, skipped most of the lectures and stayed in my room and wrote the website over a weekend!

If your project has the budget, paying for a developer to create the website can result in a good looking website, at the expense of money but also time – there will be lots of backwards and forwards with the developers reviewing, editing.

I would suggest getting going is the most important thing so champion creating a site from one of the services like WordPress/Wix/Square to get you going, get some income coming in and if needed you can pay for a better version down the track.

AI builders? Watch this space with machine learning enabled website builders – Bubble, Webflow and other that are coming along that will hopefully continue to reduce friction with building a site (although introducing platform risk – that your website is tied to their service and fees).