Welcome to the Planning for Practice Success Newsletter

Practice Startup Success
Information Advice Encouragement

March 26, 2007
ISSN 1934-3248

In this issue:

What's NEW? New article on the effectiveness of atlas adjustments to lower blood pressure!
Open Source Applications
What is your competition doing?
Which state - do taxes matter to you?
NEW OSHA poster

Research study about chiropractic and blood pressure. I just found an article about a study showing that chiropractic care (specifically atlas adjustments) lowered blood pressure in patients. The study was reported in the Journal of Human Hypertension and it's available online from WebMD. Go to www.webmd.com and type in "chiropractic cuts blood pressure" in the search box. This would be a great article to reprint for patients and use in your lay lectures.

Open Source Applications. You may or may not have heard the term "Open source." It refers to software applications that have been created by individuals without desire for profit, so they are free. Wikipedia says that open source is: "most commonly applied to the source code of software that is made available to the general public with either relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create user-generated software content through either incremental individual effort, or collaboration." Wikipedia itself is an example of "open source."

If you are considering word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software for your practice, consider Open Office (www.openoffice.org). You can download the package for free.
No strings. Nothing to buy. Nothing to sign up for. I have been using Open Office applications for several months now.
The only issue is that occasionally there will be a feature that isn't like Word (headers and footers, for example), and I have to search a little to find how to use it. But it's always there. Some people can't open the documents, but I can save them in MS format (.doc or .xls). This is one exception to "you get what you pay for."

What is your competition doing?
I saw a good quote on competition recently, and thought you might be interested:
'Competition is a good thing. It makes everyone better.... You never own a customer; you can only rent them for a little while. And it's like a one-day lease. They can break it anytime they want to. You have to continue to innovate, or your customers will go elsewhere.'

If you don't know how your competition is doing, how do you know your USP is different? Don't be afraid to check on the competition before you start practice in an area, and periodically thereafter. For some tips on how to do this, go to my blog:
www.practicestartupsuccess.com

Which state? If taxes are a factor in determining which state to locate in, you might want to check this website, which ranks states according to their "tax friendliness" to small business:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/1371.html. If you are considering selling products, the sales tax ranking might be of particular interest to you.

New OSHA poster "It's the Law" was recently released by OSHA for workplaces. If you have any employees, you will need to download this poster, print it out, and post it somewhere your employees can see it (the break room?). Here's the link in PDF
form: http://www.osha.gov/Publications/osha3165.pdf
Or you can go to www.osha.gov, click on "posters" on the right side, and scroll down until you find the poster link.
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Ask Dr. Jean Murray a question: email her at jean@professionalpracticesuccess.com
Order Planning for Practice Success or one of our other
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Best wishes for your continued success,

Jean Murray
Planning for Practice Success
Online at http://www.dcpracticesuccess.com

The most absurd and reckless aspirations
have sometimes led to extraordinary success.
-- Vauvenargues

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