Welcome to the Planning for Practice Success Newsletter

Practice Startup Success

Information Advice Encouragement

November 5, 2007                                                                              ISSN 1934-3248

 We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.              Shakti Gawain

In this issue:

Cramped trigger finger, or “good enough is good enough.”  Did you ever know someone who wouldn’t let anything go until it was absolutely perfect?  This is not the kind of person who should start a practice.  It’s a messy, ambiguous thing, and you can’t wait until everything is absolutely 100% ready before you begin.  For example, if you don’t have all of your forms printed and ready to go, can you see patients?  You should have at least the basic forms, but you don’t need them in fancy form, in 4-color, and you don’t need them in a nice binder.  Do you need that credit card machine before you start?  Maybe; maybe not. Could you do it the old fashioned way and take cash or checks?  Do you have to have all of your children’s games?  All the reception area furniture? 

Here’s the deal:  Decide what is absolutely essential, that without it you’ll be in big trouble (like not having an adjusting table, say!).  Get that stuff and gather up the rest as you go. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be “good enough.”

Why you need a practice website: Americans get their news from the web.  A new survey finds that 101 million adult Americans now get most of their news from Web sites, while 35 million people rely on TV comedians [yikes!!!] and eight million individuals turn to blogs for their main source of news. An overwhelming majority of Americans said they obtain most of their news from traditional news sources, including TV news programs (78.6%) and newspapers (66.8%).

The survey was commissioned by Edward Segal, author of "Profit by Publicity" (iUniverse, 2007), a how-to reference guide that shows real estate agents and brokers how to generate news coverage about themselves or the properties they sell.

Everything is online these days.  Every kind of computer application can be found online.  This is good and bad.  For example, here is simple accounting software (http://www.lessaccounting.com ) you might want to use to get started.  They store all your data online and they back up everything.  The charge is only $19.95 a month.  It looks like they have all the basic accounting functions and reports (although I don’t see that they have payroll processing capabilities).  Good price, backup of data automatically.  What could go wrong?  Well, for starters, what happens if you need to do some accounting and you can’t get online?  Now what?  And what if you decide to transfer to a bigger better system?  How will you get the data back?  I imagine you’d have to print out everything and input it by hand.  What other problems could you see?  I had an online file folder to store data, but I kept forgetting the password, which is another problem.  When I decided to stop using it, I had to transfer hundreds of files back to my computer, just to be sure I had them.  More on this in my blog (www.professionalpracticesuccess.com

A response from my article about being required to have 2 EINs:  “I just formed a PC/LLC.  I only had to get one EIN.  My attorney filed the paperwork and turned it in.  I have received info from the IRS and none of it has stated that I need to get an additional EIN.”  It looks like this isn’t the issue I first thought – sorry to scare everyone.  _________________________________________________________________________

 Ask Dr. Jean Murray a question (email jean@dcpracticesuccess.com )
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