Medical Practice Consultants – Valuable Professional Assistance for Any Healthcare Business

The typical medical office today is a much more complicated business than it was years ago when the good doctor, with his wife as his secretary/receptionist, operated from an addition built on to their home. Handling government regulations, legalities, insurance coverage, extensive operating expenses, increased staffing and working within a level of profitability are all necessary concerns for a physician, whether just entering the field of private practice or having become an experienced doctor. Medical practice consultants can step in to bridge the gap, offering advice and proven strategies in multiple areas such as design, planning, practice management, benchmarking and physician credentialing.

From the interior decorating design of the office space to the proper traffic flow and appointing the appropriate room for necessary equipment, medical consultants know what works for physician, staff and patients. Space design flows into reality with proper construction management and expense-spending controls. Since a well designed office space both welcomes patients and creates ease of functioning for medical staff, choosing a health consultant to assist with this important aspect is a way to ensure the best results without damaging the budget in the process.

Beyond office design, when it comes to financial planning, a consultant’s knowledge and experience can be very beneficial. Whether the doctor is dealing with acquisitions, mergers, buy-ins, or buy-outs, economic feasibility plans clarify the dollars and cents issues involved. Lease negotiations, recruitment, employment and even litigation support may require expertise that most health care professionals did not study in medical school.

Practice management is also a useful area that is often overlooked under the false assumption that everything is working about as well as it can. A health care consultant is trained to work with government requirements such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), inventory and overhead controls, reimbursement and coding practices. Additionally, policies directed towards personnel and office procedures can be part of the operational improvements implemented by a professional consultant. Establishing business objectives may seem simplistic, but becomes necessary for financial stability, growth and profitability. From this framework, the doctor can be advised about cost-cutting techniques that eliminate waste of valuable time and money without sacrificing the quality of patient care. Benchmarking analyzes and improves issues of both doctor and staff productivity through examining statistical results.

Finally, the important process of physician credentialing, a necessary but time-consuming activity can be handled efficiently by medical practice consultants. Verifying and supporting the pertinent information on file for each doctor and staff member is only part of the procedure. Completing, submitting and tracking all this paperwork may be best accomplished by those trained in this field. They can also take care of the re-credentialing process and profile updates, ensuring timely submissions of accurate information.

Medical practice consultants offer a variety of services to start-up practices, solo or group offices, and even to those doctors who are just completing their medical training. They offer expertise and experience in planning, design and operational management for doctors and others in related health care specialty fields. Success for a health-care consultant is seeing a doctor’s office operate at peak efficiency and profitability. Success for a doctor is being able to practice his or her profession, treating patients, unhindered by paperwork and office management issues.

EB-5 Visa Consulting Firms – To Use Or Not to Use?

With such an economic decline in the United States in recent years, foreign capital is becoming increasingly sought after. The ability to rely primarily on domestic investment and funding sources has put businesses and corporations in a difficult situation. Developers want to know how they can become a government approved EB-5 Regional Center and attract this foreign capital, all the while foreign EB-5 visa-seeking investors want to know exactly which Regional Center they should be investing in and how – what is the safest investment with the least risk and best expected results? – That is the question.

The $500,000 investment into a USCIS approved Regional Center conditionally provides the foreign investor and the investor’s immediate family (unmarried children under 21) with an EB-5 visa green card. Provided that the investment either directly or indirectly creates 10 jobs, issuance of an EB-5 visa administers permanent U.S. residency.

Though it sounds simple enough – with more than 100 approved Regional Centers in the United States – the actual process of selecting the right one can be a difficult decision for any foreign investor, especially when the investor’s knowledge on each and every Regional Center and the entire EB-5 process as a whole is much less than distinguished. Given that the investment is fully at risk there is a chance that the chosen center may not meet the requirements. In this case, the investor not only loses their chance of obtaining an EB-5 visa but also loses their money.

Sole reliance on a Regional Center’s advertising or expectant results is a risky business and a lot of Regional Centers encourage the investor to work directly with them in investing into their program. This can prove to be a strong disadvantage to the investor and the investor’s best interests. If a Regional Center fails to report or misrepresents information it can leave the investor in an unfavorable position. Therefore it is very important to research and compare all options. One way, in particular, is by utilizing a consulting firm. The most esteemed consulting firms play a huge role in acting as a type of unbiased counselor in the EB-5 process; providing due diligence reports, financial projections, assessing risk, reviewing all legal documents and most importantly monitoring the project until completion, the consulter essentially helps to remove most burdens of the investor.

The best consulting firms consist of a team of not only expert consulters but also include financial specialists, economists, SEC attorneys, immigration attorneys, business attorneys, industry researchers and even marketing directors. Clearly, this type of task force possesses the professional background and skill necessary to aide the foreign investor in making the wisest decision on which Regional Center to choose. Unless the potential foreign investor encompasses the education and skills of a lawyer, businessman and marketer, collecting and assessing all relevant data can be a distressing task.

When inquiring about using a potential consulting firm it is important to confirm their credentials; verifying the firm’s success rate, especially by way of requesting personal testimonies from previous clients and also discovering what nationalities they have worked with are useful types of information when questioning the firm’s practice. Questioning how they are being compensated can provide evidence to the firm’s validity as well; if they are being paid by just the client or if they are also receiving kick-backs from certain Regional Centers in an effort to advance all referrals. Another source of credibility is finding out how many Regional Centers their clients have used, the higher the amount – provided they have a high success rate – would generally be a key sign that the consulting firm is legitimate and has experience, which is ultimately what any investor would want.

How Marketing Consultants Can Market Your Business Blog

Many marketing consultants spend some of their time helping businesses market their blog. Why? Because blogs are a way to reach out to customers that goes above and beyond the traditional website. While your business website may describe in great detail exactly what your business is, how it operates, what your business philosophy is, and how clients can contact you, a blog is more informal. Blogs help show a personal side to the business world.

For example, a realtor who has a professional website detailing listings still remains somewhat of a mystery to potential clients. But a realtor who has a professional website and a link to his or her blog allows potential clients a different look at their personality and business sense. That’s because you can include blog posts that are personal stories, information about your industry, professional advice with personal anecdotes, and run contests or giveaways. Your blog is a means to reach a wide audience and get them to want to work with you.

How Marketing Consultants Can Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

One reason you may not be reaching clients with your website or blog is because you don’t have it optimised to attract the search engines. When an Internet user plugs in a few keywords, the search engine crawls around looking for the best possible matches. If your site isn’t optimized for any of the keywords commonly used to search for your type of business, your site will get buried pages deep in the results, and only those familiar with your product or service will know to search for you.

Marketing consultants understand what it means to optimize a blog for the search engines. Since search engine optimization can take a while to learn, your consultant will most likely recommend that you consider hiring someone to optimize your blog and website. This can be a freelance writer who creates the majority of your blog posts or a web design company that specializes in blog optimization.

Advertise Your Blog

Just like a website, if no one knows your blog exists you won’t have any readers. A consultant can help get your business on social networking sites that allow advertising. You can post on these networks when you have a new blog post or when you want to direct someone to your blog. Your consultant will explain how to maintain a presence on these sites without seeming like you’re posting just for promotion. By using marketing consultants to create and advertise your blog, you draw in potential clients and build your brand.

Jump Start Your Company by Hiring Business Consultants

Business consultants can help make or break any business. Without expert advice, a business can flounder in no time. Bringing a consultant on board early on and keeping them on the payroll helps ensure that a business can reach the pinnacle of its success.

Swim Don’t Drown

In order to keep your business’ head above water, you need a good master plan. A business consultant can devise this for you. With a proper plan, you will know exactly where your capital is going and can quickly funnel it into a different direction fast, if need be. A consultant can get to know your market and help you define your place in it.

Many businesses try to fly alone, without any sort of safety net. This is ill-advised. Why take extra risks when you don’t have to? With careful planning and monitoring, you can make educated calls as to how to play your cards and help your business soar.

Why Hire One?

Some thrifty business owners look to cut costs, even on things that should be considered necessities. People think they can trust their own novice judgments, rather than pay an experienced professional to properly assess what a business’ next step should be.

If you are venturing out into unchartered business territory, you need someone to help guide your way so you don’t get lost. Bringing a consultant on board who is well versed in finances, marketing, branding, writing business plans, establishing market share for your products or services as well as other invaluable skills is an extreme asset you cannot pass up.

You Have Everything to Lose

Creating and establishing your business is likely your dream come true. Don’t let your dream escape you. Invest in yourself by bringing a consultant into the fold who can brainstorm and troubleshoot with you to get your business up and running the right way, the first time.

Recognize that many businesses fail each year, many within months of opening their doors. You don’t want this to happen to you. Don’t rely on just your own inexperienced instincts to guide you. Hire professional business consultants who will help you every step of the way to get your business kicked off right, so it can become a sweet success story.

Using Business Consultants to Expand Your Business

Business consultants can help take your business from small to large with a few expert tactics. Even if you never pictured yourself running a large business with international clients, meeting with a consultant may change your mind. If you’ve always hoped to take your business to the big time and attract clients from all over the world, a business consultant can help you achieve that goal. There are a number of things you can implement in your business that will not only market your business to clients but help you gain a diverse customer base. It’s just knowing how to implement them into your business that can be time consuming and confusing for the average business owner.

Create an Online Presence

One way to reach a mass number of clients and potential clients is to create an online presence. Many businesses already have a website, but just having a website doesn’t mean you have an online presence. An online presence means that your website pops up in the search engines and clients are aware that you exist because they see your business name or brand while browsing the Internet. The days of being able to create a website and wait for people to find you are over. There’s too much online competition to expect the clients to come to your website without being led in some way.

There are business consultants who specialise in creating and marketing business websites. Not only will a good consultant help you manage a website, but they’ll help you create and organize material for a business blog. The great thing about a blog is that you don’t have to personally write the material. You can use someone from your staff or have your consultant find you a freelancer willing to create a few blog posts a month. Once your name is out there as a master in your field, clients will start to make inquiries.

Customer Diversity

One thing you need to expand is a diverse customer base. Your consultant can sit with you and discuss your current client base and see what changes you could make to diversify. Sometimes it’s something as simple as marketing to a new client sector. Other times you may need to offer a new service or product in order to attract a different set of clients. Once you are able to diversity your customer portfolio, you’ll find that it’s easier to expand the business. Business consultants can help you locate a new clientele and market your services to them.

What Can a Consultant Do For Your Business?

Introduction

This series of articles provides some perspective on business consultants and their value to your business by focusing on the abilities of a good consultant and what he can bring to your business.

The following is a list of the abilities that are required by a good consultant:

  • Can provide an objective perspective to the client’s business
  • Can accurately analyze the client’s situation
  • Can help the client focus
  • Can provide the client with techniques to solve business issues
  • Can assist the client in the decision making process
  • Can help the client reach greater levels of efficiency
  • Can help the client improve products and services

Providing an Objective Perspective

Studies have repeatedly shown that people have an overly-optimistic view of their current circumstances. In addition, ‘wishing will make it so’ appears to be a philosophy shared, if unconsciously, by many. This approach to a business is often expressed in unrealistic forecasts for sales, expenses, costs, time to market, and, of course, profit and loss.

A good consultant can look beyond the client’s eagerness and assurances, and provide the client with a set of conservative (or pessimistic) forecasts. This may dismay the client at first, but it allows the client to adjust his business strategy. In the ‘worst’ case, i.e. where the optimistic forecasts were correct, the client will be delighted at the ‘better than expected’ business results.

The consultant has this ability, because he has very little vested interest in his client’s success to date. And although being hired by successful clients boosts the image and reputation of a consultant, this is of minor import when compared to the client’s interest in his own success.

In many ways, I consider this objectivity to be one of the greatest assets that a consultant offers his clients.

The articles that follow in this series will address the other aspects listed above.

Can a Mom ‘N Pop Shop Benefit From a Consultant?

When you think of a business hiring a consultant to devise a strategy for growth, you probably wouldn’t think of the automotive industry.

John Smith is small auto repair shop owner who has been serving the Hittsville community for 20 over years. He makes just enough to provide for his family’s basic needs. John explains, “One of the reasons I went into business for myself was to make more money and spend quality time with my family. But now I’m a business owner I make less money, and spend less time with my family. Something went wrong.”

No matter how hard John seemed to work, nothing seemed to get better. His business was practically bleeding. John’s colleagues, friends and family made suggestions to help increase the bottom line, but none of them had run a profitable business before. Embarrassed to say it, John used some of his family members suggestions to no avail. Last September John was solicited to attend a workshop from a auto repair consulting firm that claimed “Increase Profits with Better Time management!”

To good to be true, he thought. Despite his hesitation John attended the workshop. The consulting firm had over 16 years of expertise in the industry and over 50% of their clients saw an increase in profits.

Great, but what’s the cost? Over $12,000 for 6 months. With no savings and unable to get a loan anywhere John found it almost impossible to grow his business. That’s when John was introduced to Smart Funding Solutions™.

Smart Funding Solutions™ devised a special funding agreement through Consultant Financing. The consultant was paid the fee up front (so he could focus on getting the job done, instead of collecting bills), John was provided with working capital to shift his current business model to one more profitable, and the auto repair shop paid Smart Funding Solutions™ back in installments that worked with John’s increase in profits. Bottom line? John increased his profits by 20% and his consultant re-invested money to grow the consulting firm.

Everybody wins.

Top Five Reasons to Use a Buy to Let Consultant

If you’ve never invested in property before, using a consultant makes sense. However if you’ve successfully invested by yourself over the last 10 years or more it might be difficult to understand why you need anyone else’s help.

However, the next ten years are not going to be as easy to make money in as the last ten. Valuing properties is a very difficult task, finding ones ‘below market value’ isn’t easy; knowing what tax you’ll have to pay when you cash in your investments isn’t straightforward and finding an area that won’t be oversupplied with properties to rent and buy is going to make buy to let investment harder and harder over the coming years.

So how can a buy to let consultant help you?

1. Work with an independent consultant that DOESN’T make money from you when you buy a property. Ideally pay them a day rate so that their advice is independent to you and your circumstances and not relying on commission from property purchases.

2. An independent BTL consultant should be able to value a property properly for you. No property has ‘one price’ but properties do have a maximum you should pay for them and an independent person is less likely to get ‘carried away’ with bidding for a property than you are.

3. Consultants should already have a good team of recommended suppliers that you can use and should also secure a discount for you, saving you money on their fees and time finding the right people from mortgage brokers to insurance and legal/tax specialists.

4. Having an independent person to work with when analysing a property to buy (or checking out what to do with your current portfolio) is helpful as they have no emotional attachment to the properties you own or want to buy. It will help you see the ‘wood from the trees’.

5. Any consultant worth their salt will keep you up to speed with legal changes and market reports that are relevant to you, even once you have paid them for their services.

A good consultant will not charge thousands of pounds for their services. They may be a good letting agent that gives advice free of charge or charges you hundreds of pounds for their services. They may charge up to a £500 for individual work, but give taster courses for less than £300 (usually for two people) and some even offer them for free.

The main thing to make sure is any consultant that you work with ONLY makes money when you do, or they charge via seminars and one to one consultancy only and don’t sell or rent any properties.

Consulting Small Business Entrepreneurs – Under Promise and Over Deliver

The other day, I was talking to a small business consultant who had an angry client, a customer who had expected more, but due to his actions made the consultant’s job even tougher. The client had misstated some key information, leading to an unfavorable result. The angry client went on a rampage and trashed the reputation of the consultant online on numerous websites. Okay so let’s talk about this.

You see, I was thinking about the small business coach consultant’s predicament, and the scenario reminds me of the anguish of many writers when trying to get their books published. You see I belong to a couple of writer’s groups and there are “literary agents” which assist authors in getting book deals and putting together book proposals, shopping publishers, and arranging meetings. Often I’ve heard stories that a literary agent has charged someone $1500 to $4000 to help get a publisher for a book deal to no avail.

The authors, remember a good many writers are pathetically broke by my observations, barely have any money, and more often than not manically depressed, over the years, I’ve reasoned that I guess many creative people tend to be, as I’ve also noted this while sifting through think tank applications, which is a little something I do in retirement. Anyway, so, what happens is the authors complain, bitch, and moan that the literary agent did nothing for them, and stole their money, and they tend to banter around the words; scam artist, fraudster, con-woman/man, etc.

Indeed, in watching and observing all this, I’ve noted that many times the authors get all full of themselves, ego sets in, and they become overly optimistic, convincing themselves that even though their chances are barely 1:15 with a literary agent and 1:65 without, even if they are a decent writer – they always want to blame someone for their own failures, this appears to be human nature, right?

What I’m saying is; as long as a small business consultant isn’t giving false expectations, and as long as they vet their clients a bit before they take their money, then they can probably prevent similar future incidents of angry clients. In this case study, with the coaching consultant, the gentleman “lied” on a form and thus, I suppose he actually he hurt the coach’s reputation with their vendors, so actually the consultant should be the one angry not client in this case.

Meanwhile, the client’s behavior afterwards working to slander and trash the coach’s reputation online is “totally unacceptable” – so the consultant can stand tall knowing they did the right thing. Finally, I’d like to advise all consultants that have such a thing happen to them to never quit or give up just because one psychopath has made you his new excuse for his own failures okay.

How Do Franchise Consultants Get Paid?

As entrepreneurs decide to join an organization to become a franchise consultant, also know as a franchise broker, one of the main questions becomes “how will I get paid”?

Commissions

The franchise broker is sometimes considered very similar to a recruiter. When the match is made between franchisor and franchisee, the franchise broker receives a payment. The franchisors are represented by the consulting organization that the franchise consultants are affiliated with. The consultant must be part of the consulting organization in order to earn the commission.

Franchisees do not pay anything beyond the franchise price originated by the franchisor. The franchisor pays a pre-determined amount when the deal is made. The amount of the fee is agreed upon with the consulting organization when the franchisor first enlists their services.

The referral fees that the franchise consultant earns typically range between $10,000 and $15,000; however may run as high as $50,000 if an entire territory is sold.

How Fees are earned

The franchisors are willing to pay these fees in order to find quality franchisees to run their businesses. The franchise brokers earn these fees mainly because they qualify potential candidates in detail to determine if they are a good fit for a particular business. At the same time they are honing in on the franchise that the franchisee is most likely to succeed at; thereby benefiting both sides.

Processing and Timing of Payment

Franchise consultants do not typically have to wait for the franchise to open in order to receive payment. The fees earned are paid at the time the franchisee pays their franchise fee.

Overall, there is a fairly quick turnaround for the consultant in receiving their earnings; therefore the potential to bring in quite a steady income.