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Mistakes in Small Business
245 Plays25 days ago
Josh and Emily talk about common pitfall in small business.
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:13
Miranda Materi
Hi, I'm Josh McDonald and we are Hand Therapy Academy.
00:00:15
Emily Kerr
Hi, I'm Emily Kerr.
00:00:19
Miranda Materi
So we have Emily joining us today.
Mistake as a Small Business Owner
00:00:21
Miranda Materi
She's one of our staff therapists at our Phoenix based clinic. And like we've done before, we wanted to have some of our staff ask us questions that maybe are topics that we wouldn't think of that someone would want to hear. So Emily, what's our first topic you have for us today?
00:00:34
Emily Kerr
um Yeah, my question for you, Josh, is as a small business owner, what is one mistake that you've made along the way?
00:00:43
Miranda Materi
Yeah, so so much of what we cover is about the therapy side of it, but we run clinics, Miranda and I. We have a total of five clinics that we run. So that's a whole huge part of what we do on a daily basis is managing and running clinics. And it's a bit of a roller coaster of small business management.
00:00:57
Miranda Materi
But I think from the managing a clinic perspective, for me, the thing I made the mistake on for too long was misunderstanding what marketing should be.
The Importance of Traditional Marketing
00:01:07
Miranda Materi
um I tried early on, i want to establish a relationship with doctors.
00:01:12
Miranda Materi
And that's the best way to get a good back and forth of patient referrals and communication and all that. And I thought that would be enough. I felt a bit like a used car salesman when I'd walk into an office with a box of donuts or some tchotchke or some little thing and, you know, schmoozing with the front desk staff. And I don't know, I had been in clinics where others did that.
00:01:32
Miranda Materi
and it just felt icky and so I didn't want to do that and I thought you know what I'm going to have a great business and not need to do that And then I met a marketing person who we had lunch together and we sat down. She's like, that's the game you got to play.
00:01:45
Miranda Materi
That's, that's the game you got to play. So I spent too long thinking I could like exist outside of that marketing world. Um, and just have a relationship on a professional level with, with a provider, with this, with the doctor or the PA, maybe a medical assistant, and that would be enough.
00:02:01
Miranda Materi
And that wasn't the case.
00:02:04
Emily Kerr
um Do you have any other examples of maybe either smaller mistakes you've made or other mistakes that you've kind of learned from?
Challenges in Hiring Trustworthy Staff
00:02:13
Miranda Materi
Yeah, I think um another example, this one's kind of ah um a bigger issue. One of the hardest things about small business in my mind is staffing, um is coming up with the right staff to be providers, the therapists, coming up with the support staff that I i't know I can trust, um wanting someone that I can...
00:02:33
Miranda Materi
trust with patient care but trust with customer service side of things and so i it's so hard to hire new people and find and especially the non-therapy staff from therapist perspective we just like to hire students because it's been a great like working interview for three months or um emily was a referral from a former student so we knew we could trust that so ah but hiring support staff has always been a challenge and we ended up hiring someone that They didn't pan out in the first couple of days, like they called in sick and they said it wasn't gonna work. And I thought it was a good candidate.
00:03:07
Miranda Materi
And I really, really pushed and said, I really think this could work out well. I think, you know, we'll be patient. We'll wait for you to feel better. You had COVID, we'll be understanding. And then three days later, when that person came in, they started stealing from our front desk cash box.
00:03:20
Miranda Materi
And so I probably should have read the writing on the wall that on day one, this person really didn't want the job. She wasn't expecting to get the job. We've since learned that in Arizona, at least, if you want unemployment, you just have to prove that you've had a job interview periodically and provide proof of that.
00:03:36
Miranda Materi
So people will sign up for job interviews. And if I get any indication that the person doesn't really want the job, I need to let that go and and not like And not think, oh, okay, well, you know, we'll be understanding and you that we can make this work. Like, she really didn't want the job. So that was a lesson well learned.
00:03:54
Emily Kerr
Sure, that
Adapting Marketing Strategies and Learning from Mistakes
00:03:55
Emily Kerr
makes sense. You kind touched on it for the second example, but um how do you feel like you've overcome these mistakes and to continue having such a successful business?
00:04:07
Miranda Materi
We've been very blessed and fortunate. Things have gone really well for us. When COVID hit, um I found a doctor I had worked with before and we started great connection and we did really well that year where a lot of businesses struggled. So we've been very blessed and fortunate and a lot of that outside our control. That's just been how things have gone for us.
00:04:24
Miranda Materi
um But we have also tried to stay very flexible and say like the marketing thing, I needed to learn Okay, I can't just do what I think is good. I need to fit into like, this is the way that everybody markets. I probably need to be flexible enough to adapt to that um and commit more time to it. Make the goofy little tchotchkes in the things that I take the doctor's offices and they're silly, but the referral coordinators think they're cute and they're fun and they're different. And it's so...
00:04:54
Miranda Materi
I had to pivot and be willing to be flexible and do a different kind of marketing. I had to be willing to say, like, maybe this is how I need to hire new front desk people instead of committing all of my time to working on Indeed and spending hundreds of hours on resumes.
00:05:07
Miranda Materi
I now hire someone who helps me kind of weed through those when the time comes. And I'm outsourcing things and being willing to hire people to do something that maybe isn't a strong skill set for me.
00:05:18
Emily Kerr
Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
00:05:20
Miranda Materi
Yeah. Yeah.
Encouragement and Contact Information
00:05:21
Miranda Materi
um So if you guys have any questions, certainly about small business stuff, we don't usually talk about that nearly as much as we do the whole therapy side and all that other stuff. But if you guys have questions, don't hesitate to reach out.
00:05:30
Miranda Materi
You can find us on our email info at hand therapy academy.com or on social media at our handles hand therapy academy.