Starting a medical tourism facilitator business is the role of an "entrepreneur" with only one job...and it isn't referring patients or coordinating care. Those activities are merely the means to success.
As an entrepreneur, your job is to create a business and systems that create wealth. Everything else is ancillary to this single, most important job.
WHEN YOU CREATE WEALTH...
- The profit you accumulate improves your own life
- The income you earn improves your family’s life
- The product your selling improves your customer’s life
- The job(s) you create improve your employees’ lives
- The money you spend improves your suppliers’ lives
CREATE SYSTEMS TO WORK SMARTER...
- Efficiency – Avoiding waste of time or money
- Effectiveness – Make a difference, make a problem better or eliminate it.
- Enjoyment – You must enjoy the work that you do because it will consume your time and come at great sacrifice to family, friends, leisure and rest.
FINANCE
The goal of finance, first and foremost, is to make sure that you take home profit at the end of the day.
- Pay your bills on time to earn creditworthiness
- Get paid for your services on time to maintain cash flow
- Look both forward and backward. Most people only look backward which helps you pay your taxes. It doesn’t help you generate profit.
MARKETING
The goal of marketing is to spread your reach, making sure your target customers know that you exist and that you’re the provider they should be working with when they’re ready to buy.
This requires planning and execution. But before you can market and gain reach, you must have a product that a market needs and wants to buy. Who are your ideal prospects for your “product” and why? If you have not yet identified your ideal prospects, you’re not ready to market.
Most medical tourism facilitators “assume” that people want to buy medical care in a place other than where they live. If you believe this, what’s your proof? And why would they buy…from you and not someone else?
Is the fee split (e.g., kickbacks, commissions) marketing approach and business model legal in your jurisdiction or the jurisdiction in which you are marketing? It is not legal in the USA, UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, and other countries. Therefore, every overture you make for a fee split arrangement with a person in those countries “proves” your ignorance, lack of research and understanding, and or your lack of integrity to make an illegal proposal for a business arrangement.
YES or NO DECISIONS
Once people discover that you exist, you need to present them with a yes-or-no decision, an opportunity to give assent to give you something that signals they view what you offer as valuable even though they won’t pay money for it. This could be downloading an ebook, an informative brochure, or something that requires your targeted ideal prospect to consciously opt-in and consent to go further with you.
SALES
The goal of sales is to complete the transaction that moves people from curious to invested, paying you (via your business) for a needed or desired product or service you’ve promised.
The goal of your sales process is to make a promise to potential ideal customers about your deliverable that they decide to accept. Once they accept (and money changes hands) they move from lead to customer, and your selling work is done.
If you don’t fulfill their expected deliverable, you’ll end up with a less than delighted customer. So part of the delivery phase is ensuring set realistic expectations and customer delight.
If you or your employers, suppliers, partners or destinations fail to fulfill and overdeliver their expectations, the market will punish you by complaining online, to their friends, and risking damage to your reputation.
You can easily fail to delivery their expectations if you don’t set clear expectations from the beginning, or if you fail to analyze and mitigate risks.
Risk-based thinking, training, job knowledge and education about medical and dental procedures, fluency in medical terminology, patient safety, anatomy, physiology, altitude and travel physiology, knowledge of the destination and first hand knowledge of your network providers’ operations WILL make or break your ability to sell, operate, and succeed.
If you thought your job would be managed remotely, via email, you will fail at your ability to create wealth and your business will fail.
If your business is undercapitalized such that you cannot afford to hire help to learn the missing parts of the business, and you cannot afford to travel at your own expense to inspect and observe providers and suppliers, you will fail at your ability to create wealth and your business will fail.
Save money on training and skills building when you order my best-selling book for medical tourism facilitators. The Medical Tourism Facilitator’s Handbook is a must-have resource of hard-to-find tools, checklists, terminology, and other helpful information for hospital-based, lay facilitators, travel agents, and even retired physicians and nurses.
Available from the publisher or at any online or retail bookseller.
- CRC Productivity Press (part of Informa)
- Published November 23, 2011
- Reference – 180 Pages – 9 B/W Illustrations
- ISBN: 9781439812839
