Excerpted from SEAK’s course, “How to Start, Build, and Run a Successful Physician Consulting Practice”
So, on the niches, the takeaway, I think, is gonna be the protocol. Not the niche. You don’t need to know your niche today but the protocol of procedure that you’re gonna follow to figure out what your niche is gonna be. And, actually, I don’t really want you to figure out what your niche is right here because that would be premature, I think. So, you’re going to look at what you’re really good at, you’re going to look at what you’re passionate about, you’re going to look at what people will pay for, you’re gonna think about how you’re gonna reach your person, your clients, okay, how you’re gonna market to them, and make sure you’re gonna think about something where you can do a great job, and by the way, we’re gonna talk about doing a great job, eventually, and that’s become crucially important. What I call, your work product.
All successful consultants have high-quality work products. They deliver. Okay. You can’t get by in BS and general BS, it’s not gonna work and you don’t wanna work that way. So you’re gonna have to develop a high-quality work product to get business, to get repeat business. We’ll talk about that. And you also, in my view, want to think about doing whatever additional research, reading, consulting, talking to people, interviewing them that has to be done to really become a leader. You don’t have to be the world’s leading expert in your area, but you want to be a thought leader, eventually. Okay. Somebody that people will turn to or can turn to and say, “Can you help us with this problem?” And, you know, looking at the internet is fine, and finding things on the internet is fine. A lot of times, what you’ll get is sometimes kinda short, little articles and blurbs, which is good to start with. But, really, it’s just like doing anything else, I think. My experience has been with this course that the people that take the course seriously and really, you know, work at it, do much better. Some people do it as a hobby, that’s fine, some people come and really, you know, don’t follow up on it, and that’s your choice, And I’m gonna give you a suggestion to increase the probability that you will succeed as a consultant. It’s not gonna cost you anything, It’s gonna take an hour maybe. I want you at the end of the course within a week after the course, to send me your action plan. Okay? This will force you to write it down and it’ll be helpful to you. You can just email it to me, stevebabitsky@gmail.com or stevenbabitsky@seek.com.
And we actually have, and don’t look at them right now, some actions plans from the past in the back of the book. I put them there rather than, you know, talk about it, we just put them in there. But, the people who actually convert their ideas into thoughts, to writing, do much better, actually. It’s very easy to come to a conference like this, you know, enjoy the breakfast, talk, have some fun at the conference, meet some people, go home and do nothing. Okay. I’ve done it myself. I stopped doing that. Every conference I attend, I write up a memo. So, for example, when I was doing research for fiction writing for physicians, I attended a course in New York for fiction writing. And I was there for a few days, and I wrote up like a six-page, single-spaced memo about what I learned there. What I learned there, actually, they weren’t doing that good of a job, frankly. They had people sitting on the floor, they didn’t have enough room, they didn’t provide food, you know, tons of other problems. But it was an eye-opener, okay? And I learned something. And I wrote it down. Because you’re not gonna remember, you know, six months from now exactly what was said. But if you write down the key points and send it to me or keep it yourself.
