Excerpted from SEAK’s stream on-demand course, “How to Market and Grow Your IME Practice”
Okay. So, let’s move on to building your IME brand. We’re on page 75, I believe of your book. And some of this is important to review, but I think it’s important to mention. The first important thing is…there’s only about 10 or 15 points, 10 points. The first one is be easy to deal with. We talked about this at length yesterday, and it’s not only you that needs to be easy to deal with, it’s your staff that needs to be easy to deal with, okay? That people that are easy to deal with, they’re cooperative, they’re able to set up appointments, and so on and so forth, do much better. And that’s your brand. And your brand should be that you’re easy to deal with. Make scheduling easy. We talked about this, prompt appointments, you want to make the process, you want to align yourself with what they need. Now, sometimes they may need something in a rush, or lawyers are always notorious of needing everything in a rush, but sometimes there actually may be a legitimate reason. And if you can accommodate them, they certainly would appreciate it. Transparent and fair billing or collection practice, we talked about that. They want to know how much it’s going to cost within reason, and they don’t want to be nickeled and dimed with. On the other hand, you don’t want to be in a situation where, you know, you agree to do an IME for $1,500, and then a banker box of records show up.
Okay. And I think that does happen fairly routinely. You agree to an IME, they don’t tell you, you don’t ask how many records are involved, and your 30-year-old case shows up, okay? So, whatever your fee is on that 30-year-old case, assuming you have to go through 30 years of records, the file could be this big, you know, it could be, you know, 2,000, 3,000 pages of documents. In my opinion, if you do get an IME like that, and they kind of sandbag you without telling you how big it is, I would call them up, and say, “Listen, I herniated a disc lifting the records that you sent me. You never mentioned the fact that you were sending me 1,500 pages of documents to review, and obviously, I can’t do this for $1,500. So, you know, the fee for doing this with reviewing the records is going to be whatever, do you want me to do it, or do you want me to return the file to you?” That’s what I would do. And I’ve been in that situation myself when people send me things to review. I ask people when I do their consulting and stuff, “How large are the file?” And they say, “The report’s eight pages long. I just want you to look at this eight-page report.” Okay? The report comes, it’s 87 pages. I go, “Perhaps my memory is incorrect, but I distinctly remember you telling me this report was eight pages.” They go, “Well, I added some stuff on to it.” Okay. “Well, adding 79 pages on is adding a lot on, so the fee that we agreed on, obviously, I can’t do it. Do you want me to send it back, do you want me to do it, and it’s gonna cost you extra?” Yes.
