Finding Win-Wins

For the past few years, my wife would take our youngest son to his speech therapy appointments every week.

Each session was 45 minutes, but it would take 15 minutes to get my son ready to leave the house, 30 minutes to drive to the therapist's office, and 30 minutes to drive back home. So a 45-minute session was really a two-hour time commitment.

A while back, my son's speech therapist told us she was leaving the office where she worked to begin her own practice. We liked our son's progress with this therapist, so we asked where her new office would be located.

That's when she informed us there wasn't going to be an office.

Instead, she planned to travel to her clients' homes and conduct sessions there.

And the cost to us would be the same. 

As you might imagine, we couldn't sign up fast enough.

Instead of my wife or I spending time travelling to and from an office for our son's weekly appointments (and then wasting time on our phone for 45 minutes during each session), we could now go about our day while the therapist worked with our son at our dining room table. No time spent getting ready to leave, no travel time or costs, no idle time (for the accompanying adult) while our son was learning and, best of all, no compromise in the quality of the service our son received. Having sessions-at-home was a clear win for us.

And while I don't have visibility to the therapist's business model, it's safe to assume she did the math and determined that working with a no-office model, even factoring in the vehicle costs and travel time she would incur, was at least as profitable as either continuing to sub-contract her services to another office or maintaining a physical office of her own. Add that to the scheduling flexibility that typically accompanies working for yourself and the ability to choose who you want to work with, and it appears the sessions-at-home model represented a clear win for our speech therapist too.

It might not be practical for you to eliminate your office and conduct your business in your client's homes. (Or perhaps it is... have you thought about how that might work?)

But there are likely changes you can make to your business that will make your customers happier and you more profitable.

• Would a "best price guaranteed" (read: no-haggle policy) result in lower selling costs and enable the ability to truly deliver a "best price" to your clients?

  
  

• Would implementing a customer-relationship-management (CRM) system (versus sticking with your paper-based systems) allow you to know your customers better, enabling you to be proactive with delivering profitable solutions at the right time?

  
  

• Could you offer clients a discount in exchange for electronic statements (versus mailing paper invoices), automatic payments from a bank account (versus incurring credit card fees), or both? Would the administrative savings you realize more than pay for the discount?

Finding win-wins requires you to critically examine your business with a "what can we change to make things better" mindset.

But everybody benefits when you take the time to think about that.