Benjamin Walker, a former banker, was looking for a change in his career. He was making a living selling mortgages but had a strong desire to get into the medical industry. He decided to follow his desire and he pursued entry into the medical industry. His pursuit eventually led to becoming the founder of Transcription Outsourcing, LLC, a successful transcription company with revenue in the millions. But this founder’s success did not come without challenges along the way and many lessons to be learned.
Walker pursued entry into the medical industry for six months with no luck. No doors seemed to be opening for him. One day Walker heard that a family friend was starting a medical transcription company, a different path than expected. The company would convert voice-recorded reports as dictated by physicians or other healthcare professionals, into text format.
When Walker heard about this, he realized this was an opportunity to finally break into the medical industry. He asked the family friend if he could be a part owner and do sales for them in the company’s new office in Denver, Colorado. The family friend agreed. A few months later they established an official partnership agreement and Walker was finally in the medical industry.
The company did well, initially. Since Walker had a sales role, his job was to find new clients. He found his first group of clients by using email. “I would scour the internet for email addresses of people in authoritative positions within the medical industry”, Walker said. “I would find them on websites for different medical societies or conferences and email them late at night. This way my pitch email would be one of the first things they saw in the morning. After landing a few and learning about the different medical societies I started to attend the events and become a sponsor and then a board member for a few different medical societies in Colorado.”
Everything seemed to be going well. Then the company started going downhill.
Pay Attention To Changes In The Market
The needs and desires of every market are always changing. You have to adapt with those changes. No market stays the same forever. You will see in Walker’s rise to success how important it is to pay attention to the changes in your market.
Soon the company began to lose its medical transcription clients because of technological and cultural changes in the medical industry. “The medical industry has changed dramatically in the last five years with the widespread adoption of Electronic Medical Records systems”, Walker said. “Now your physician keeps your medical chart on a computer or in the cloud by pointing and clicking, and sometimes a few lines of dictation. Those lines of dictation are sent through voice recognition then delivered to editors who clean up the mistakes the voice recognition makes. The editors of voice recognition are almost all overseas, which has resulted in a shift from onshore transcription to overseas editing.”
Since the future of the company did not look bright, Walker left the company and started his own transcription company, Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. Walker continued to pursue the medical transcription industry with his newly founded company. He didn’t yet understand how much the medical transcription industry was was quickly losing demand. He didn’t fully understand that changes in the medical transcription industry were was the root cause of the former company losing clients. ”Unfortunately I did not clearly understand, or see, that the medical transcription industry was going to reduce in size and scope”, said Walker.
For two years, in the hopes of winning new clients in the medical transcription industry, Walker continued attending and sponsoring medical conferences. He also helped run a few medical societies as a board member. He finally realized the changes that were happening the market and he changed the company’s direction. He began to pursue high growth areas of transcription such as academic transcription, legal transcription, and law enforcement transcription services. The company experienced much success working with these new markets. Now legal and law enforcement transcription services are almost 50% of the company’s revenue. The company grew to $1.1 million in revenue in just a few short years.
Test And Optimize Your Sales Strategy
One or two changes in your sales strategy can make a huge impact to your bottom line. It is smart to test different sales strategies. One simple change can increase the number of prospects that turn into new clients. When Walker initially changed the company’s direction and began to pursue new markets, he had a tough time convincing prospects to become clients because he didn’t have any references or experience in these new markets. “Prospects would find us online and call us, then back off when we couldn’t give them any references”, said Walker.
Then Walker came up with another strategy. He realized some of his team members had a lot of experience in these new markets, although the company itself did not. “We started to emphasize the experience of our individual team members rather than our current client list”, said Walker. This strategy proved to be successful. They simply changed their approach in how they sold themselves to prospects and it worked.
If your prospects are not buying, find out why. Is there something you can say differently? Is there an alternative way you can position your company?
Hire The Right People
One of the mistakes Walker made early in his company’s history was is hiring the wrong people. “If I could change the past, I would asked better interview questions.” Not only is it important to hire qualified help, it is important to look for a cultural fit.
Companies across the world are beginning to see that cultural fit and specific personalities for certain roles may be more important than experience or skills. You need to ask the to right questions during interviews to identify the characteristics you are looking for in a new employee.
In Walker’s case, experience was very important in the beginning because the experience of individual team members helped help him win new business.
The Future Looks Bright
Walker’s company is now doing very well. When we asked him what marketing strategy has resulted in the greatest rate of growth for your company, his answer was, “public relations.”
“Public relations has been the best thing, far and away, I have done for my company to scale up”, said Walker. “It’s not marketing, I understand that. If no one knows about you it’s really hard to even get the chance to market your services to them. It drives almost all of our marketing efforts and is directly responsible for almost 50% of our business growth.”
The company plans to continue growing by responding to a lot more RFP's as well as significant growth through organic means. Fortunately, it didn’t take Walker too long to clearly see the changes in the medical transcription industry. Walker says, “As we have adapted to the new reality in the healthcare market, the future is much brighter.”
Brian is an international speaker and coach. Say hi to Brian at connect@brianrashid.com.
