The year 1984 was big for Granville Brady Jr., AuD, FAAA, CCC-SLP/A. He married Carol, the daughter of a patient and his future office manager. And he launched his private audiology practice, with sites in Clifton and East Brunswick, NJ.

"We opened both offices on the same day. I sat in one office, and my wife sat in the other office. And nobody called," recalls Dr. Brady with a laugh. "No, I called her, and she called me. We wanted to make sure the phones were working. It was a little slow. for about 7 years."

To generate business in the early days, Dr. Brady relied heavily on direct mail campaigns to consumers. Evenings, weekends and spare minutes were spent stuffing and stamping envelopes with Carol and his 7-year-old stepson. The special offers and information drew patients, and slowly the practice generated a following.

Twenty-five years later, business is better, but Dr. Brady isn't resting on his lauels.

"I still get out there and push as much as I did 25 years ago," he says. "I may be targeting different markets and doing different kinds of marketing, but I still spend as much time and effort marketing as I did when I first opened up.

"You have to make sure your name is out there. Because, if it's not, someone else will take your place."

Slow Start

Dr. Brady's marriage to Carol and the opening of his practice 3 months later were not unrelated.

"My new wife suggested that perhaps I'd be happier if I opened my own practice," Dr. Brady remembers. "I was not a very good employee. I always felt I could do a better job than my boss. I ran every job as if it was my own. And when they'd tell me I couldn't do something or didn't reward me enough, I'd get frustrated. So I finally decided I may as well do it better and do it myself. And that's what I did."

Carol's background in accounting and banking helped the couple establish the nuts and bolts of the new business. Establishing a professional identity in the community, however, proved more difficult.

"The biggest challenge at the time was that nobody knew what I did for a living," says Dr. Brady. "Nobody knew what audiologists did."

The obscurity of the young profession, combined with tough competition from ENTs and a general lack of insurance reimbursement for audiologists, led Dr. Brady to market his practice as a hearing aid dispenser would-as a retail business. He mailed promotional literature, held open houses, participated in health fairs, and advertised on the radio. It took years, but a patient base eventually developed.

Staying the course during the lean years was difficult on an emotional level, Dr. Brady admits. "That was the biggest problem. When you don't get business and you don't see people coming in the door, you feel very lonely and isolated," he says.

"I have to laugh. My wife says that I was closing one office or the other every month, at least in my mind. But then she would tell me to stay with it, that it would get better. And it did. She had a lot of faith."

TV Commercials

Flip through cable TV stations such as the Hallmark or Lifetime channel in Dr. Brady's geographic region, and you're likely to see the audiologist promoting

his practice through a pair of 30-second commercials, which he also wrote.

One focuses on vertigo and dizziness; the other, hearing loss. The spots generally run 900 times a month at a cost of about $2 per airing.

"Cable TV is a popular medium. Everybody watches it," he says. "A week doesn't go by that patients don't come in and say, 'I saw you on TV.' It's instant recognition when they see me, and I think that adds to my credibility. People tend to believe what they see on TV."

Each commercial costs less than $1,000 to make. A camera operator/director from the TV station worked with the audiologist to set the stage and rehearse his lines. A good take requires looking directly into the camera, not fumbling words and delivering the message in the exact timeframe allotted. It's not atypical for a 30-second commercial to require 2 hours of onsite work, Dr. Brady explains. Narrators, editors and other post-production workers put the finishing touches on the commercial back at the studio.

The commercials are available for viewing on a rotating basis on Dr. Brady's Web site, www.drgranbrady.com. The audiologist set up an online presence for his practice about 5 years ago. Dr. Brady includes the URL on his practice brochure, as well as other promotional literature, and has noticed that the site has drawn patients.

Creative Marketing

In a welcome sign of the times, Dr. Brady now markets his audiology practice directly to physicians, who are more responsive than ever. A few years ago, he hired a practice field representative to visit provider offices on his behalf, much as a pharmaceutical company representative would, and provide information and promotional literature about his practice's services.

"Remember that 7-year-old kid who used to stuff envelopes at the dining room table? My stepson Matthew is now a 32-year-old man, and he does detailing for the practice," Dr. Brady says. "Patients are picking up our brochures in their doctor's office, and physicians are now calling me to ask for business cards they can hand out to patients."

Dr. Brady's creative approach to marketing over the years has provided experience with a variety of mediums and yielded one enduring lesson: Nothing works all of the time, and everything works some of the time.

"I used to do a lot of direct mail and open houses, but over time the number of patients they generated went down. I realized I pretty much saturated that market," he says. "We did some radio ads years ago, and they didn't pull that much in. The TV ads have been pulling in more people this year, but 2 years ago they didn't. I don't know why. But what I've learned is everything works some of the time, but you can't depend on it to work all of the time."

The audiologist prefers to advertise through several mediums simultaneously-right now it's newspaper, TV and direct mail advertising-to reach prospective patients through at least one venue.

He and office manager/wife Carol also promote the use of hearing aids through unintentional yet effective means: Both wear them to assist with their own hearing loss. Patient reaction ranges from surprise to comfort to give-me-what-you-have requests.

"It's helped me show patients that having a hearing loss isn't a stigma, and that it's OK to wear a hearing aid because the doctor wears a hearing aid," says Dr. Brady. "Hearing loss isn't something you should live with. Hearing loss is something you should correct."

A Transformed Career

In addition to practicing in and publicizing his private practice, Dr. Brady keeps busy in a number of professional activities: He currently writes for ADVANCE and other industry publications, serves as treasurer of the Audiology Foundation of America, sits on the New Jersey Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Advisory Committee, and teaches a business development and accounting course for AuD students through A.T. Still University, Phoenix, AZ.

"I'm proud to say that many of my students have gone into private practice after they took my course," he says. "And one, while she was taking my course, not only went into private practice, but her business plan was accepted by the lending institution, and she got all of the money she asked for."

Finding the time to participate in other ventures (Dr. Brady is also commissioner of elections for Somerset County, NJ, and enjoys expert witness consulting on the side) hasn't been too difficult, he says, since he and associate Anita Bhandarkar, AuD, write reports immediately after patient

visits to avoid taking work home. He also finds the professional activities rewarding, especially those that promote private practice as a legitimate path for young audiologists willing to take on the responsibility and risk.

Turning his back on a 9-to-5 job to embrace the private practice lifestyle-lean years, dining room table mailings, middle-of-the-night brainstorming sessions and all-has transformed this self-described employee with a bad attitude into an audiologist who loves his career.

"Over the past 25 years, I have never gotten up in the morning and dreaded going to work. I'm very happy with what I do," says Dr. Brady. "Not that birds and bees fly around me every day saying how wonderful everything is. There are days when the hornets fly around and sting me and everything goes wrong.

"But all in all, it's just so neat to be in private practice. I enjoy it very much."

Jolynn Tumolo is a freelance writer in Morgantown, PA.