The Toughest Competitor

By Granville Y. Brady, Jr., AuD

I decided to devote the final Competition Counsel article to the toughest competitor of all—ourselves. Every practice goes through an evolution similar to the human life cycle, moving from infancy to young adulthood, middle age and maturity. Each stage offers opportunities and challenges.

The neophyte audiologist sees competitors behind every corner and develops a knee-jerk reaction that can result in a "give away the store" approach that can be disastrous. It may seem to be a good strategy to offer lowball prices to meet competitors, accept every insurance provider and give away batteries and years of free service. But when patients don't value these services and fail to come back for new hearing aids, the practice suffers. The new practitioner must be aware of the breakeven point, for if the practice does not show a profit, it will fall victim to the harshest internal competitor called "dreams and fantasies."

The more seasoned practitioner learns to be more selective about the types of insurance accepted and the ability for the patients to bargain. Whenever the audiologist accepts the price of a hearing aid to be less than the preset profit margin, the audiologist competes with the patient—and it is the patient who wins. When the patient wins, the audiologist loses as surely as when a competitor steals the patient away.

Somewhere between the practice's infancy and maturity comes the temptation to grab everything in sight—nursing home cases, labor union plans, Medicaid, HMO hearing aid programs. Rarely do any of them yield a profit margin greater than 50 percent, but all place a heavy demand on the audiologist's time. Low paying programs sap a practice's energy and compete with the ability to acquire better paying private cases.

As the practice grows, the owner makes better financial decisions leading to an improved bottom line. Travel to nursing homes and low paying union plans are dropped in favor of more lucrative services such as videonystagmography. We learn that patients seeking bargain-basement hearing aids might better be served elsewhere.

A mature practice faces danger when it fails to keep up with the times. Update potential referral sources: the physician group that was a big referral source 15 years ago now has its own technicians selling hearing aids, or the local ENT merged with a large practice and has become a strong competitor. In the practice of audiology, loyalty, like uncorked wine, doesn't last forever. The audiologist who fails to stay ahead of the referral curve is doomed.

Perhaps the greatest threat to a mature practice is apathy. Combating apathy is not easy, especially when a practice is successful. There is the temptation to reduce marketing efforts since patients are coming in through word of mouth, but it is just as important for a mature practice to market aggressively as it is for the new practice. As a practice reaches the 20-year mark, an entire generation of referrals and patients is about to exit, leaving room for a whole new group needing audiology services. If an effort is not made to alert the new generation (professionals and the public) about your practice, you will lose them.

You will also lose new patients if your marketing methods fail to incorporate new technology. We are competing in an information age such as the world has never seen. Tried and true methods to contact prospects at senior centers and health fairs have given way to the baby boomer's quest for knowledge on the Internet. The mature practice that refuses to have a Web site and relies on word-of-mouth referrals will probably go the way of the mom & pop pharmacies. As the technology changes, we must change with it.

As audiologists, we must constantly remind ourselves (and the public) that we are highly educated professionals whose services keep the world communicating. If we become complacent about any of our services, we will find that Walt Kelly's line in a 1970 Pogo comic strip can be as true today as it was then: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Granville Y. Brady, Jr., AuD, practices in East Brunswick and Clifton, NJ. Contact him at drgranbrady@optonline.net

Advances

As We Grow

Audiology practitioners cannot afford to sit on theirlaurels. We must constantly: