Michael: What kind of business are you in?

Eric: I recruit and staff for medical offices and hospitals.

Michael: Okay. So you’re working for a company?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: And your job is to recruit and fill hospital staff?

Eric: Exactly.

Michael: Doctors? Nurses? Or all of the above?

Eric: Primarily nurses and support staff, but not a lot of doctors.

Michael: That’s kind of tough with nurses right now. They are kind of a rare commodity.

Eric: Absolutely. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack and they are valuable when you do.

Michael: So, you need a Registered Nurse before you can get support staff for them… which is really becoming a problem, right?

Eric: Correct. The healthcare crisis is a true crisis.

Michael: Is your job part of that? Making sure you don’t lose people?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: Does that go into how much they make, benefits, and things like that?

Eric: Both of those are very important. One of the factors that nurses look for is the type of provider. It’s a little less stable if the company you work for supplies you as an independent contractor and so the provider has to pay a little better and provide better benefits, but sometimes the stability of a full-time job is still a little bit more of a pull than making a little bit more money.

Michael: What has worked for you in the past?

Eric: Well, a lot of contacts. And that’s been one of the things you struggle with as a rep, because a lot of the people expect very regular contact. It’s all top of the mind types of things.

Michael: So… referrals?

Eric: Yes. The referrals.

Michael: Where are the referrals coming from?

Eric: Primarily from the clients that are working with you in a particular facility. Someone you are working with will call you and say “You know, I’m working doing this, however there are several positions that are open that you might want to take a look at.” We give bonuses for referrals.

Michael: All right, so you are saying a client working with you. Who is a client?

Eric: A client would be a hospital.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: And one of our employees would be the people who actually work for us.

Michael: Oh. So you’re not working for one specific hospital?

Eric: I work for an independent.

Michael: You’re an independent staffing agency for hospitals?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: I got it. Okay. So referrals have been a good source for your business so far?

Eric: Yes. It’s been very good.

Michael: Any other methods in generating leads?

Eric: Some of the postcards have worked really well. It really depends, postcards get thrown in the trash a lot and that’s fine.

Michael: Who are you mailing the postcards to?

Eric: Primarily to the Practice Administrators in private offices and the Directors of the departments within the hospital.

Michael: And what are the postcards saying?

Eric: We’ve gotten a lot of corporate postcards and most of them are just “We’re your staffing solution.” Just very plain things and that’s one of the things that I’m looking to change.

Michael: Just so I’m clear, now what you’re trying to do is build your business generating clients to work for?

Eric: Right.

Michael: You’re not necessarily trying to recruit the nurses. That’s the hospitals duty.

Eric: Yes. We work together. I have a partner recruiting the staffing end of it and then I do the finding of the client.

Michael: Okay. What you want to do more effectively is to generate clients for your business?

Eric: Right.

Michael: Where a client will sign up with you so that you can help them staff their facility. Correct?

Eric: Exactly.

Michael: You’re calling to find out how to get more clients?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: The crisis in finding nurses for those facilities is another issue in itself.

Eric: Oh yeah. It’s definitely another issue.

Michael: Does that issue make your job difficult and less effective?

Eric: Yes. It makes it much more difficult.

Michael: How many clients do you have now?

Eric: We’ve got about 75 to 78 clients, right now.

Michael: And how many more do you want to put on - or how many can you put on comfortably?

Eric: We could probably double that and be comfortable. If we triple it we can add another person to help out.

Michael: Okay. How long have you been in business?

Eric: We’ve been in business since ‘82.

Michael: And what’s the retention rate of a client?

Eric: The retention rate is typically in terms of lifespan, is about two to three years. Most of the clients don’t use anyone exclusively, so that creates its own little problem.

Michael: So when they need nurses, they’ll call you and say, “Can you help?” Or they may have a couple of other people on the board too.

Eric: And if we say, “No we don’t have anyone at this time,” they go down the list to the next staffing provider. Your role, as a sales person or business person, is to keep yourself on the top of every list of all these administrators.

Michael: Okay. Does that happen? Do you have clients call you who are looking for people and you just don’t have anyone?

Eric: Oh, sure.

Michael: So you’ve got to let them know that you may not have someone right then, but two weeks from now… “Don’t give up on us. We may have someone then.”

Eric: Right. I also try and probe for more information. When does this person actually have to start? We may not need to tell them “no” right then, if they don’t have to start for a week. A week in our business is a life time.

Michael: I’m just curious… on your end, what kind of money is in it for your company? Do you take an hourly percentage? A percentage of the hours worked? Or is it based on the salary of the person you staff, like an employee staffing agency?

Eric: Yes. It’s very similar to that.

Michael: I see. You handle all the billing and all the paperwork and everything?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: So they are independent contractors or independent contractors outsourced by your service?

Eric: Right.

Michael: Now, you say that they call you in to try and handle some of the communications with your client. The previous postcards have been more corporate in type postcards. Do you have full editorial control in sending out contacts to you clients?

Eric: Yes. They just gave me that because they gave up on the other things, because it wasn’t working at all.

Michael: So they aren’t going to look over your shoulder and say, “Oh, we can’t use this and we can’t use that.”

Eric: No. No.

Michael: Do you have to get approval from anyone?

Eric: No. Not really. My partner is going to take a look at it but there is no legal department that it has to go through or anything like that.

Michael: And when you’re doing the postcard mail out, how many customers are you mailing out to?

Eric: Typically only one to two thousand is really our target base. We have a pretty good list developed of some of the larger people that we want to go to, so they can be a really targeted type of postcarding or direct mailing.

Michael: Do you feel a postcard is more effective because you can do it all at once? You just want to keep your service in the top of their minds so when they need someone, they call you first.

Eric: Right. You’re always in their minds.

Michael: Okay. How often if ever, do you follow up with your customers?

Eric: Typically, I normally will for the current customers. We’ll normally see them at least once a month, if not more.

Michael: You’ll see them personally?

Eric: Yes. Personally.

Michael: So they are all local customers?

Eric: Local within the State. It’s a pretty hairy run when you are trying to see all these people.

Michael: Where are you located?

Eric: I’m in Tampa, Florida.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: We’ve got people in the surrounding metropolitan areas.

Michael: Okay. So you’re just doing local clients. You meet with them and go over their needs et cetera et cetera?

Eric: Right.

Michael: You and your partner?

Eric: My partner pretty much is in the office. He does the fulfillment.

Michael: Right. Give me a profile of the type of person you’re seeing.

Eric: It’s typically a person who is running a department in a hospital.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: Or is running a practice, a private surgical practice or outpatient services.

Michael: Okay. This person is probably running like a chicken with it’s head cut off, right?

Eric: Absolutely.

Michael: In your honest opinion, is that meeting a productive meeting, when you’re out there meeting with them personally, or is it something could be avoided?

Eric: It’s something that could probably be avoided if we could come up with a way that we could be sure and have contact with them.

Michael: What information do you have? Do you have these people’s names, their position, and their mailing address? Are these people online - on the internet?

Eric: All of that. Most of them are online; we can even do an email campaign. That’s one of the things they’re looking at.

Michael: Yeah, that’s going to be really effective. Do you have all their emails entered in a database?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: You’re thinking about it, but you haven’t used email?

Eric: Not yet. The freedom that they’ve given me is kind of new, and the other state rep is pretty new. So it’s emerging. The supervisors are saying, “We’re going to hands off. If trouble happens, our legal department will handle it, but otherwise, do whatever you want.”

Michael: This shouldn’t bring any trouble. Do you have a website?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: What’s your website?

Eric: www.onassignment.com .

Michael: www.onassignment.com . I can take a look at that later. You know what sounds like the most obvious thing to do? Set up all your customers up in an email database and I think it could save you a whole lot of time. There’s no reason to send a postcard or letter just saying, “Hey, remember us, remember us” when you can shoot them an email. What you can do is can put every one of your customers on a hot list, and whenever you have anything to say, it’s just a matter of going online. You have all your email addresses, all your names in one database, and you shoot an email out to them.

Eric: Good.

Michael: That will probably be a really effective way in keeping in contact with your customers.

Eric: And I’m finding out that even the people in the more rural aspects of our area are still very computer-savvy because of the Medicare billing and other things that that they have to do electronically - so everyone has an email address.

Michael: Are you online right now?

Eric: No, not right now.

Michael: Okay, I mean I think that will solve your problem of keeping contact with your customers very inexpensively. I don’t think it’s necessary to mail anything because I think these people are probably too busy to read it. You know, when they have access to internet, and they can read an email. With your email you can link them to your website. I don’t know what your website looks like, I haven’t had time to look at it, but when I do, I can give you some feedback. You can have all your selling points and features, why someone should choose you over any other staffing agency, up on your site and you can give the descriptions of the type of people that you can staff these facilities with.

Eric: Sure.

Michael: So, imagine there is a dating service and you’re searching for people you want to date. Could you do something like that and have the people who are looking for a job have a small profile, a picture of them, something like that up on your site?

Eric: Yes. That’s one of the things that we’re looking at. We would like to send those types of departments specific candidates. For instance, we would send radiology departments radiology techs that are available. We’re going to do host art type of things.

Michael: Is there another staffing agency that you know of in the area who you really admire? One who is doing a great job, and makes a lot of money, and is really successful?

Eric: Not really.

Michael: None that you know?

Eric: No one’s doing a very good job. Everyone’s doing adequate and they’re kind of getting positions filled, but no one that I’ve talked to, any of my clients, even asked them about the competitors. No one’s said that anyone particularly stood out. That’s one of the things we’re looking to do is be very different, in terms of trying to be different with service and anything like that.

Michael: Right. Before I forget, I want to recommend an auto responder service or an email management service. It’s something I use. It’s www.reply2it.com . It’ll take a little time to learn how to use it, but it’s really powerful and gives you a lot of flexibility to manage your emails. You can import your entire database into it, and then when you need to send a message, boom, you write the message, click “send,” and it goes out to everyone automatically.

Eric: That’s great.

Michael: And you can also set up something called an auto responder. You can have it set up to where it can send messages automatically without you having to do it. You just pre-write the message, as say, just a weekly reminder. It could be the same message, or a series of ten different messages explaining to your customers maybe one benefit of why they should choose you. 10 reasons why they want to choose you. Just to remind them, to keep reminding them, how you’re different and what your unique selling proposition is. Let’s say you did ten different unique reasons why they should choose you, and you just put in an automatic sequence that automatically gets emailed to them, you know?

Eric: Oh, yeah.

Michael: And you always want to have, in each one of those emails, a hyperlink back to your site, that says, “To view our newest employees, click here.” They can go see the kind of people that you may be able to staff for them.

Eric: Sure.

Michael: What other ways besides the referrals that work for you in generating new business?

Eric: Getting out and doing a lot of the cold-calling, in person, has generated some business for us. It’s been pretty helpful and doing the professional organizations that we belong to has been helpful.

Michael: All right, let me ask you, when someone refers you, do you give them some kind of financial bonus? What’s in it for them?

Eric: Right now, we’re not allowed to do a straight financial bonus anymore, but we try and do either gift certificates to restaurants or gift certificates to one of the local malls.

Michael: How much do they?

Eric: Probably about $20 for a deal that gets completed.

Michael: All right. Does it seem to work?

Eric: Yes it has worked. That’s been pretty helpful. And it does give you a change to go back and see that person in person. You can go to them and say, “I have a gift certificate for you,” and they’ll give you their time.

Michael: This brings me to another idea. The people you’re sending that postcard to are the people you want to contact. I want you to think about, and make a list of, other types of businesses, vendors, and associates that these same people are dealing with besides you. Can you give me any ideas?

Eric: They deal with billing companies, they deal with…

Michael: Companies who do all the billing for the hospital?

Eric: Yes, billing offices that work with them, the office supplies, some of the medical equipment companies and the pharmaceutical reps that they deal with all the time.

Michael: Okay, asking that question’s really important. It make some effort on the front end, but if you can establish a relationship with another company that’s dealing with these same people, let’s say that billing company - let’s say they’re sending out statements to your customers every single month for the billing services. Maybe you can take that little coupon, that $20 gift certificate, and create an 8” by 11” flyer, and I have templates for that, that offers a free $25 dinner at the finest restaurant in your area. You do a joint venture. You call that billing company and say, “We’re a staffing agency. We work with the same people you work with. Would you mind inserting our gift certificate or our one-page sales letters, with your statements?’

Eric: Okay.

Michael: You see what I’m saying? What would be even better is if you could get the owner of that billing company to endorse you. So let’s say the owner of that billing company’s name is John. John says to Mary, coordinator you’re dealing with, John says “Hey, Mary, I don’t usually refer people to you, but I just found out about a company you may or may not be dealing with, who’s exception in staffing hospital or medical staff. I’m including a free gift certificate for $25 or $50 bucks to ‘x’ restaurant if you can refer somebody to him or if you sign up with him as a client.”

Eric: Oh, okay.

Michael: John gives you an endorsement. It comes from him, which is much more powerful than you saying, “Hey Mary, look at me, I’m the greatest…”’ Do you see what I’m saying?

Eric: Sure, sure.

Michael: And then he gets to feel like a hero because he’s giving her nothing but a piece of paper, right?

Eric: Right.

Michael: But It’s worth $25 or $50, if Mary uses it. So he gets to give her a $50 gift as a “Thank you for doing business with our billing company” and then if she uses it, you’ve got yourself a new client and a referral referred by somebody else.

Eric: Absolutely.

Michael: Does that make sense?

Eric: Oh, it makes great sense.

Michael: So, you’re leveraging all of John’s goodwill with all his clients and you get the referral, which is much more powerful than you saying “Look at me. Look at me.” He gets to feel good. It’ll be much more powerful and they do all the work. You have to do the work in setting it up. Now, if you can find five or six alliances that all deal with Mary, the same person you’re trying to go after, and they all are referring your service, that could be really powerful and significant.

Eric: Exactly. I see what you’re saying.

Michael: That’s doing a joint venture. You just have to make it a win-win for everybody. It would be worth it to even pay half his postage. You have to think to yourself, “What’s in it for him?” And you could say ‘”How would you like it if I paid for half you’re postage on all your billing statements?”

Eric: Right.

Michael: And so what if you pay him 15 cents for a letter, even if you paid the whole thing, it’s going to be much more powerful coming from him than it is coming from you.

Eric: Sure, and it’s no more expensive than me mailing something out in the first place.

Michael: Absolute. And he handles and the work, and the envelope stuffing and all the details, you just have to oversee it.

Eric: Got it.

Michael: Now, if you can get five or ten alliances - just come up with a list and just rack your brain of all the different people these people come in contact with - imagine every statement they get, they see a referral about your company. Can you think of how powerful that would be?

Eric: That’s fantastic.

Michael: And it would remind them all the time. You could take down advertising on the outside of their envelope and offer to pay for that and have a little ad or something. What I tell people, first of all, is you’ve have to get your message down. You’ve have to come up with the reasons why your agency blows doors over everybody else. You guys all probably do the same thing, but no one has probably taken the time to really write in down and explain it in detail. It can go on twenty pages, but if you can sell, if you can offer that information to someone who’s really wondering why they should choose you, and answer those questions and alleviate any of the fears, you’ll have them hooked. And that message has to be on your website. It’s has to be on your sales letter or fax. There are so many different ways you can get that message to your target market.

Eric: I see.

Michael: Just using ten or fifteen different ideas and having just a little bit of success with each of them, can really grow your business geometrically. But establishing those joint ventures is a very powerful way - because you’re really leveraging off the other company’s goodwill and their efforts and their labor.

Eric: And they’ve already established the trust that you were looking for in the first place.

Michael: That’s right, and if you did nothing but that, I think you could grow your business three times.

Eric: Oh, absolutely.

Michael: There are other things to do also. Let’s talk about your list, the potential customers of who you probably haven’t contacted. Do you have some kind of mailing list of your potential target customers?

Eric: Yes, we have got a pretty good list of some of the people who are prospects for the market that we’re looking at.

Michael: And you got their names and numbers and all that?

Eric: Yes, the only thing we don’t have for them is the email address.

Michael: I see. Do these staffers belong to any kind of associations?

Eric: Some of them - but not all of them.

Michael: There has to be some source where someone has all their email addresses. So you have to ask yourself, “Who has the email addresses of all these people?” Do you know how you find out? You call a couple of your customers. Call a couple of your clients and ask if they belong to any associations. What associations? Which ones? What associations have you given your email address out to? And then you can call that association and many times you can rent that list, or you can buy it for a small fee. All you want is the names. You just want a way to get in touch with these people. The stuff I’m telling you about, Dan Kennedy teaches it, but Jay Abraham’s a real master at teaching it. Like the one joint venture strategy I was explaining to you, that’s Jay Abraham’s style stuff, how to think and leverage your time and leverage your efforts through others - and that stuff’s amazing. Dan Kennedy, he’s a great teacher, he goes into the more of the copyrighting, and he’s the strategist, and I think…

Eric: That’s what I need, is the strategy.

Michael: You need the strategies and the ideas and then…

Eric: I can copyright and do some of that stuff, no problem.

Michael: And you’re gonna be on your own to implement them. I have the ideas within the Jay Abraham programs. One is called the Mastermind Program, where he got businesses all together and they’d go over all these ideas, just to brainstorm all. First of all, he taped all of his attendees at his seminars. These were $5,000 seminars. They were done all the way from 1992 through 1995. He did about eleven sessions of them and they’re really, really popular. He actually just did a new one just about four months ago, because so many people wanted him to bring back these Mastermind seminars. I have them fairly inexpensive. I’ve got this seminar up on my site for around four hundred, but I’d be willing to sell you a set of the mastermind tapes, it’s twenty-four audiotapes and there’s a couple preliminary tapes that come with it. I can throw in some written reports of some of these concepts for about $300 plus whatever the shipping costs.

Eric: Yeah.

Michael: When you’re in your car, do you have drive time and a cassette player?

Eric: I have plenty of that.

Michael: So when you’re out there making your appointments, you can get yourself a master’s degree in marketing.

Eric: Sounds good.

Michael: No, really, you can. So as you hear these ideas, light bulbs are going to go on in your head. You have a little pad of paper and you write these ideas down and implement them. It isn’t hard. The hard thing is just implementing them.

Eric: It’s just the process of getting starting at it.

Michael: Exactly. I’d recommend that.

Eric: Yes that would be fantastic.

Michael: I’ll set you up. Do you want to invest $300 plus $7 for shipping? I don’t want to say load you up, where you feel like you have to go through all this stuff. I’ll give you plenty of audio stuff to listen to that will arm you with strategies. You could blow doors off your competition.

Eric: I’d love to know the details. Like you said, the joint venture strategy is very interesting.

Michael: And then I’ve got more on my website, have you seen any of my audio recordings?

Eric: Yes, I’ve seen a bunch of those.

Michael: I have some great ones on joint venture, from people that are a lot sharper than I am. They’re there for you to listen to free.

Eric: Okay.

Michael: And did you order my CD-ROM?

Eric: Yes, I do have your CD. The CD is fantastic.

Michael: Oh, thank you.

Eric: It’s great, I’d say, now that I have it, you should be charging for it.

Michael: I know, I know. I should, and I will be. On the website, I have a ton of stuff that’s not on that CD and I’m putting up stuff daily, I just picked up the rights to an incredible marketing seminar called the Direct Mail Boot Camp and you got some of the best direct mail and direct marketing people in the world. It’s from the early ‘90s but it’s timeless.

Eric: Oh, wow.

Michael: Have you heard of John Carlton?

Eric: Yes.

Michael: The copyrighter? I’ve got it! I’ll have up there later today and for part of the recording, he was at that seminar. I have Dan Kennedy. I have Ted Niklaus. All these guys you can learn from. Gary Halbert….and that’s there for you, free. But I don’t have any recordings of Jay Abraham up there.

Eric: That’s okay.

Michael: But I can certainly sell you some.

Eric: Well, let me take a look at your website one more time and take a look at some of those other ones, I definitely want to do what you’re talking about with that Mastermind Program and having you set me up for some of that stuff. Are you going to be around tomorrow?

Michael: I’ll be here. You can always email me, call me, and leave me a message. If I’m not here, I’ll call you back.

Eric: I’ll probably do both. I’m going to look tonight on the web, when I get back. And then I’ll probably email you - but keep me in mind in terms of your offer with the $300 package.

Michael: Just remind me.

Eric: I will. I’ll probably send you an email. Do you have an online order system on your site?

Michael: No, call me. You call me and let me know what you want and we’ll go over it and you’ll fax me a credit card number and where I’m shipping it to or you can do it thorough PayPal. Have you ever done PayPal?

Eric: Sure.

Michael: Okay.

Eric: Okay.

Michael: All rightty.

Eric: Well, that sounds great. I sure appreciate your time.

Thank you again for listening; this is Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com . If you want to get in touch with any of the people in the interviews, please email me .