Hi. It’s Diederik Gelderman here. Speaker, Trainer, Author of four published books, and Founder of Business Productivity Academy and Turbo Charge Your Practice. Welcome.

Looking forward to the Sydney event on 20th and 21st of February. If you haven’t signed up for this workshop yet, the tickets are going fast.

https://dgelderman.leadpages.net/ch2/

My thoughts on wellness plans.

To learn more about wellness plans in depth and to get some examples of wellness plans that you can implement in your practice immediately, plans that work come to the workshop.

There are plenty of wellness plans that don’t work. You will not get one of those. You will get one of those that do work.

Banfield, Vet West in Australia & Greencross in Australia have them. Those three practice wellness plan models are the best around that I can find at the moment.

When you come to the workshop event, I will actually give you some specific websites that will tell you exactly how and why these plans work, all the specific details and all that sort of stuff and the specific steps on them.

First; what wellness plans do really well is they minimise missed charges.

They are good in practices with high staff turnover. The new staff members come in and all these new staff have to do is learn about are the practice’s wellness plan.

It is also really good where you’ve got poor staff training methods.

Wellness plans become a focus for everything you do in the practice including talking to the clients.

They make care more affordable. And because it is paid on a monthly basis, more people take it up.

When you sell wellness plans, you are actually selling discounted services. In the Benfield model, the services at about 55%.

What percentage of clients would have booked those services at the normal price if you did not have a wellness plan?

We will talk about that in detail at the workshop event.

Do wellness plans promote the use of extra services?

I receive probably a phone call every 2 or 3 week from a practice who says, “Hey Diederik, can you help me out? I have a wellness plan in place and it is driving me nuts. I only got a wellness plan because my competitor up the road or up the street has one, and my clients said they wanted one from me or they’d go to the other practice. I did what they wanted me to do and that is driving me broke”.

So, a couple of thoughts here.

Don’t include high margin stuff in your wellness plan. Flouresceins, Shirmer tear tests, diff-quicks, gram stains, they are high margin things. Skin scrapings, sticky tape impression smears.

Statistically people will come in 2.3 days earlier.

Clients will come back more often.

With wellness plans your margins are cut dramatically. You get busier but your margins will go down. Mark-ups will go down. And also your net profit will go down. So, your actual dollar profit might go up, but your net profit will go down. So, more work to get less outcome.

Most people pay monthly so that levels out your cash flow.

I have got some stuff here about wellness plans from a group of practices that remain nameless. I looked at A, B, C, D and E clients.

• A clients, there was virtually no increase in use of practice services.
• B clients increased or improved their spend by 58%.
• The C clients by 88%.
• The D clients by 138%.
• The E clients, 160%.

Now, the roadblocks.

• Training the team.
• The team accepting wellness plans.
• The logistics of putting the monthly payments through.
• Now, in most wellness plans, the visit is free. The revisit is not. That causes, in a lot of practice, a lot of headache, a lot of miscommunication with clients.
• In a lot of cases there is confusion about wellness plans and paid insurance,
• You also need to educate clients about the difference between wellness and illness.
• What do you do if the patient dies? What happens to the money that the people had invested in the wellness plan?
• What about if they move out of town and you are a single site practice, you’ve not got another site that you can refer that client to in a new town? What do you do with the money?
• And then, what about in a situation where you’ve got a wellness plan and it is paid monthly and let’s assume it’s for a young dog, they are getting all their vaccinations, they are getting their spey or castration, they are getting their heartworm, they get their annual flea-tick pack. And then they move out of town. Or they stop paying.

Some thoughts about how and where wellness plans work best. Just have wellness plans for senior citizens, just for the senior pets.

In Sydney on 20th-21st of February 2015, we spend much, much, much longer going into real depth about wellness.

I will give you FOUR wellness plan models that are working in practice. You can take these wellness plans and implement them in your practice. All done for you.

There’s a lot of reasons to come along. Sign up for the workshop. It is only $349. Bring along a second team member. Remember when you go home and there are two of you there, you are much more likely to implement. I’d love to see you at the event.

Here’s the registration link https://dgelderman.leadpages.net/ch2/

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