I was delivering a seminar recently, and sitting
in the front row was a well-dressed IT professional looking very smart—apart
from the embroidery on his shirt—it said “Reactive Technology.”
I personally thought this was a terrible name
with a terrible message to send to your clients. It screams that you are going
to take a very simplistic approach, and when something goes wrong, you are
going to react. You should be telling clients how you will solve their problems
holistically—not react after they had a preventable problem.
There is a group of doctors in the United
States who I believe have got it absolutely right. They have based their entire
business model on holistic health care. Doctors are your classic reactive
business—who ever heard of going to the doctor when you are healthy? They are
challenging the accepted notion that a doctor should just sit back and wait for
a patient to get sick.
They charge an annual fee to be a patient of
the practice, and at the core is a “prevention and wellness” plan. This
includes a compulsory annual medical check-up to analyse your lifestyle,
exercise, nutrition, and family history. They perform vision, hearing, and
pulmonary tests with broad lab testing.
By detecting problems at the earliest stages,
treatment can be swift and is more likely to be successful. Taking an holistic
approach to all things in life can prevent little things from becoming big
things, and the statistics support this. Avoidable factors cause 38 percent of
all deaths, and 60 percent of adults do not exercise enough. Heart disease and
stroke are the first and third leading causes of death in the United States.
Staggeringly, patients seeing holistic-style doctors have hospital admission
rates 80 percent lower than the general population.
And this is not limited to one industry. In a
recent survey, businesses were asked what they most wanted from their
accountant. The number one response was…proactivity. So take an holistic,
proactive approach to the needs of your clients, and get ready for the phone to
ring hot.