Make a Date for Your Database

By Coach Cary Bayer

I've met countless alternative healers whose office files belong more in the 20th century than in the 21st. I'm not suggesting that therapists should have paperless offices. I am suggesting, however, that electronic data be incorporated, as well.

Paper files for each session are perfectly appropriate, and need no changing. But as a business coach for massage therapists and alternative healers traveling the country giving my CE workshop, "How to Build a $100,000 Healing Arts Business," I've seen and heard about far too many intake forms that fail to ask for email addresses. How can you communicate with a client by email if you don't know his address? The answer, of course, is that you can't. And that's a huge oversight. I've also seen far too many therapists who treat the computer itself as an enemy. (I'll save that topic for a future column.)

Go through your files, and if you don't have a client's email address, simply pick up the telephone--another invention that made people uncomfortable in the 19th century when it was brought into the world--and ask for it. Go through your intake form, and if you're not asking for an email address, correct the oversight.

Once you've collected email addresses from clients, it's time to build a database. That's simply a slightly high tech way of saying a mailing list. Except that the mailing list I'm talking about is electronic. I think the days of alternative healers mailing out paper will soon go the way of the Edsel and Betamax.

Your computer likely has some kind of database software. If you don't know how to find it and/or are reluctant to learn it, find a friend, a client, a colleague, or a teenager to do it for you. If you can't afford to actually pay them for it, consider a trade.

What you're building towards, of course, is a newsletter of your very own. The ability to stay on the top of your clients' minds by sending them useful information via email--and that's very 21st Century. (And that's a subject for a future column.)

For more information visit www.CaryBayer.com.