Since 1981, BusinessWorks.US

has been coaching businesses

of every size and description

to success . . . and beyond. 

We are NOT a collection of big-talk, big-price consultants who tell you what you already know.

We are invested in helping Clients to “Grow Now.” We help you ignite and pursue the best of your dreams, and interests. We open doors.

You get a proven track-record Business Growth Coach who invests hands-on experience, creative  support, energy (and even part of the project fee) into the success of your business.

From services to products, manufacturing to online, retail to professional practices, our Clients get decades of successful business-building experience and creative business development expertise.

Our credits include regional and national awards, and extensive experience with:  the SBA, chambers of commerce, universities and community colleges, private healthcare practices, and public service providers, national healthcare teams and committees . . . and with opening new market opportunities . . . for hundreds of successful Clients.

We have achieved record sales results for every size and type of business and industry — from entrepreneurial “Startups” and “Family Businesses” to “Fortune 500” companies, to public service and nonprofit enterprises.

Clients get sales and impression results from our unique creative content, strategies and applications for branding, marketing, advertising, PR, CRM, sales and management skill applications to virtually every form of broadcast/ online/video/print and promotional media.

When appropriate, we also deliver custom-designed, Client-Staff and Management Team training strategies and support programs

We energize and ignite client businesses and projects. We generate new revenue streams.

At our clients’ beck and call, we work remotely/virtually and on-site as required.

If you would like to know more . . . no fees, no “pushy hard sell,” no strings attached . . . give me a call:

HAL ALPIAR, President/CEO

BusinessWorks.US

1.931.854.0474

(M-S; 9AM-6PM; CST)

GROW YOUR BUSINESS OR

PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

N O W !

[And… keep your money, name, age, 

interests, address, email, SS, phone 

number, and dog’s name to yourself!]

Here’s a FREE no-strings weekly dose of success. Hear host Hal Alpiar’s proven business and practice development input based on 49+ years (and still ongoing) hands-on experience as a founder/partner/owner/manager/coach/ consultant, national book award author and management trainer of more than 50,000.

Hal’s FREE 23-minute podcasts are available 24/7 (via mobile phone). You can “listen in” on any 23-minute show (night-or-day) you choose (before, during, or after work… even while driving), and repeat portions (or entire broadcasts) at your leisure.

These podcasts are 100% about sharing problem/ success experience to help small businesses and professional practices grow NOW! No time limits. No need to identify yourself. Hal doesn’t chase you down.

You simply listen to any broadcast anytime that’s convenient. If you seek follow-up input to match your specific needs, simply email Hal@Businessworks.US (put “941” in subject line) or call 1.931.854.0474 (NO sales calls accepted) and set up a personal no-charge talk time.

YOU GET:

• Examples of what others have learned the hard way so you can avoid wasting time, money and effort.

• Stimulating, practical “how-to” ideas, input, advice, cautions, and encouragement, with a special emphasis on Partnerships and Family Business Development and ways to raise and nurture Family Support.

• The latest and best approaches to Branding, Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations, Sales, Hiring, Firing, Risk-Taking, Management Methods and Employee Training.

• New perspectives on small business Time and Money investments, Building New Revenue Streams, Startups, Revitalizations, Goal-Setting, your Mission and Vision.

• Ways to improve Staff and Customer Relations, Communications Skills, Stress and Time Management, Leadership/Teamwork Development Skills, and More.

• Diverse approaches to success from Hal Alpiar and his guests, who share their firsthand failure and success experiences with practically every type of business and professional practice imaginable.

The Guests are people who have single-handedly or teamed up to grow Family Businesses, Medical Practices, Retail, Service and manufacturing  entities, Nonprofit and Creative Projects.

Learn why on-the-job training often beats classroom theories (and this coming from your host who was twice honored as “Professor-of-the-Year” once at a major university and once at a small community college!)

GO NOW TO

 www.NewsTalk941.com/Podcasts 

(Scroll down 14 topic boxes to “BUSINESSWORKS”

Click on any Subject! (Many more behind the most

recent; scroll down thin gray righthand border)

1 pm (CT), Every Sunday, Every Week . . .

BUSINESSWORKS

Broadcast Podcast Blast Off!

BUSINESSWORKS begins a year of free, weekly, stimulating  “business-expansion-how-to” input offerings for business owners, managers and operators, and for  professional practice owners and managers, and entrepreneurs.

The information source?

Two unique, and vastly different business leaders with hugely successful backgrounds:

HAL ALPIAR & JOHNNY STITES

Hal and Johnny are a proven, experienced, unlikely pair of highly active 70-something business success MBA mentor/coaches.

They decided they can have greater impact on business and professional practice growth and development by working as a team.

And they agree that weekly broadcasting and podcasting best allows them the flexibility to help others get things done.

Visit weekly with Hal and Johnny on News Talk 94.1 Middle Tennessee Radio AND, from anywhere else . . .  

CLICK HERE:  newstalk941.com 

FOR PODCAST

Or go to www.newstalk941.com . . . ANY time and Click on “Podcast Center” tab at top then scroll down to BUSINESSWORKS and (with volume on) click the little white circle!

“See You Sundays 1 pm on 94.1 Radio Cookeville, TN or ANYtime via podcast!”

BusinessWORKS

GROWING BUSINESS & PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES NOW

Medical Practice & Other

Healthcare Leaders…

R-E-J-O-I-C-E !!

Finally, a simple, straightforward path to:

• Save huge amounts of business expense

• Have happier staff and partners invested in teamwork and in getting the most out of every hour, every day

• Increase confidence and communicate better with patients, patient families and the communities you serve

• Manage your own stress with easy unnoticeable steps and be able to teach those around you in 10 minutes!

• Increase patient volume with (little-known in the health-care world) practice-building steps that are FREE!

. . . AND MUCH MORE in the new $19.95 book:

HEALTHCAREPRENEURS — the best of proven success in medical practice and healthcare business development guidance, including the latest 2018 techniques and basic step-by-step procedures to save time and aggravation.

Reader comments include:

• …“Reading this book is like having your own personal coach whispering to you from over you shoulder.”

• … “It’s like getting a lifetime of direct experience peppered throughout with subtle humor.”

• … “Loaded with easy-to-identify-with examples… stories I’ve heard but never before considered the solutions.”

• … “It’s easily worth a year+ of private-tutor-style healthcare business training that gets results!”

Healthcare business development author/coach/radio host Hal Alpiar is currently scheduling his third Workshop/Speaking/Book-Signing Tour (Tour #1 was for his 5-Star DOCTOR BUSINESS; #2, his National Healthcare Book Award-Winning DOCTOR SHOPPING)

Hal is AVAILABLE NOW AT NO FEE.

You choose from any of the 35 Chapter topics! 

He conducts these sessions in exchange for booksale opportunities and for covering (reasonable/ documented/pre-authorized) expenses only. Special arrangements for regional scheduling.

RESPOND TODAY! Schedule YOUR medical/Healthcare group NOW: Currently planning dates for independent practices, healthcare associations/organizations/local chapters, in Atlanta, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia,  DC, Delaware, Philadelphia, and the NJ Shore. 

hal@Businessworks.US

or prompt-reply phone message: 1.931.854.0474  

Books, billboards, news

releases, website content,

magazines and magazine

articles, posters and

displays, newspaper

columns, surveys, signs,

 postcards, brochures, 

commercials, promotional

 emails, direct mail, photo

captions, jingles, branding

themelines, package labels,

training curricula, promo

literature and exhibit

 materials, webinars, sales

presentations, seminars 

lyrics, booklets, speeches,

 ebooks, blog posts, scripts

  business plans, marketing 

 strategies, love letters,  

manuals, greeting cards,

and matchbook covers

Ever write any of these yourself? How’d it come out? Did you get the results you wanted? What happened? Are you a skilled writer? An experienced wordsmith? Probably not. If you’re reading posts on this blog site, it’s because you’re an entrepreneur, a small business or professional practice owner, manager, or principal, a student, or a leader.

If you fit any of those kinds of career descriptions, odds are that you are marketing a product, service, or idea (or some combination) and the daily challenges of keeping your business or organization moving forward leaves little room for you to indulge in fantasy of seeing yourself as a talented writer. And you’re smart enough to know when to get help.

One telling characteristic of successful entrepreneurs, in fact, is that they know how to pull their ideas forward while leaving necessary professional services up to professionals they engage — CPA, attorney, management consultant, and more often than not: creative services, especially writers and designers.

Entrepreneurs, after all, are the catalysts of business and the economy. They are agents of change. They serve as mirrors of society wants and needs. They alone are responsible for new job growth (not corporations, and certainly not government). As a result, entrepreneurs are also the most sensitive of business people, and the quickest to recruit outside expertise when they see the need.

Small business owners are far more in touch with reality than their big business counterparts who are obsessed with analyzing what message content and structure communicates best, and sells.

They recognize that one dot or small sweep of a design line, or one word can make the difference between sale and no sale. (And remember, with online content: WORDS are still King!)

Entrepreneurs respect and appreciate the value of expertise.

So the list above is not just a teaser or composite of writing applications. It is a list of real business-related (yes, even love letters!) writing needs that most entrepreneurs are confronted with at one time or another. It is also a list of writing applications that anyone you hire to write for you should have experience with, at least most of them.

I know. I’ve written all of the above many times over. And I can tell you that a marketing writer who hasn’t written a book doesn’t know how to tell a story, and stories sell. A website content writer who hasn’t written radio and TV commercials has no sense of writing concise, punchy stuff that’s short, sweet, and memorable . . . and “short, sweet, and memorable” sells!

Someone who’s never written a billboard hasn’t even a clue about how to write branding lines because the discipline is the same:  Aim for 7 words or less and tell a story in those 7 words or less that has a beginning, middle, and ending . . . and is persuasive. Ah, then comes the opposite: Direct mail. In direct mail, the more you tell, the more you sell — that means, literally, a blanket of billboards.

Writing emphasis must always be “you” focused (not “we”). It must attract attention, create interest, stimulate desire, bring about action, and deliver satisfaction. It MUST ALWAYS answer the question: “What’s in it for ME?” All writing –even an instruction manual– represents an opportunity to make a sale and/or create a favorable impression.

The writing you have now?

Does it work as hard as you do?

# # #

Hal@Businessworks.US  931.854.0474

Open Minds Open Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Your Role In History As An Entrepreneur

Side note: In editing Peggy’s book chapters for blog adaptation, I’ve found her style to be surprisingly (for an economist leadership expert, itself, to me, an oxymoron) engaging. Today’s topic, however, encompasses the object of my business teething and career so I feel compelled to spotlight a bit of the professionalism of marketing. Factoids (such as the components of marketing and the distinction between creating and stimulating desire, for example) are seldom addressed or positive-ized in economic treatises or website meanderings. Thank you. Enjoy the journey! Hal

Imagine Marketing

One of the great advances of the 20th Century was the development of the field of marketing. As industrialists were able to mass produce clothing, cars, homes and candy bars, they sought a method or methods to promote those things to a public who may not have known that they needed or wanted them.

Psychology and sociology combined with imperatives to maximize business profitability and the science of markets was born. Where markets existed, they were maximized. Where markets did not exist, they were created. Yet marketing is not a creator of society wants and needs. It is simply a reflection of society–a mirror of what already exists.

You know you need a home but you probably didn’t know you need or want a certain type or brand of kitchen appliance or configuration of closets until marketers educated you about the differences in price, performance, design, function, impressions, and longevity.

You know you need a car to get to work, but marketers let you know which models and styles were available so you could choose those that would best serve your practical functional and budget needs as well as those that best meet the conscious or unconscious emotional wants you most closely identify with (e.g., power, status, sex appeal, safety/service focus, family/parental focus, environmental/energy focus, etc.).

Marketing attaches meaning to the products and services we consume. Think of marketing as a big umbrella over a broad spectrum of marketing functions, which include sales, advertising, branding, pricing, packaging, promotion, merchandising, public relations (news releases, events, media communications), and more. Marketing also raises life necessities to luxury levels for a price.

Marketing does not create desire because humans already possess desire. Marketers stimulate desires that already exist. Marketing sometimes prompts us to purchase or consider purchasing products and services we didn’t know we needed or wanted until subliminal interests are created for them, and our desires are stimulated.

By the mid-20th Century, mass production meant that businesses could create enough products to satisfy the desires of mass markets. Mass communication through a mix of limited channels (using television, radio, magazines, direct mail, and outdoor and transit billboards) standardized desire for mass produced products.

The Internet changed the whole world of marketing. The Internet is a personal communication device. What comes through my computer is as different as what comes through yours as we are. No two computers deliver the same content because the content is a reflection of the fingerprint of the user. One user accesses religious content, another pornography, and yet a third spends most of her or his time surfing the net for the best price on handbags, shoes, or on hunting and fishing equipment and gear.

How do you market to EACH individual on his or her personal communication device?

Like finance, we’re rewriting the discipline of marketing while we’re practicing business in the New Economy.

As an Internet entrepreneur, you find your markets by searching for people who are interested in buying what you are selling. You contact them through social media using list serves, groups, email blasts and subscriptions, blogs and connectivity/referral platforms . . . following where each thread leads. When you pull on a thread, it will lead to a tapestry of related interest groups. As a business person, the end of each thread is a potential customer.

The hardest job of Internet Joe is to refine his product or service to meet the needs of a specifically defined target market within the potential of a global customer base. Expect that it could take time to refine your approach. You will go through several iterations before you hit on exactly what specific flavor of what you offer appeals to which specific individuals.

In the New Economy, your customers are in New Zealand and Newfoundland. Get to your keyboard and go find them.

# # #

C’mon back tomorrow 10/2 for Day 19 —

It’s all about SALES, SALES, SALES, and more SALES.

# # #

S P E C I A L    A N N O U N C E M E N T

Sign up NOW for NOVEMBER 29th (Sunday Night after Thanksgiving)

LIMITED SEATING COACHING WEBINAR:

“ENTREPRENEURS ARE AGENTS OF CHANGE . . . Accelerating Your Business”

Get fresh, informed, proven insights geared specifically to your business market, your biggest problems, your biggest opportunities.

With Hal and Peggy’s wealth of business coaching experience, you’ll learn how YOU match up with what successful entrepreneurs are thinking and doing RIGHT NOW. Get ideas you never imagined. Gain the traction you need within 2 hours — not days or weeks or months. Simply call 931.854.0474 Central Time: 11AM to 4PM Monday-Friday for details, to explain your business pursuit focus and to reserve your seat! $99 total for 2 hours. Satisfaction Guaranteed.

———-

For more information on Peggy Salvatore’s book: 30 Days to the New Economy [© Peggy Salvatore 2015. All Rights Reserved.] click on ENTREPRENEUR NEWS or visit ow.ly/RysnP for the E-book

# # #

Hal@Businessworks.US      Peggy@Businessworks.US

Open Minds Open Doors

Thanks for your visit and make today a GREAT day for someone!

Healthcare Pros STILL

Flushing Money Down the Drain!

Thanks for your visit. We have recently relocated to Cookeville Tennessee (between Nashville and Knoxville), home of Tennessee Tech University. Return here often for new posts in this series for Doctorpreneurs©and Healthcare professionals.

Why not just open the window and throw your money out? Why bother spending it on meaningless, confused thinking about marketing? Why keep feeding the nonperformance of media, mobile apps, direct mail magazines and newsletters, social media and, oh yes, outdoor advertising? Can we look at this open-mindedly?

The business and sports worlds have fed your fires since childhood that you must be competitive at all costs in order to win… that’s 100% false for healthcare professionals! In fact, many healthcare pros have marketing success expectations as unrealistic as imagining that a heart attack can be treated with a BandAid®

REALITY: No one “buys” billboards with smiling doctor faces (or, even worse, the recent trend toward somber looks!). Most people are not so stupid as to think that hospital “magazines” and “newsletters” with feature (dressed-up PR) stories are interesting or meaningful enough to be worth reading. My guess is that –other than the few and far between genuine healthcare educational mailing pieces– most of these exorbitantly expensive items go straight to the recycle pail. All this nonsense came and went thirty years ago. [Interesting how America’s healthcare institutions are accelerating these feeble old-fashioned attempts at marketing. Is it some kind of knee-jerk attempt to cope with the Obamacare muddle?]

BOTTOM LINE: No one cares! The public simply doesn’t care how great hospitals, doctors, therapists (or any professionals for that matter) think they are! Healthcare consumers may have more (and more personal) issues on the line than other kinds of consumers, but they really and truly only care about the same thing that every consumer cares most about: What’s in it for me? Period.

So if you’ve read this far, perhaps it would be useful to explore and reassess your current “marketing” practices, and decide if your money could be better spent on strengthening patient, patient family, and referral network relations. If you’re looking for a role model institution, consider the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center… you’ll find no shallow representations of professional skills… “Treatment” is their specialty, and it applies to everyone who enters their doors. Oh, and guess what? The only expense is training and training maintenance time.

Marketing –if it’s done right– might sometimes succeed at building brand loyalty for some products and services in some markets and marketplaces. But when the two end-results people seek most from healthcare professionals are 1) Reassurance and 2) Trust, it’s not likely either will ever be achieved with empty images or promises.

Doctorpreneurs© Copyright Hal Alpiar, 1994. All rights reserved.

BandAid® is a Registered Trademark of the Johnson & Johnson Company

 # # #

“Got here safe & sound, Y’all!”

AND STILL UNPACKING AND SETTING UP NEW OFFICES . . .

GUESS WHERE?????  Email your guess: Hal@Businessworks.US  (“New Office” in Subject Line) Winning guesses entered in drawing for a FREE first edition signed copy of HIGH TIDE fictionalized account of America’s biggest drug deal! See www.HighTideNow.com

Thank you for your visit.

If you’re new to this blog, please mark your calendar to return on April 16th for the beginning of Tax Return Recovery, and to help kickoff an exciting new series of posts you won’t find anywhere else!

If you’ve been visiting here regularly since the birth of my blog in April, 2008 (and now closing in on 1500 posts), thank you even extra!

You, especially, will want to return April 16th to see what’s in store for innovative, spirited business and healthcare professionals. You’ll get  proven new ways of thinking to boost your sales and make the most of your leadership skills — for profit and nonprofit businesses and professions alike. You’ll get coaching that works in the office and meeting room, on the phone and on paper, on the smartphone and the computer. You will get specific how-tos for building and enhancing your leadership posture in your industry, your marketplace, and your community.

When you return here April 16th, you will get the beginning of an input stream that no one else dares to share . . . on ways to feel better about your SELF (no product or service sales pitches, no lectures, no gimmicks). You’ll get ways to be encouraged, ways to make a difference with your career and family pursuits, ways to rise above the clutter.

You’ll get solid substance based on more years of experience than you probably are old. Not just passive observations, you’ll get frontline/hands-on experience with over 2,000 business consulting and return engagements AND with more than 20,000 students and management training participants. PLUS –as incredible as it’s always been–it will be free on this blog. Try it. You’ll like it. Send your friends.

In the meantime, to better serve our Entrepreneurial Clients (Including Business Startups, SalesPropreneurs©, Doctorpreneurs© and Corporate Entrepreneurs©), BUSINESSWORKS.US and TheWriterWorks.com, LLC will be in the process of relocating to another State. You’ll get the details as soon as we’re settled. In the meantime, Happy Spring!

See you the day after taxes!!!

 # # #

 Healthcare is NOT About

Billboards of Smiling Doctors

 . . . So STOP the nonsense and STOP wasting money!

STOP your healthcare marketing long enough to seriously

ask yourself if your public messages really make sense.

Healthcare is and has always been all about TRUST. Nothing more. Nothing less. Doctors and medical groups and hospitals and therapists and chiropractors and dentists and veterinarians who run smiling (or threatening) branding messages on billboards (or in print, online, and broadcast media) are wasting time and money!

Healthcare professionals are wasting their money. 

But they are wasting our time.

Huh? Why? Because NOBODY CARES!

The public today is not the public of yesterday – literally! We are no longer just Internet-savvy. We are Internet-addicted, Internet-crazed, and Internet-bamboozled. We are being micro-chipped to death!

• Healthcare DOWNside: Rampant Google-dependency and new strains of attention deficit disorder.
• Healthcare UPside: We can now know more about our ailments, disorders, symptoms, diagnostic and treatment procedures than ever before. And we can know it in a heartbeat.

Much of the problem lies with healthcare professionals who think they can knock out effective branding programs because they watch TV (or surf the Net, or read blogs, newspapers and magazines) and that makes them experts! But truly effective and memorable branding programs require special skill sets too . . . and those seldom parallel professional healthcare training. Creating marketing that works is not a hobby.

Oh, and if you are a healthcare marketing person, agency, group, or consultant: Before you jump up and down and run off copies of this post to pass around to support your credibility, STOP!

You may well be the other part of the problem!

• Are you selling healthcare professionals on printing and mailing expensive magazines that no one reads or cares about?
• Are you trying to package healthcare services and market them like hot dogs, popcorn, and underwear?
• Are you pushing email blast campaigns and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn as ways to market healthcare?
• Are you saying: “We’ve got your back, Doc! We’ll make you famous! Patients will be standing in line, breaking down your door?

For a fraction of the money healthcare professionals are now spending on marketing, the right approach to building volume and referrals and growing patient and patient family loyalty needs to be considered. The right approach can reap two to ten times as much success! It starts with a diagnostic workup to generate a healthcare practice history. It ends with treating the practice appropriately to achieve the most positive prognosis imaginable.

It’s based on ways to build and increase trust levels, decrease and make the most of stress levels, enhance every level of communications, and make the best -most humanly possible- use of time each day with each patient, patient family, and referral source, as well as ensure proper EMR use and full reimbursement compliance.

It takes time and patience to get and keep patients — not fancy, ineffective and expensive marketing.

 # # #

“Huh? Now? But it’s the holidays!”

“Well, Merry Christmas to you! But

after quality family time, remember

1st quarter 2014 is just hours away.”

Why “NOW!”? Just click here: take a quick look at this to see what’s happening this very split second —as you read this— and you’ll realize that delaying this task is simply not in your best interest.

Getting others to refer you/your business is more than a survival tactic, it’s the key to 2014 success. No sales are more important right now than those to the friends, families, associates and online connections of your existing customers, clients, and patients. Because 2014 is bringing increased competitive activity to the surface. And it cannot be sidestepped.

The harder the times, the fiercer the battle! And the easiest, most economical path to increased sales and customer/ client/ patient repeat-sales-and-visits loyalty is a strengthened referral base. Economical? You decide. It costs nothing to delight those who purchase from you.

Cease and desist all marketing? No. But don’t expand it. Instead, consider shifting gears from reliance on expensive media, to fine-tuning attitudes and cultivating a much more pronounced reputation for integrity than you probably imagined being necessary. 

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Hal@Businessworks.US