How to Significantly Grow Your Legal Practice in 2015

Most business-savvy legal professionals I know spend a significant portion of their time and revenue on advertising and marketing activities. I've found that this is particularly true for those of you in areas like personal injury, insolvency and employment law. As you are undoubtedly aware, practices can spend tens of thousands of dollars on TV advertisements, billboards and print advertising.

On top of all the effort you are expending on managing your offline advertisements, you need to build and maintain an online presence too.  Despite the plethora of information available both online and off, Canadians still find it challenging to select the right legal provider.

When prospective clients start looking for a lawyer online, it is often because something has happened that requires immediate attention and very specific expertise. They may need a personal injury lawyer, someone who practices family law and has expertise in adoptions, or perhaps they need legal assistance with a real estate transaction. Someone who is looking to get out of a criminal offense needs to know if the lawyer they select specializes in theft, insider trading, drug trafficking or murder cases. It is critical that your prospective clients find you online, and understand why they should select your services.

That's where we come in. Introducing Kabuk for Legal Professionals, the best way to connect with new clients and grow your practice.

How does it work?  Prospective clients go to Kabuk to search and find local law practitioners by area of practice, review their profiles, read testimonials from previous clients, and then (if bookings are enabled) book an appointment directly on the site. Once the client has visited your legal practice they are prompted by Kabuk to leave a review of their own, helping future clients make informed decisions. You can restrict testimonials to those who have booked an appointment on Kabuk, creating an additional layer of credibility - and reputation protection - for your practice.

We are excited to announce that, as of today, we are now accepting beta users. You can sign up HERE to be notified of updates, future developments and get a three-month free trial when we go live.

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MDs: e-Book with Kabuk!

Doctors - just a reminder that registration for Wave 2 of Canada Health Infoway's eBooking initiative closes December 15th!

E-booking is one of Canada Health Infoway’s key initiatives right now. Licensed physicians and nurse practitioners who implement an e-booking solution, like Kabuk, by December 15th are eligible to receive up to $2,000 through the Canada Health Infoway e-Booking initiative (a further per-clinician amount of $750 may be reimbursed for additional clinicians at the practice). You can find out more information about Canada Health Infoway’s e-Booking initiative here.

Did you know that 90% of Canadians surveyed by Canada Health Infoway said that they would like to book appointments online. E-Booking is not only good for patients its good news for clinics too. Canada Health Infoway found that clinics implementing eBooking solutions reported fewer no-shows, increased staff satisfaction and an 80% decrease in the time required to set up a single appointment.

You can get set up on Kabuk in just minutes here. We're a very affordable way to give your patients (and yourselves) the gift of e-Booking. Kabuk is available for a flat cost of $50/practitioner/month with discounts for larger clinics. We know it takes time to transition to any new technology so we are currently offering a THREE MONTH FREE TRIAL.

What are you waiting for? Get yourself online right now!

Have questions or need help getting set up? Feel free to contact me directly at asha@kabukit.com.

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Finding Strength in Differences

In a start-up, there is a 0% chance that you will always agree or get along with your co-founders (no matter how awesome indeed your co-founders are!). That's not necessarily a bad thing.

When this happens, what do you do? While this is hardly a start-up specific problem, I think that when you are arguing over your "baby", things just have the potential to get that much more "heated". After all, unlike employees in a firm, you and your co-founders are all extremely invested in every marketing decision, strategic move and technical choice that you make.

People say that picking your co-founders and defining roles can help circumvent some of these issues. While, I agree that selecting your co-founders is a crucially important decision, I sincerely doubt that it cuts back on the arguments... the good ones that is. A certain amount of heated debate can be very healthy. After all, you didn't select co-founders that would blindly agree with you all the time. In my opinion, if you don't argue you probably don't care that much to begin with. Adding new view points to a discussion can help you discover whole new strategies. What's important is the ability to listen and take-in other people's thoughts and the potential to change your mind when warranted.

At Kabuk, we tend to have a few spectacular fights every few months or so. We yell, talk loudly over each other and vigorously defend our own views. Can these incidents be stressful and emotional? Yes, but I think we are better off for them. These "incidents" typically blow over in a day. We fight things out, get everything on the table, and miraculously come-up with some middle ground (not right away of course... sometimes we need some downtime in between to let things sink in). Luckily, the three of us handle arguments in a fairly similar way. That is, we can get really angry, but we don't take anything personally and we don't hold grudges (and that's a very good thing).

Sadly, my arguments against us all taking a sparring class for team-building have so far been ignored.

Is it ok to get mad at your co-workers and think that they are a bit (or a lot crazy)? Perfectly normal! The way that we are set up at Kabuk, two of us are extremely technically/functionally oriented, and the third design/user-experience obsessed. Do we sometimes want to strangle him when he is pushing all this pedantic formatting, and user messaging talk in the middle of a big release when - to be completely honest - all we are really concerned about is fixing functional issues? No comment. Does his input make Kabuk a better product for users? 100% - having a less technical co-founder helps us uncover usability issues that wouldn't occur to us in a million years. Striking the right balance between form and functionality is a big deal!

Every start-up handles these issues differently. What do YOU do when your co-founders and you disagree? How do you "fight" or not?

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All About the Clinic!

Team Kabuk is extremely pleased to introduce long awaited support for clinics! 

So what's new?

Clinic Creation: Clinic owners can now create a clinic and easily add practitioners. More key functionality for clinics will be heading your way very soon, including the ability to assign administrators to oversee practitioner schedules.

Up next? Some exciting new resources, admin functionality, testimonials, and the ability to claim your profile!

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The Big Bad Business Plan

The problem with business plans, in the most traditional sense of the term, is that they are static;  A window into, or snapshot of, your business at a very specific moment in time. You write one, or many - everyone seems to have their own required standard template - and then they just sit there and stagnate.

As a start-up, your business is changing exponentially every day. New obstacles and data have a way of making themselves known constantly and your strategy needs to shift to keep up. Unless you are updating your business plan constantly - and I do mean constantly- your business plan is never going to reflect the up-to-date state of the market or your business. Who really has time for that? If you have the resources for this great! As a start-up we certainly don't.

Writing a business plan can be very time consuming. Some of these monsters can get upwards of 100 pages. A tedious, repetitive document (and from the ones I've read often badly written). I find myself wondering if anyone (other than me) actually reads these in their entirety. If you are a VC or accelerator reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Unfortunately, many start-ups seem to be using the argument against the business plan as a way of avoiding the labour intensive stage of getting to know the market inside and out. This is not at all the argument that I am making. I think that proper market research is an imperative step for any company, start-up or not. Without doing a SWOT analysis, how can you properly position yourself to compete with incumbents and create barriers to entry for newcomers? How will you be able to recognize market events that are negative or positive game changers for your industry. What about TAM? Many entrepreneurs shy away from talking money especially in a social innovation start-up like ours where the passion to change the world is thought to be enough. Without revenues down the road, and knowing the size of your market, how will you pay your employees and be able to enact any change at all?

A more dynamic way of doing things is necessary. I am definitely in favour of weekly progress meetings. Everyone sits around and summarizes some of the changes or new expressions of interest that they have seen in their area, what that means for the company and we brainstorm, if needed, some of the things we need to do to keep on top of things. Is any of this reflected in our business plan? No.

Do we have a business plan? Absolutely. We wrote our first business plan when applying for a grant. The particular organization that we were 'writing' our plan for had a standard template. In truth, it drove me crazy. As a veteran of the sell-side, I am no slouch when it comes to writing readable, business documents. I'm also highly adverse to repeating any piece of information and well aware that it is the rare individual who reads beyond the first page of any report. Once all was said and done, our "business plan" took weeks to get into the right format and was a painful, Quasimodo-like document. I would be reticent to share this document with anyone that I didn't wish painful torture upon.

Am I anti-business plan? Not at all. I'm sure I'll be asked to write many more business plans in the future (hopefully in a more efficient template or one of my own choosing).

In my opinion, a well written two page executive summary, demonstrating that you know your market and are willing to talk about relevant areas in greater detail would be a far more effective endeavor.

What do you think about business plans? Good, bad, indifferent?

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The Trouble With the Cross-Training Hygienist

I recently became aware of the trend towards cross-training in dental offices. I immediately called my friend,
a dental hygienist to see if "cross-training" in the world of dentistry was a real, or common, phenomena. I was somewhat unsettled to learn that it was.

It was time to do some research.

So - what exactly is cross-training anyhow? Cross-training is the practice of training an employee who has been hired for one role to do tasks associated with another. This has historically been used to increase engagement as employees learn new skills and gain additional experience and improve workplace efficiency.

In recent years, it seems that dental hygienists are being asked to step into a number of different shoes, including the role of a dental assistant and the front desk staff. Those who aren't agreeable to filling in when times are busy can risk being branded not team players.

Why doesn't this work? There are a number of reasons. Cross- training typically works best when employees get the opportunity to learn new skills that help career growth. Cross-training really shouldn't be used as a way to eliminate job positions, or avoid bringing on new staff to meet demands.

A dental office staff all have well defined technical skills. As The Myth of Cross-Training accurately notes, cross-training in a dental office devalues everyone's roles and training. Everyone has different skills. As the co-founder of a start-up, I'm very familiar with needing to fill a number of roles both technical and not. That front office desk team has honed their customer service skills and is familiar and comfortable with the software you use to book appointments and bill patients. A dental office assistant is more comfortable sterilizing equipment. Sometime cross-training can actually end up costing you more in terms of efficiency, staff engagement, and ultimately customer satisfaction - a value that's terribly hard to quantify - than you save.

But what is one to do in a small practice where every dollar counts? It's expensive to run your own practice and its not always feasible to bring on new staff. Not to worry - it's situations like this for which we created Kabuk. Kabuk let's you focus on your customers and helps increase office efficiencies. We are here to give your front office desk a break, reducing the amount of time they need to be on the phone scheduling appointments, and letting them focus on other tasks like increasing customer satisfaction. Empowering clients to schedule and manage their appointments online can significantly increase the efficiency of your office. As a bonus, our helpful automated appointment reminders - proven to reduce no-shows- mean that your office staff has one less task to worry about.

Its time to bring booking online for your practice! Sign up on Kabuk for your free trial today.

Not ready to think about online bookings? We are currently offering free profile listings on our platform. Its just like LinkedIn for healthcare pros and a great way to increase your online presence and get found by more patients today.

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Funding Fumbles and Chatter from a Woman Living the Tech Start-up Life

I can't tell you how many articles I've read espousing the need to fund more women led companies, or
provide more mentorship opportunities.

Countless.

The truth? Getting funding for a start-up is hard no matter who you are. Is it harder for a woman? Maybe.... Probably. I'm certainly not trying to downplay the stats on men vs. women-led companies getting VC funding.  In truth, the bigger problem for us was experience (i.e. previous successful exits) and connections. Unfortunately, the whole thing is somewhat of a vicious circle. (But please, whoever you are with funds pen-marked for female-led companies, do give me a shout because it certainly seems like a funding desert from my seat at the table). 

Does that mean that start-ups without previous experience or a tie-in to someone entrenched in the start-up sphere can't get funding? No. We've all read success stories of a viral product from complete unknowns.

Is it a lot harder? Absolutely.

As you know, things began rather slowly at Kabuk. After all, we were all working full time jobs and doing whatever we could in our spare time. Funding wasn't even a question at that point. Any accelerator, incubator or VC we approached said we were too early stage. At the beginning, we were 100% self-funded and we did what we could. We had a great idea, but execution took time as we had to weigh every penny (should I be saying nickle now?) spent. A company with prior start-up experience or personal capital can almost, shall we say, bypass this teething stage. They have the resources to get things done quickly and try multiple approaches. They have the connections and clout to forgo the "You're a pre-revenue start-up. Come back to me after you start generating revenue" talk.

Does it bother me when I read in the news that those same companies who turned us away are now funding earlier stage companies with very similar concepts but co-founders with proven start-up success? 100%, but it doesn't change where we are today and how we got here. Would we have gotten better reception if I were a man? Who can really say? Its certainly possible that a more aggressive personality and inclusion in the boy's club could have opened more doors. What I really believe is that lack of start-up experience and cred was more of a factor.

What's the solution to all of this? If I was sitting on the venture capital side of the table, I would undoubtedly rather risk my capital on a known commodity too. Is that the best way to build and nurture a culture of innovation? Not really.

We were nearly at launch, having self-funded Kabuk's development for at least a year, when we raised our friends and family round. I will be forever grateful to all of our wonderful investors who believed in us and gave us the capital we needed to go it full time and make us a "real company". Perhaps having such a difficult journey to get here makes us appreciate every new feature, every new release even more.

Anyone involved in a start-up will know that funding is a stressful, soul-crushing process. I have to say, however, that the start-up culture among Canadian companies is fantastic. Companies and associations in Canada always seem ready to have an intro conversation regarding synergies or take a look at our demo. I think Canada is one of the best places to be involved in a start-up and I wouldn't trade places for the world. Still, there is much that could be done in terms of increasing access to and availability of funding.

I don't have all the answers and, yes, talk is cheap. What are some of the ways you can think of to build a better culture of innovation in Canada? What would you like to see?

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