HEROs 1st class

    Today I had my first HEROs class. HEROs stands for Helping Everyone Realize Opportunity. It is a course run by business coach Andy Belanger, and is also known as the Health of Business Business of Health course in the United States http://www.hbbhealth.net/. At some of the naturopathic colleges in the US it is a mandatory course, while here at CCNM it is an extra course. Well I am glad I took it, and will go over a little bit of what we do each day. The course involves 4 modules, the first 3 taking place on Monday or Tuesday nights (I'm going to Tuesdays since I have Physiology Monday nights), and then the last one on a weekend in the winter. The modules include Starting Smart/Leadership, Operations, Marketing, and Administration/Accounting.

   Andy has been teaching business to health professionals and working with naturopathic doctors specifically for 26 years now, and it seems like he has a very strong understanding of the field and of what it takes to be a successful naturopathic doctor --> on the entrepreneurship side. I say this because the majority of people who go to school to become NDs will likely have the skills and ability to be very successful and strong doctors, but the problem is that you also need to be an entrepreneur. It would be amazing if we could help people be healthy and that would be that, but the reality is that we need to be successful business people in order to that. If we are struggling financially to live keep our offices running, or even to survive in your personal life (pay your mortgage, buy groceries), then we wouldn't really be able to help a lot of patients. Also, marketing is such a key aspect of naturopathic medicine because so many people still don't know about it or understand the benefits they can get from it, so we can't really help people until they know we exist.

   So the first class today was on Starting Smart and Leadership. Andy provided a bit of an overview of the course, and talked to us a lot about what you need to do to hit the ground running. We talked about goal planning, business plans, how to properly "position" yourself in the market (how to determine where to set up an office and what kinds of things you should do to ensure that you have the correct services to provide for that area), and talked a lot about what successful and unsuccessful people have done. So I'm very excited to move through this course and work hard to learn from it, and use the lessons in my planning for the future so that I can be successful and help lots of people in the future. I'll continue to comment on the next sessions in the future (with the next one being next Tuesday).