“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
As is usual, Seth Godin is right on the money here.
Please read his post about lifetime value of customers:
I urge you to consider the lifetime value of your clients. This is especially true if you are in the services business. If your service fails to meet their expectations, or (more likely) you fail to meet their expectations, people can and will dump you.
What’s more, these people become a massive problem for you because someone who has been burned is much more likely to talk about their experience with your service.
You can’t survive as a sub-standard service for very long these days. The means by which people can share their poor experience with others are many. Friends, family, colleagues — all these people that could have potentially become referred clients are now lost to you.
Put yourself in the position of a customer. More often than not we are all spoiled for choice. Why then, would they choose something that doesn’t live up to their expectations? The answer is, they don’t. And if they are, you’re seriously at risk of losing that business once someone comes along and does what you’re doing properly.
Create and deliver value to your clients. If you want to be better than the rest, you need to discover ways to consistently deliver MORE value to as many people as you viably can (without your service degrading as a consequence of scaling).
Lifetime value is a very important consideration. Especially when you consider not only the revenue you will generate from people in a lifetime, but also recognise that you will need to continue to deliver value to this person - over a lifetime.
If your service is static, then I’m afraid your bank balance will stay that way too. Its a reflection of how well you’re servicing your clients.
Australia spends roughly 8.5% of GDP on healthcare each year. That, my friends, is a lot of money. In 2007, our GDP was $637 billion; 8.5% of that being a sweet $53 billion or so.
Then lets take a look at how much of that is spent on looking after people with preventable disease. The graph below plots the 10 leading causes of disease burden:
*DALY counts equivalent years of 'healthy' life lost due to poor health or disability and potential years of life lost due to premature death. Source: AIHW: Mathers et al 1999. The burden of disease and injury in Australia. AIHW Cat. No. PHE 17. Canberra: AIHW.
Looking at the list above, I’d say three things account for the disease in most cases:
“Oh, but its my genes…,” or “I eat perfectly well,” or “I don’t have time to exercise,” or “I only smoke on the weekend,” or “Its not my fault, it can’t be due to the things I’m doing…”
Sound familiar?
Healthcare is necessary - absolutely. But a lot of it is not. Imagine what else that money could be spent on if everybody only bothered to look after their most important asset - their body. Your best healthcare policy doesn’t consist of Medibank or Medicare. Your best healthcare policy consists of the following things:
The best healthcare you can get is by spending time and effort to empower yourself to make choices every day that support your health. Choose to be proactive about it instead of only dealing with things when you’ve come apart at the seams and something major has gone wrong. The old adage is absolutely true - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Yup, the majority of healthcare is your responsibility, not the government.
Michael is a 26 year old entrepreneur who can help you with health, fitness, business, software, design and music.