advocacy business

The One Thing That Will Cause Your Private Advocacy Practice to Fail

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Here are samples of some inquiries I have received from people wanting to be advocates. See if you can guess what they all have in common: I want to help Medicaid patients find doctors who will take their insurance. We plan to help children with mental health issues find the help they need. I want to help young girls who find themselves pregnant find the social services they need to get them through their pregnancies. I want to work with churches and senior centers to help their members and attendees understand their medical care. I want to help lymphoma patients …

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The One Thing You Must Do to Grow Your Advocacy Practice (and Take a Vacation, too)

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The answer to this notion of “the one thing you must do” boils down to trust, although maybe not in the way you’ll expect… I say this to you, with the keen awareness of the fact that trusting isn’t something I do well. Having spent the first half of my life as Pollyanna reincarnated, then having been burned by too many people I DID trust along the way, including an ex-husband, an ex-business partner, and the notorious reason for all this empowerment and advocacy work of mine – the doctors who I trusted to help me whether my mysterious odyssey …

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Mentors and SIGs – Our Best Resources Yet

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Updated March 2017 When APHA and AdvoConnection were launched in 2009, the resources that existed for starting and growing a private, independent advocacy practice were few and far between. There weren’t many advocacy experts, because with only a few exceptions, there just weren’t many people with the track record to call themselves experts. Certainly there were experts in different useful topics; for example lawyers or insurance people who could take what they knew and apply it to advocacy. So we took advantage of those experts’ good graces to build the first foundations for practices going forward. We still rely on …

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The Real Cost of Selling One’s Soul

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I heard from a friend that he recently sold his start-up business after years of building it to do just that. Wow! I was so impressed! “Take a break!” I replied. “I can only imagine how much work that was and how much money you must have made!” Yes, he told me. It was a LOT of work and he is exhausted. But, he confided, he really didn’t make much money in the sale. What? I was flabbergasted… Then I learned why. It seems that he and his partners, in order to raise the money they needed to make their …

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Henry Ford, Mary Kay, Success and Patient Advocates

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It’s a holiday week, a quieter time for many businesses, and for that I hope to leave you with some food for thought to ponder your success as an advocacy practice owner… One of my favorite quotes is one that has been attributed to two well-known people. Henry Ford said it first:   If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right. Then Mary Kay Ash (as in cosmetics) put it more eloquently: If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right. Of course, the translation …

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Teaching Your Clients to Fish Starts by Leaving the Rod and Reel at Home

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“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”? (Maimonides) As a former classroom teacher, and now a teacher of advocates, I’ve always embraced the “teach a man to fish” concept. It’s part of my core. It’s in my DNA. It’s what I do with both my patient empowerment and my patient advocacy work. Many of you have been beneficiaries. And my great reward has been to watch you go off into the waters to successfully fish on your own as your practices grow and …

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Hidden Agendas and Being Used

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Years ago, in my salad days, I took a new marketing job after being interviewed by a gentleman who seemed as nice as anyone I had ever met in a workplace. It didn’t take me long to learn my new boss’s friendly smile, and the words that came out of his mouth, only masked a hidden agenda that he hoped naive-me would help him fulfill. The first clue that things were not as they seemed came when I was asked to sign off on some media invoices, in effect, giving Accounts Payable my approval to pay the agency that had …

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