You Offer Apples, But They Ask for Oranges. Now What?

How Fruit Salad (or Hawaiian Pizza with Pepperoni) Can Help You Grow Your Business

You’ve been an advocate for a while, or maybe you’re just getting started. You often receive an email or a phone call asking you if you provide a service that you don’t typically provide.

Over the years, I’ve asked many advocates how they handle that type of outreach. Here are some of the answers I’ve heard:

I just don’t respond (to an email) – or – I don’t call them back.
I tell them I can’t help them because I don’t offer that kind of advocacy.
I tell them how to fix or improve the situation themselves.
I send them some website links.
I tell them to find someone else in one of the advocate directories.

I hope you’re cringing like I do! I hope you realize how unacceptable those answers are. Not helpful to YOU as a business owner. And even less helpful to that potential client.

I hope you realize that sticking only to your apples without considering what to do about orange requests can put you right out of business!

The Hawaiian Pizza Shop Goes Out of Business

In The Health Advocate’s Start and Grow Your Own Practice Handbook, I tell the story of how the Hawaiian Pizza Shop went out of business. The new pizza shop owner took all the right steps to get started with his business – except to prepare for those who would make requests he couldn’t fulfill.

He would receive calls every day from people wanting toppings that he, who sold Hawaiian pizzas, didn’t offer. They would ask him to add pepperoni, or mushrooms, or even anchovies. But his response to them was always, “We don’t put those things on our Hawaiian Pizzas. Would you like extra pineapple?”

What’s wrong with this pizza picture?

The answer is actually quite simple: The pizza shop owner didn’t tune into the wants and needs of his customers. Instead, he did exactly what those business-rejecting advocates did in my list above: he gave away business.

Sadly, he eventually he lost his livelihood, too.

Develop Your Fruit Salad Recipe for Success

So what’s the solution? If you don’t offer the services being requested, how are you supposed to use those requests to improve your practice (and your income?) It’s not as difficult as you might think.

First – a couple of rules:

A. NEVER pretend you can do something you aren’t sure you can do. If you are a cancer advocate who has never audited someone’s medical bills before, do not promise you can provide medical billing services. Be honest – tell them it’s not in your wheelhouse. Then choose one of the options below.

B. You don’t have to do all the work yourself! That’s actually the key to success with this aspect of your business. Just like you might find someone to help you build your website (because websites are NOT your thing!) or just like you might hire a tax accountant for that all-important April 15 deadline (because who among us enjoys doing our taxes?), you can connect with other professionals to support your work with any client.

How? Here are some of your options.

You may even think of others.

First – and perhaps most importantly – TRACK all requests and eventual decisions about how you are handling the requests, whether or not you will end up working with them yourself. Each time a potential client reaches out, write down their name, any contact information you can glean, what their request was, and what you did or provided in response. Over a period of time, you’ll be able to see what requests are repeated and that will help you determine what your next steps, as the business person you are, should be.
Connect with other advocates who DO offer the services you don’t. Agree to refer potential clients to them, in exchange for their referrals to you for the services you do provide. Keep a master list of which advocates provide what services so you can refer to your list whenever a potential client you can’t (or don’t want to) help reaches out to you. Then you’ll have someone very specific you can recommend when the time comes and you will have served that person well.

Note: Be sure you learn what you can about the other advocates you plan to refer to. You would never want to provide a referral to someone who really couldn’t do the work! That would not only leave the client in a terrible place, it would also reflect negatively on you and your practice. Not smart.
Connect with other advocates and make a formal, contractual agreement to provide referrals to them as subcontractors to your practice. Years ago, I wrote a blog post that applies here, called Eight Hour Day? Get Paid for Sixteen. The recommendation is that you contract with other advocates whose skills complement your own. When a potential client requests something you can’t provide, you go ahead and agree to working with them (you contract with the client). Then you hire the other-skilled advocate to work with them at a reduced cost from their regular hourly fee. You oversee the relationship by taking care of the administrative work – client liaison, time tracking, billing and collecting, and you pay the assisting advocate. Win-win-win. (Learn more about this in The Health Advocate’s Start and Grow Your Own Practice Handbook. )

The same caveat as above applies here: Be sure you vet other, potential referral advocates closely.
Over time, and using the tracking information you’ve saved ((#1 above), you can decide whether you, personally, want to learn HOW to provide those requested services so that you can provide them yourself.
Don’t ever assume that this is the best way to handle requests you can’t serve. It makes no sense to take a course, or earn a certificate for something you will rarely be asked to do. It makes even less sense for you to invest time and money into learning something you don’t think you would LIKE to do! But if you have tracked enough requests to make it worthwhile, and you think you could develop a new marketing niche for yourself, or that you’d enjoy offering a skill you don’t currently know much about, this will provide data for your decision-making.