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Narrowing down your location: Choosing a street |
Five more things to consider in selecting an office
1. Parking availability, ease of access from main roads and distance from major interstates.
2. Other local businesses in your immediate neighborhood. Your neighboring businesses should attract the kind of people you want in your practice. A dry cleaner, used-book store, or coffee shop is good; a tattoo parlor or liquor store is not.
3. Availability of signage and restrictions on signs. A great location without a sign is not going to bring you any walk-ins or help your prospective patients find you on their first day. Check local zoning restrictions about signage.
4. The side of the street your office is on. McDonald’s and other big chains choose the “going home” side of the street, because people are more likely to stop on the way home, when they have more time, than on the way to work, when they’re in a hurry
5. Other chiropractors and healthcare providers in the area. Unless another chiropractor is practicing exactly the same technique, he or she is probably not a direct threat. Other professionals can be good sources of referrals, so cultivate relationships with these neighbors. |
Once you have chosen a city to practice in, you have the tough challenge of finding an office. If you are in a small town, only one or two office locations may be available. In that case, if neither looks good, you may have to consider constructing an office building.
For a new doctor, this is a daunting task, and it increases your loan considerably.
But what if several office locations are available for consideration? The best way to describe this predicament is to state it as a trade-off between advertising and rent. Let’s take a real-life scenario as an example:
A recent graduate has been looking at offices and has narrowed his options to two locations. Location A is on the first floor of a three-story office building. The building is on a busy intersection near a large shopping mall. It includes space available on a signboard, but no individual sign is available.
The rent on this office is over $25 a square foot. Because it is in a newer office building, the build-out (renovation of the office to suit the needs of the new doctor) will be substantial, and could exceed $30,000.
Location B is an office of the same size several miles away from Location A. It is in a strip mall, at the end, but in a much quieter neighborhood. The neighborhood does not have a Starbucks or McDonald’s.
The rent is $15 a square foot; the build-out will not be expensive because the existing office layout is similar to what the new doctor needs. A large individual sign could be placed along the street.
If the doctor chooses Location A, he will have higher monthly costs and may need a larger startup loan for the build-out, but with the high traffic in the area, he might not have to do as much advertising.
On the other hand, if he chooses Location B, he would have to do more advertising to get people to come to his office, at least until he has a large patient-referral base built up.
If you are short of funds and having difficulty getting a loan, Location B might be the better choice, because your monthly costs would be lower. If you were willing to work harder to talk to more people to tell them about your practice, you might be able to overcome the drawbacks of the less heavily traveled office location.
Ultimately, your choice of neighborhood is important, but more important is your ability to get out in the community and talk to people and get them to your office.
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