March 2009

In line with our talk about the wonders of the Windows^® operating system, I’ve got a mixed bag of news. On April 14 of this year, Microsoft^® will end support for Windows^® XP, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003. For the majority of the Certified Legal Nurse Consultants out there, it’s the support for XP and Office 2003 that will hurt.

What does this mean to a busy CLNC^® consultant? Well, the endless stream of bug fixes and service packs that flow from Microsoft will finally cease – for the two products you’re likely to be using (Office 2003 and Windows XP). Microsoft will still issue security updates for these products, but only updates that Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, deems to be critical.

Should you be scared? No. Both programs will still run just like they do today (and tomorrow and the next day) and you’ll have plenty of time to consider your next move – upgrading to a new computer that runs Windows Vista (or Windows 7 if you wait long enough) and Office 2007. The older programs are still good and will remain in service for some time. I know a number of major law firms that haven’t upgraded to Office 2007 due to compatibility issues with their legacy software, computer hardware and Vista. A lot of small businesses and consumers (that’s us) will just ride it out until our next (scheduled) upgrade (i.e., when our computer craps out). If you’ve got the cash, you can buy an extended support agreement from Microsoft, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

If you do decide to panic and upgrade, or simply to upgrade, make sure your new computer has 2GB or more of RAM (memory), a fast 2.4+ GHZ dual-core processor and a big ‘ole hard drive to hold all those medical-related case reports for your CLNC^® business. Conversely, you could always just buy a Mac^® and only have to worry about upgrading every 3-4 years.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

As I’ve grown older I’ve learned to appreciate the difficulty of keeping my body (and mind) in great physical (and mental) shape. I hit the gym three days a week to lift weights with a trainer. On the odd-date days I really stretch myself by doing yoga or speed-walking to the Starbucks^® a couple of miles from my home. As my age has increased so has my strength and muscle-mass. I only wish I’d been as dedicated when I was in nursing school.

Before I became a nurse, my exercise consisted of scrambling for Mardi Gras beads and doubloons in the crowded parades of New Orleans (a true contact sport), playing intramural basketball for my high school, playing neighborhood touch football and baseball in the streets, and wrestling with my twin brother Vince (and sometimes his friends, wink-wink). Closest I ever came to an injury was burning my mouth on a bowl of my Grandma’s seafood gumbo.

In nursing school I got a whole different education in exercise that involved weightlifting – lifting patients, lifting more patients and when we were done, lifting even more patients. At 5′ 2 ½”, 110lbs I was hardly Arnold. No training could really prepare me to lift and/or turn patients twice my size. The result? Nursing school turned out to be more hazardous than a childhood of physical activity! It was in the hospital that I strained my back trying to lift and turn a patient. Being the good old days I was prescribed a period of bed rest and, of course, Darvon. I remember telling my nursing student peers, “what a worthless drug it was despite all the hype.” Obviously I’m not much of a drugstore cowgirl. All it did was make me feel fuzzy – it didn’t touch my back pain.

An FDA advisory committee recently recommended a ban on Darvon, Darvocet and their generics, notably after they have been in use for more than 50 years (check out the presentations from the meeting). According to the testimony, Darvon and Darvocet have been associated with over 10,000 confirmed deaths and 2,110 reported accidental deaths in the United States, and the risk of death, overdose, addiction and life-threatening side effects, outweighs the minimal benefits provided by these drugs over other available painkillers.

The committee’s recommendation is nonbinding on the FDA which has 90 days to act on it and either pull the drug from the market or let it go on killing people. Hard to believe but, yes, a drug that according to the AMA is less effective than two adult-strength aspirin, kills.

As of the date of this posting I haven’t seen any cases filed yet, but plaintiff attorneys are already advertising for potential clients. This is where you, the savvy Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, come in.

If you are interested in consulting on these potential products liability cases, research the plaintiff attorneys who are advertising for these cases and market yourself to them. Defense firms are a potential market too. There will be plenty of issues for both sides in these cases as the drug is often prescribed to elderly patients, it’s addictive, it doesn’t mix well with other drugs and a good portion of the deaths are suicides.

If you’re looking to get involved in pharmaceutical cases – Darvon will probably be a good starting place. Just do your research and watch your back.

Success Is Inside!

First off, if you have not yet heard of Facebook, thanks for exiting your cave. I’d like to heartily welcome you to the Internet. I think you’ll like it here.

But seriously, here are some quick stats on Facebook which should be of interest to you as a CLNC^® business owner.

1. There are more than 150 million active Facebook users.
2. The number of active users has doubled in the last year.
3. About 34% of users work as professionals. This includes attorneys, sales people, executives, educators and techies.
4. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook consists of users 25 and older.

Though Facebook started in the student demographic, it’s quickly grown out of it. So, my guess is that at least a few of those 150 million active users (active users spend about 20 minutes a day on the site) are prospective attorney-clients for your legal nurse consulting business. The question is, what do you do about it?

All you have to do is sign up for an account…then start joining relevant Facebook groups to find attorney-clients for your CLNC^® business.

While you are signing up, you’ll have many options to customize and flesh out your CLNC^® profile page. Include as many details about your CLNC^® business as possible…and don’t forget all your business contact information (you want to make it easy for the attorneys to contact you).

Joining Facebook Groups

Joining Facebook Groups is easy. Simply log in to your Facebook account, and on the left tab, you will see a list of applications.

Click Groups, and once you are there, you will see two tabs, one indicating groups recently joined by your friends and the other indicating your recently updated groups.

Browse the groups and you will find more than a thousand groups available.

There is no limit to the number of groups that you can join. The more groups you join, the bigger your social network becomes.

While browsing through the groups, you can find the name of the group, its population, its type or category, the latest number of new members, the latest number of members who left the group and any updates to the group.

Even though you can offer your CLNC^® services across the country, let’s start by narrowing your focus to find local attorneys. All you need to do to find local groups is to click the Search for Groups box, enter your city (or state, if you are in a small town) and the word attorney or lawyer. Hit Enter and Facebook will give you a list of local Facebook groups for attorneys.

If you see a group name that looks interesting, view the group and read the information about it. If you feel you want to join the group, look for the Join This Group button. You automatically become a member of the group if it is a public group. If it is a private group, you’ll have to wait to be approved by the group’s admin.

Join as many groups as you can that are relevant to your quest to find more attorney-clients for your CLNC^® business.

Once you become a member of a group, you have the option to upload photos and videos for the group, write on The Wall and join discussions in the discussion board or perhaps start your own topic. Joining these different Facebook groups is not only fun but it expands your network, giving you more opportunities to market your expertise.

After you join a group, you should post a comment on their wall. Do not…I repeat…DO NOT promote yourself at this time. Simply compliment their group and thank them for creating it. Then invite the group’s admin to be your Friend.

Try to interact with others in the group by participating in the conversation on The Wall, commenting on pictures/videos and joining discussions in the discussion board. Once you interact with another member, feel free to invite them to become your Friend. When someone makes an interesting post, send that person a “Friend invitation” mentioning that you enjoyed what they had to say on the topic.

As a member of a group, you can see a list of all the group’s members. You can also send Friend invitations to people who haven’t participated, just as you did with the people who have participated. These connections won’t be as powerful as ones with people you’ve had a dialogue with, but they’ll still be your target market.

Once you have a few key people in the group as Friends, feel free to start adding a promotion to their wall every now and then.

A Word of Caution

Don’t get too gung ho about inviting every attorney you can find in your area to join your group on day one.

Facebook has a limit of how many new invitations you can send in a given day or week. The exact number isn’t posted anywhere, but if you exceed this amount you can get a warning and could get cut off from Facebook. If you stick to no more than twenty invitations a day you should be safe.

When you are sending invitations, don’t copy and paste a standard message. This can lead to a warning from Facebook. Be sure to customize each invitation you send.

Don’t Just Limit Yourself to Connecting with Attorneys

Connect with your high school, college and nursing friends also. You never know where you’ll find an attorney-prospect. I got three clients off Facebook from old high school friends…without even trying.

I think you’ll have fun with it also!

Guest Blogger Profile

Brian Horn is an Internet marketing consultant who specializes in search engine marketing, site optimization, social media marketing, link building and web data analytics. Brian has consulted with Vickie Milazzo Institute for over three years.

Brian also speaks at seminars and conferences throughout the U.S. and Canada on how to use the Internet to improve business.

In this information age where we are constantly overloaded with garbage in garbage out, I am surprised to be still thinking about an article I read five months ago in Fortune magazine, “Why Talent Is Overrated.”

The team who works for me at Vickie Milazzo Institute knows that to get the same performance evaluation rating the next year, they have to be stronger and swifter. That’s right; the same behaviors year after year won’t cut it. They have to improve their existing skills – static behavior is not acceptable.

The reason I’ve survived 27 years of competitors poorly copying and imitating my every move (even including my typos!) is because the improved performance I expect of my staff is exactly the performance I expect of myself. A song lyric I really like is “The only thing constant is change.” When I think of change, I want change for the positive – through education, effort and a heavy dose of honest self-analysis.

Are you applying this principle to your legal nurse consulting business with your attorney-clients? To increase consulting fees 5-10% every year you have to show up new and better year after year.

According to Geoffrey Colvin in his book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else, high achievers are not just talented (i.e. have an inborn ability); they might not be talented at all. Is there any real talent involved in being Donald Trump? So what separates highly successful business owners from the rest of the pack? Repetitive, focused and deliberate practice designed to specifically improve performance. You can only improve performance if you know what needs improving (that’s why the honest self-analysis is important). Then you must practice that particular skill.

Another distinction of high achievers – they are able to assess how they’re doing. They don’t need someone to watch over them or push them. The CLNC^® consultant can recognize she’s not answering the attorney’s question quite right and pull it together swiftly. Practice the answers to the interview questions over and over and you appear as an eloquent pro (or at least a practiced pro) to any attorney who meets you for the first time. But that only works if you’re practicing the correct responses. Deliberate practice is worthless without accurate self-evaluation. Do you assess each attorney communication afterwards? I don’t mean obsess over what you should have said. I mean really ask yourself, “Was I succinct?” “Was my communication effective?” “Were my points clear?”

Consciously make practice and assessment a part of your CLNC^® business practice and require the same of your vendors, subcontractors and even attorney-clients. There is no stronger compliment than a vendor, subcontractor or attorney telling you they are better at what they do because of you. You can only do that if you’re working to be the best you.

I recently invested eight months mentoring a staffer through repetitive, deliberate practice. This investment has paid off tens of thousands of dollars. It was time consuming for both of us. We constantly evaluated each step afterwards. Sure, we made a few missteps but we made many, many more improvements and now we have not only a better process but a staffer who cannot only operate independently but can also be an example to others.

Read the article. Better yet, read the book and put practice into practice. You’ll never be the same Certified Legal Nurse Consultant again.

Success Is Inside!

If you’re reading Vickie’s Blog and my Tech Tips from the FeedBlitz email you receive, you’re only seeing part of the picture. Sure it’s easy to read from the email, but try this: click the title “Vickie’s Blog” under the FeedBlitz logo in the email.

You’ll then have access to not only the full blog post (and any photos) but you can also:

• Post your comments or thoughts about the blog (click Comments).
• See other comments for that blog post from your CLNC^® peers and other readers (click Comments).
• Have access to the searchable archive of all past blogs.
• Search for blogs by category (Ask Vickie, medical-malpractice cases, tech tips, etc.).
• Access the resources we link to from the various blogs.
• View the most recent photo slide show.

While you’re there, remember to add the site to your bookmarks or favorites and visit it often – there’s more to Vickie’s Blog than will fit in any email notification (and you get hours of fun reading!).

If you’re not getting an email alert each time Vickie or I do a new blog post, all you have to do is add your email address at the top of the page and click “Sign me up.” FeedBlitz will walk you through the process. It’s an easy way to keep up to date with Vickie’s Blog (just remember to click through the FeedBlitz email).

Keep on Techin’,

Tom

On February 4th I gave an assignment for all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants attending the 2009 NACLNC^® Conference to go see the movie Slumdog Millionaire and to identify Jamal’s maverick entrepreneurial moves. For those of you who couldn’t join us in San Antonio, read the brief overview of my conference opening below.

I will start by confessing that the only reason I saw the movie was because of the acclaim it was receiving. Frankly, I didn’t have the high hopes for Slumdog Millionaire that the critics had. It was directed by Danny Boyle and the last movie of his – Trainspotting – I walked out of.

Set in Mumbai, India, Slumdog Millionaire unravels the main character Jamal, who lives in a slum and against all odds, escapes by evolving into a true entrepreneurial maverick. The movie opened with a torture scene and just when I was packing up my popcorn to leave, suddenly the scene switches to Jamal, as a little kid, diving into a filthy toilet, and before I knew it, I’m sitting back down, laughing so hard I’m falling out of my seat.

What made it funny is – it isn’t even a toilet. It’s a squat hole with a 4-foot drop into a pit – filled with you know what.

Locked in the outhouse for this squat hole, Jamal’s first maverick move is when he plunges himself through the squat hole and literally, into the sh*t. Covered head-to-toe with excrement he uses that to his advantage to push his way through a crowd and ask a famous Indian movie star for his autograph.

And some of you are afraid to walk up to an attorney in your best suit and ask for a case.

Then, after losing his mother at age 5, he and his brother survive by scavenging dumps for scrap materials to sell.

You already know that some of the best marketing strategies are free. But when’s the last time you made a maverick move and scavenged your old attorney-clients for new cases?

Soon the brothers are abducted by a gangster who steals children off the street with the plan of maiming them and sending them back out to beg. Jamal doesn’t mind begging – but he’s not about to settle for being maimed, so he and his brother find a maverick way to escape.

Let me ask you, are you settling and accepting something in your CLNC^® business that you shouldn’t?

We next see Jamal stealing shoes at the Taj Mahal to resell in the market.

Overhearing the guides taking tourists around the Taj, Jamal, in another maverick move, promotes himself to self-professed and self-educated tour guide, filling the tourists with facts he makes up as he goes along.

When’s the last time you tackled something that you’re not an expert on? That’s maverick.

As an uneducated young adult, he works as a “tea wallah” delivering refreshments to employees in a call center. A job he uses in true maverick manner to locate his missing brother and, against all odds, to catapult himself onto the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

On the show, the host secretly tells him the answer to a question but he doesn’t trust it. He goes with his gut and this uneducated slumdog chooses a different answer instead – and wins. That’s a true maverick.

When is the last time you ignored someone’s “expert” advice and came out the winner?

Now I’m not advocating you start running scams on your attorney-clients or make uneducated guesses about your cases. We will leave that to your competitors.

What struck me about the movie was the spirit, the life force and the maverick qualities embodied by Jamal. His entire life he faces terrible adversity and yet you don’t see that stopping him.

One door closes in his face and he forces another one open, each time using his life experiences to succeed.

Let me ask you: What would your CLNC^® business be like if you never gave up?

Now I know this is just a movie. But what if you allowed yourself to have Jamal’s maverick entrepreneurial spirit?

Like life, Slumdog Millionaire is not all feel-good. Parts of it are painfully harsh. But in the end, it’s the story of a little boy who teaches you the greatest tools of the entrepreneur – maverick persistence, hope and optimism.

Jamal never gave up hope, never gave up trying and never gave up on himself.

Two of the child-actors in the movie were actually from the slum and ended up, against impossible odds, walking the Red Carpet, spending a day at Disneyland and receiving a hero’s welcome when they returned to Mumbai. If opportunities are there for the slumdog Jamals of the world, why not for you?

This story reminds me that life is meant to be good.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

What’s stopping you?

Go out.

Get started today.

My motto is: We are nurses and we can do anything!

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Thanks again to all for a great Conference. Comment to share your best maverick entrepreneurial techniques you learned from Slumdog Millionaire.

It’s Spring Break time again and peace has been restored to my neighborhood. I live in what could almost be described as a pastoral setting. Although I live in Houston, the fourth largest city in the U.S., I actually live in a city within the city of Houston. It’s a small neighborhood with its own fire and police departments. On Saturday mornings, you can watch the hunky firemen wash and wax the fire trucks. We’ve got a couple of little league and soccer fields and when the weather’s nice the morning air is filled with the sounds of sprinklers and the evenings are filled with the sounds of children having fun and engaging in organized chaos.

Except for one small thing, it’s like living in a Norman Rockwell painting. Right in the middle of these fields of fun is an elementary school. Each day on my morning commute I have the misfortune to pass through a school zone full of frenzied, caffeine-deprived soccer moms jockeying for position to drop their little ones off at the perfect spot.

This sounds like no big deal until you experience it first hand. Suddenly a quiet street turns into a heavy-metal combination of a demolition derby, death race, Indy 500 and bumper-car-ride full of median-strip-hopping SUVs the size of small airliners. Dropping off children is a competitive sport worthy of its own reality show.

I almost believe they can smell fear or hesitation from the inside of the Suburban. Be a second or two slow off the stop sign, and three cars have glided through the 4-way stop at the intersection (one from behind you). They’ll make kamikaze turns in front of you to drift-slide into a parallel parking spot like a Japanese racer. It’s like a pool of armored piranhas.

They come at you from all directions – U-turning, 3-point-turning (in about 16 points due to the overly large turning radius), stopping and waiting with the turn signal on for a parking spot that won’t be available until that driver gets off her cell phone, walks her son to the school, has a conference and cookie with the teacher, walks back, adjusts her makeup in the rearview mirror and checks every radio station in Houston for her favorite song before heading off to Starbucks^® for a Skinny Latte before yoga class.

The relentlessness of this race-for-the-door makes me a little crazy. At the center of this sturm und drang stand the gatekeepers who patiently wave the cars in, one after the other, to drop off the kiddos. These are the wizards of the walk and they have the power to banish an unruly mom for a second lap around the “fruit” loop before discharging the precious cargo. Even the person who two seconds ago was threatening to pull your intestines out through your teeth suddenly experiences extreme bursts of politeness and becomes as docile as a lamb when faced with the power of the gatekeepers.

What’s the takeaway for Certified Legal Nurse Consultants? Don’t run over the gatekeeper in your dash to the attorney’s office. Don’t be intimidated either. Gatekeepers control access but they have rules to do their job and as long as you obey the rules, or don’t bend them too far, you can get access. Be nice to them. Hard to believe as it may be, gatekeepers are people too. Pay them a compliment (“Gee, your hair is a nice shade of blue today – it complements your housecoat.”), bring them some of their favorite food (roasted wildebeest or brownies) and remember their birthdays (right before Lincoln’s). Be nice to the gatekeeper and they’ll be nice to you.

When all else fails, just call the attorney’s office and say “Hey Doris, this is your name here. Can you put me through to attorney’s first name here? She’s expecting my call.”

Good luck. Stay off the streets and up on the street lights where it’s safe.

Success Is Inside!

When it’s your first time, everything is exciting. Sure you’re nervous, but that’s a good thing, like the way you feel waiting in line for a roller coaster. Your knees are knocking and you’re thinking “I don’t know if I really want to do this.” Then you go on the ride and squeal, “Wheee! That was fun! Let’s do it again.” When you first start a new business, a new quilt, a new marriage, even the little things are exciting (“Gosh that’s a great thimble, honey! Can I try it on?”). But how do you sustain such excitement for 3 years or 30 in your legal nurse consulting business, not to mention in your relationships with your attorney-clients and subcontractors?

My solution is a simple one. I am a voracious reader. My day is off if I don’t read something each morning and each night. 15 minutes of a nourishing book (not a newspaper or gossip rag) accompanied by a steaming cup of healthy green tea in a quiet environment renews me and energizes me for the day. At night, 15 minutes of any book accompanied by a glass of healthy red wine relaxes me and prepares me for a good night’s fooling around and sleep.

Managing my business and the 25 employees that go with it is challenging and potentially exhausting. There’s one of me and 25 of them – all with their sick children, flu season, bad hair days, bare midriffs (and that’s just the men). I know when you have problems you think they’re worse than anyone else’s, but when you’re the boss, they’re magnified 25 times and you get your own and your spouse’s too! I need renewal time to joyfully come back for more of this punishment day after day after day.

After those 15 morning minutes I can step into my office with a smile and the attitude of “Bring it on! I’m ready.” I’m a working CEO, so I have to get hauled out of bed (no, I don’t pop up like a piece of toast) at 4:00am to make time for my quiet time and exercise, and yes as strange as it sounds, it’s totally worth it. I choose to start my day for me, so that I can freely and happily give to everyone else what is demanded all day, every day. My day is never predictable. While I always start with a plan, the plan rarely plays out the way I designed it (nothing makes God laugh like plans). I once naively scheduled Pilates lessons at the end of the day. When I was paying for more no-show classes than classes I showed for, I faced the music and found an early morning yoga class instead. Now I rarely miss getting my om on.

You don’t expect the batteries in your kids’ toys to keep going forever without recharging. Don’t expect it of yourself. Revitalize your mind, body, emotions and spirit frequently, and you’ll find the energy abundantly available when you need it. Certified Legal Nurse Consultants who invest in renewal have the energy to enjoy the ride long after the carnival has left town. Believe me, your attorney-clients, your family, your friends and your spouse will see the difference a little renewal time can make. For more renewal ideas, read Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn’t Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now.

Whether you’re consulting part-time or full-time as a legal nurse consultant, you will love your legal nurse consulting business more if you start your day for you. Design it today to assure you’ll be here tomorrow.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share how you renew yourself each day.

If you’ve moved to Microsoft^® Office 2007 with its suite of upgrades, enhancements and head-banging, you’ve probably noticed the so-called “Ribbon.” This replaced all the good, old-fashioned, easy-to-use command buttons in Office 2003. I’ve been using this suite for about 10 months now and still misplace commands and I never remember where the darn “advanced options” can be found. If a techie is flummoxed, what’s a legal nurse consultant to do?

Well, fire up your favorite web browser and head on over to Microsoft’s excellent Get Started web page and check out the tutorials created for people just like us. Trust me – when it comes to software, you’re more like me than I am myself.

Look at Basic Ribbon Training. It will help you track down the commands that you can’t or won’t find on the new Ribbon. These are two terrific links and I keep them both bookmarked in my IE7 browser. I usually use the Firefox browser but found that for some strange reason Microsoft’s websites work best when using the Microsoft IE browser (something funny about that).

While I’m on the topic of Word 2007, do you ever use the little (?) help symbol up in the top right hand corner of your Office 2007 programs? This replaced the “Help” button and the “Type a question for help” box that was found in Word and some of the other Office 2003 programs. It’s a pretty good tool, but as many times as I’ve used this to search for a solution, I don’t always find what I want right away.

Here’s an example. When I insert a headshot of Vickie into a Word 2007 document, all I see is an empty box (in Windows-speak a “placeholder”) – not the photo.

Now, I’d really like to see this photo of Vickie so I can figure out how to wrap the text around it to make best use of the space on the page. When all I see is an empty box, it’s not much help. I can’t use any of the cool feathering tools, etc. on this darn box.

So I did an online search by typing in “I can’t see my inserted photos in Word 2007″ and I got some good leads, one of which told me to “Open the advanced tab under Images and un-click show placeholders.” The perfect answer right? Except in 2007 there is no “advanced tab” under the Image tab!

Giving up on that, I decided to use the built-in Windows help function. I clicked the little (?) and typed “show placeholders.” I got nothing. I typed “view placeholders” – got nothing, typed “view images” – got nothing. I finally remembered the Windows bar doesn’t say “images,” it says “pictures.” I typed “show picture placeholders” and I got the answer to “Go into advanced options and remove the checkmark for ‘view picture placeholders.’” Gadzooks! That’s the answer. Now all I need to do is find the “advanced options” and I can fix my problem. It’s simple. Click “tools,” click “options” and darn. There are no “tools” or “options” in Word 2007. So it’s back to the online “Basic Ribbon Training” page to use the Find Word 2003 commands in Word 2007 link to find my “options” and “advanced options” (they’re at the bottom of the Ribbon under “Word Options”). Now I see how to play with my inserted headshot of Vickie (not image of Vickie, duh!).

You can download a free “Get Started” tab from Microsoft that you can install right onto the tool bar of your Office 2007 versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel. When you encounter a bump in the road or can’t find a command simply click the “Get Started” tab and you’re on your way!

The moral of this story isn’t to buy a Mac^® for your legal nurse consulting business – it’s if you’re searching for something in the Windows Help function, you should use Windows-speak to find it. The more you use the language of the software the more likely you will be to actually find a useful help answer! Something cool about the new online help function is that people can comment and add answers that truly help other people like me who are challenged by help.

So, like I said in the title – don’t be afraid to ask for help, just be careful how you do it.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

P.S. Please comment on your wild experiences riding the Ribbon.

My heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to all the Certified Legal Nurse Consultants who attended our successful 2009 NACLNC^® Conference in San Antonio. Our sell-out gathering was a spectacular event, and I hope you had as much fun as I did. It was great to see and talk with all of you again.

I’m sure you’ve already started to “Move Like a Maverick” for more breakaway success in your CLNC^® practice. Here are just a few tips to get you started as you execute the new unconventional strategies that only CLNC^® mavericks know.

1. Decide on one new CLNC^® service you will provide to every attorney-client. Offer to provide that new service the first time for a discounted rate to get them hooked.
2. Reconnect with your attorney-clients by sending a note to let them know you’ve attended this conference for additional education and to renew your CLNC^® Certification. Remind them that this is your way to better serve them and their clients.
3. Send a news release to your community newspaper announcing your completion of this advanced Certified Legal Nurse Consultant training and renewal of your CLNC^® Certification.
4. Commit now to review your 2009 NACLNC^® Conference textbook and all the meaningful notes you took. Listen to the audio recordings of the conference once a week, once a month and once a year after the conference. Repetition helps you integrate and implement the principles and strategies successfully. With each review, you will hear the information in a new way because you’ll be more experienced. Each time you listen, you’ll generate even better ideas. After each review create three new action steps to propel your CLNC^® business to the next level.
5. Continue your success: mark your calendar and sign up now for the 2010 NACLNC^® Conference where you’ll Take the Stage for Legendary CLNC^® Success in Nashville, Tennessee.

We’ll be posting the 2009 Conference photo gallery on “Vickie’s Blog” soon so be sure to check back.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Please post your comments and share your favorite personal experience at the NACLNC^® Conference.