Cheap Can Be Expensive for Your Legal Nurse Consulting Business

Everybody, including me, loves a bargain. While I don’t like to actually bargain, I do like to feel that I’ve received value for my money. If I get that value during a sale or find something I want at a heavily discounted price, I’m happy. But one thing I won’t do is buy cheap at the expense of quality. While cheap may feel like a bargain at the time, it often ends up costing more in replacement costs, repairs or in a state of dissatisfaction.

Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, explores how much a discount culture really costs society. Extrapolating from her writing, you could determine that discounts and cheap goods are actually lowering our standard of living. Instead of buying higher quality, longer lasting goods such as clothing, home furnishing or even food, people are generally turning to lower-cost and much lower-quality replacements. You can find cheap just about anywhere you look, whether it’s cheap toys that break, cheap big-screen TVs that fail all too quickly or cheap farmed tilapia that has no taste and minimal Omega 3s.

What about your legal nurse consulting business? Are you letting cheap get in the way of your CLNC^® success? There are many ways it can. The first is being intimidated by legal nurse consultants who charge less than you do. Certified Legal Nurse Consultants frequently tell me that their attorney-clients have tried someone who charges less only to find that the low-end work product of the cheaper and inadequately trained legal nurse consultant was useless.

I can’t tell you how often a CLNC^® student will approach me and reluctantly confess that before coming to my program, they’d spent their money on a cheaper program only to find out that as a result they were ill-prepared to enter the field of legal nurse consulting. Depending upon their sense of humor about their loss, I sometimes respond that we’re the Harvard of legal nurse consulting and they picked Jonestown Community College the first time, but no worries – they are now on the path to CLNC^® success.

Other legal nurse consultants will tell me that exhibiting at legal conferences is too expensive. I’ll agree that exhibiting seems expensive, but what’s even more expensive is sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring without actively marketing your legal nurse consulting business. When you consider that a single attorney-client can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in your lifetime, I believe it’s expensive not to incorporate exhibiting into your marketing strategy.

We frequently review marketing materials for new Certified Legal Nurse Consultants, and I and all of the CLNC^® Mentors instantly detect when someone has designed and printed their own materials in an attempt to cut costs. How many attorney-prospects passed up a consultant because the first impression was cheap?

Websites are another example of cheap that can ultimately be expensive to your legal nurse consulting practice. Tom likes to say that anyone with $3.99/month can create and have a website. I agree and when they do, the website often looks like it cost $3.99. If your website is your billboard on the information superhighway, you want it to be attractive and represent your brand in a professional way. If it doesn’t, you may not even know how many attorneys rejected you outright because you opted for cheap.

Finally, two tips on technology. First when you’re buying equipment for your CLNC^® business, don’t skimp. For example, it’s costly and time-consuming to set up a computer. If it crashes and takes all your legal nurse consulting work-product with it, you’ll quickly learn why people buy from Dell, Apple or other recognized brands. Second, saving money by not subscribing to an online back-up service will save you $60/year – but how much is your legal nurse consulting data stored on your computer worth to you?

Cheap is not always a bargain. Be smart about when and how you choose to be cheap.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share situations where cheap has cost you more!