Adrien Paczosa is a Registered and Licensed Dietitian and the Owner/ President of I Live Well Nutrition Therapy in Austin, Texas. Adrien’s approach to healthy nutrition is one that encourages whole-body wellness.
Jeffery: I have with me Adrien Paczosa, owner of I Live Well Nutrition Therapy. Adrien, welcome.
Adrien Paczosa: Thank you, Jeffery. It’s so great to be here.
Jeffery: Adrien, I wonder if you can explain a little bit about your practice.
Adrien Paczosa: My practice, I love my practice. I own I Live Well Nutrition Therapy as you stated, and I have about four to five dieticians working for me. It varies from week to week. They’re all independent consultants. We definitely specialize in eating disorders and addictions, but the also we’re able to see other clients for other medical other medical reasons as well.
Jeffery: What are some of the techniques that you use to get new clients?
Adrien Paczosa: Well, I think one of the biggest techniques that has really helped us is being on the insurance. Just today before you called I had two people call saying that they found us on their insurance panel. Then also really making a great connection with whomever their doctors are, so following up with their physicians or their therapists takes maybe four to five minutes to send an email or a phone call and those physicians and therapists couldn’t be more excited to be part of this process. That has really catapulted my company to the next level.
Jeffery: So it’s just as simple as following up with the practitioner and letting them know what you do and what your practice is about?
Adrien Paczosa: Exactly, so I’ll give them a call and usually 95% of the time if it’s a physician’s office I just leave a message and just say, “Thank you, Dr. Smith for the wonderful referral. I’m working with you patient. I will be faxing over a release of information and also chart notes. For further communications would you please let me know if you’d rather us continue to fax updates or our email updates. I can be reached at . . .” and I give them my phone number.
Every single time the physician actually calls me back and is over the moon and will either want to go out for lunch or everything like that. The way I’m able to kind of capture them is I always say, “I have a lot of other patients that are looking for physicians. Are you accepting new clients?” Those couple of sentences allow them to, even if they’re not, every single one of them always returns the favor and says, “Oh, are you accepting new clients? Can we refer to you? That’s been a really big opener as well.
Jeffery: That’s a great technique and one that definitely other people should be taking note of. One other question around that: how do you market your business?
Adrien Paczosa: If it’s available we’re going to market it. I think one of the grounding principles in my company, and all of my dieticians abide by it, is to create better access to dieticians. Here in Austin, Texas there are very few dieticians in private practice, and our city is growing leaps and bounds. Truly providing better access to dieticians is what we stand on. If there’s health fairs, booths and things of that nature where we’re out and able to engage with the community we’re for that. I love stopping in at physician’s offices and dropping off educational material, post it notes that have our logo on them, and just getting to know the office managers or getting to know the staff. A lot of times the staff are the ones that also say, “You know, it sounds like, Mr. Smith, you keep coming in. Have you thought about seeing this dietician?” Really getting to make it a community because we all like to refer to the people that we know and that we trust.
Jeffery: That’s a great way to broaden the message about the services that you’re offering. Now, how do you efficiently manage your time?
Adrien Paczosa: The efficiency, I like the adjective in there. Well, that’s been one of, I would say, the hardest struggles of a business owner to balance the running the company side of it and also seeing patients. Personally, I love the company side. I think that’s just so cool, and I absolutely love it. The patient side can be extreme at times, so what I’ve really been able to do is squish my days so I’ll have one day that is completely administrative work, company work, and then have a couple of other days where it’s just 100% patients. Then I have one day of overflow for if I end up charting, or forget to return an phone call, or if I need to meet somebody for coffee. I also have once a month that I schedule for marketing where it’s dinners or stuff like that. I really have tried to keep my schedule tight.
Jeffery: Finally, what’s the one thing about your practice that you’d change if you could?
Adrien Paczosa: Charting, I hate it. It is the one thing, unfortunately, I’m not able to do my charting with my patients in the room due to with eating disorders it’s just not appropriate. That time I have to do outside of patient hours, and it tends to suck every life out of me.
Jeffery: Great, thanks Adrien. I’ve really enjoyed our chat today, and I know that everyone is going to really benefit from the discussion.
Adrien Paczosa: Thank you Jeffery. This has been wonderful.