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To describe Dawn Piebenga as a caring and sharing person may be true but would it do justice to her business sense? Apparently the answer is yes! Dawn insists that it has been the caring component that has created her unique business culture.
After all – how many businesses do you know that allow their staff to take their birthday’s off, and offer them “doona days” or unofficial sick days? Or how about paying their airfares back to Australia when they have been away travelling overseas?
IMR has been built on creating relationships with staff, customers and clients as a more effective and cost efficient way of growing the business than having a dedicated sales team.
Caring for people is part of Dawn’s heritage. A New Zealand country girl, with a farmer dad and a weaver mum, she became an Occupational Therapist. Yet unlike many in the caring health professions, she went on to build a profitable and award winning business.
An essential component which placed her on the road to business success is her self acknowledged “latent entrepeneurialism”. It was this characteristic that led her to opt out of the red-tape bound hospital system for private practice.
When Dawn arrived in Sydney in 1994, she worked tirelessly under another practitioner in private practice, and that passion together with acquired ability helped the practice to grow enormously. She also realised that the key ingredient to growth was not marketing but customer service.
“If you do a good job and consistently deliver what you say you will deliver, your customers, be they individuals or businesses, will want to work with you again and again.”
By 1995 she had expanded her services to include specialising in medico-legal assessments and workplace ergonomic assessments – and was very busy! She was headhunted and employed by another firm of practitioners – and all her clients found and followed her even though nobody had told them where she was going.
 Dawn’s clients were not the end users of her services or product – the people with injuries. Her customers are a step removed from her clients, the GP’s, legal firms and businesses that sent their clients to her for help. These clients had either been injured at work or in car accidents. They needed getting back on their feet as quickly as possible. Dawn also had to prepare assessments for courts to work out how much their injury claims might be worth.
And in all of this her core values of doing the right thing and continuous improvement shone through.
Dawn found herself in new position, getting paid more, yet with all the same clients and more coming on board. It was then she had her “entrepreneurial seizure”, realising that she must have a secret business ingredient and so after just three months decided to go out on her own.
IMR was a comparatively easy business to set up with low overheads. All Dawn needed was a car, a phone and a computer. And as she got busier and busier she realised there was huge opportunity to expand the practice into a business!
Initially Dawn only employed contractors but in late 2000, IMR engaged its first employees and today has more than 30 support, clinical and consultant team members servicing greater Sydney and country areas and more recently as far away as Bourke. Although she did go down the sales team path to generate more business, Dawn found it expensive and inefficient. She now uses her her staff and contractors to generate more business through a system of outstanding customer service and sharing their passion for their work.
Dawn was coached by Louise Woodbury (author of How to Grow Your Business by Taking Three Months Off). Through working with Louise, she manages to regularly indulge in her passion for travel. She knows that although she is still the heart and soul of IMR - it is such a well-set up business, it can run without her. However, there are challenges with her team and her customers in doing this and in the interview Dawn tells how she addresses and solves these issues.
Here is a summary of magic ingredients to IMR’s success.
- Reward staff financially for referrals. This will still work out cheaper than employing a dedicated sales team.
- Train your staff and contractors so they apropriately use every conversation as an opportunity to generate more business.
- Have a system for keeping track of birthdays and personal details of staff, contractors, clients and customers, so that when you or your staff speak to them even after a long break, they feel you know and remember them as someone special.
- Create a script and have role model sessions for sales relationships, but allow the flexibility for people to add in their own words and thoughts.
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Implement “team days”, where everyone gets the opportunity to safely, address, discuss and get to the heart of their issues.
- Treat and educate your contractors as well as you treat your staff. IMR has paid orientation days for new contractors.
- Call it when you see it. Spot undercurrents and step in to address the problem before it escalates into a flood.
- Have regular customer advisory board where you get your customers together to tell you what they like about what you do and what could be better. You’ll discover that customer service is not “one size fits all”. service.
- Develop your workplace culture to fit the needs of your staff and contractors. At IMR, these are often Gen Y’s and part time workers.
Source: Dawn Piebenga interviewed by Paul Buckingham
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