Becoming My Own Boss

As I was thinking about my post for today, I suddenly realized it has been 22 years since I have worked in an office outside of my home.  I guess my worries about not being disciplined enough to stick with meeting deadlines, keeping my references up-to-date, taking on new clients, or even taking my career in new directions turned out to be unfounded, because all these years later, I still seem to be doing okay.

It was on December 13, 1991, that I landed my very first client and began my own local service.  Now you might wonder how I remember all of these dates. Believe me, my memory is not that good, as much as I would love it to be.  What I have done over the years is keep a journal of my career.  It is very easy to do and can give you a sense of where your career goes as you move through the years and lines and lines and lines of production. I have a day planner, a hard copy planner purchased at OfficeMax, where I like to jot down notes for ideas for articles, handouts for my students, phone numbers, favorite web sites, and my list goes on and on. One section is devoted to my career journal, and all I do is mark down the date and place of work, when I change jobs, a new client, my AHDI activities, and I even include when I would get a call for a potential client, even if it resulted in not getting the account.  Anything I feel is significant relating to my career, I jot it down.  Whenever I have any doubts about my abilities, my skill set, my confidence in general (and we all have days like that when you think—what am I doing here?!!), I get out my list of accomplishments and activities, and that snaps me back to reality pretty quickly. 

My first client turned out to be one of my busiest.  It even involved working weekends, because what I picked up on Friday night, I had to return on Monday morning.  So my Saturday mornings were spent at my desk.  You may find this hard to believe, but this physician could see up to 100 patients in a day, and he dictated on every single one of them.  That was usually about 2 days a week when he would be seeing only postop patients and checking their incisions.  He did a lot of endoscopic carpal tunnel surgery.  He eventually added an associate to his practice, which made this account almost a 2-person operation, but I managed to keep it up pretty well.  Because I gave them such excellent service and turn-around, if I did have to have an occasional day off or just had to delay return of his work, they were fine with that.  

I will never forget the one night when the doc was dictating his chart notes after office hours, and in the background, he was playing a video of himself lecturing on carpal tunnel surgery.  He played it so loud, that his dictation sounded like an echo, only the echo was saying something completely different.  Talk about a challenge! I told him the next day I was going to charge him double for that day’s work. When I told him why, he just laughed and walked down the hall.  I did not charge him double, but he never did that again.  I think he appreciated that I did not go wild MT on him and just expressed my somewhat displeasure at the difficulty of transcribing 2 very loud voices speaking at the same time, but I kept it professional and friendly and even joking a bit about it.  I believe it is true if you treat people the way you want to be treated, most of the time, they will return that back to you in kind.  It has worked well for me more often than not.

Throughout 1992 I picked up p.r.n. accounts.  One was a hospital about 45 minutes from my home and the rest were handling backup for MT friends with their own services.  We would help each other out during vacations or any time someone needed to be away.  The hard part about p.r.n. accounts is you can have days where they all need you on the same day.  I did have a handful of days where I started around 9 a.m. and finished up at midnight.  Thankfully, there were not too many of those days.  It may be good for the bank account, but not so good on the mind and body.  In February of 1993, I did get another permanent account for a small family practice group, so between my 2 regular clients and my p.r.n. clients, I had a very busy service and felt very proud of what I created and ran right up until a few months before my move to Idaho.   My husband, Joe, accepted a job in February of 1994 with a large ENT practice in Idaho, began his job in June, and I stayed behind to handle selling our home.  I wound up selling our house twice, which also resulted in my closing down my service a bit prematurely because obviously at the time, I had no idea I would have to go through selling my house a second time. 

I’ll explain about that and my quick jump right back into running my service 2 short weeks after moving across the country next time.  Enjoy your day!

Going Home

It was in the summer of 1989 that I started my new job at the local service in downtown Akron.  I remember my mom thought I was absolutely insane for quitting a job that had benefits with paid vacation, but as I explained to her, it is not healthy to stay in a job in which you are miserable if there is any way to get out of that type of situation.  Giving up the benefits was actually a benefit in itself because I was going to some place where I knew I could again enjoy the work I loved.  That more than made up for the so-called benefits I was losing. 

My main account was for a large hospital from the Cleveland area.  This service also transcribed   the H&Ps for St. Thomas, the very hospital I left, and usually one of the MTs would work a later shift and do any H&P dictations that came in up through 7 o’clock in the evening.  When she was off, I would stay and do those H&Ps for her. So some days I was there from 9 a.m. to around 7:30 or 8 at night.  But I loved the work and never had a problem with those long days.  It felt a little ironic that I was sometimes transcribing reports for the hospital I left behind, but it was great to be so familiar with those dictators. 

One of the MTs I worked with also had a home office, as she was paying for her college and needed the extra money.  I used to marvel at the fact that she would drink a 6-pack of Coke everyday (not diet Coke) and smoke cigarettes all day long.  My boss was a smoker, so she had no problem if anyone wanted to smoke at their desk. Luckily my desk was at the front of the office and the smokers were in the back, so I really did not notice it very much.  I guess she had to have all that caffeine to keep awake because of having a full- and part-time job on top of going to school.  Oh, to have that much energy today! The more she talked about that home office, the more I thought that might be something to try.  I had another friend who also worked from home, so it was sounding more and more intriguing to me.  I wondered if I would have the discipline to get up every day and get the work done without having to leave the house other than to pick up tapes.  Could I get everything done and returned the next day without procrastinating and thus having to work until 2 a.m. to get it all done?  

  My Home Office

As luck would have it, I had the opportunity to get my hands on a word processor with Word Perfect DOS (remember that software?), so I asked my boss if I could give working from home a try.  As long as the work got done, she really did not care where it was done, so about a year after I started with her, I set up shop at home.  I was still her employee, so this was not my service just yet, but it was my first steps into having a home office.  I found that I absolutely loved working from home and never looked back.  I was a little surprised at how well I handled the self-discipline I needed to make sure I met my deadlines.  It is not that I thought I would put off the work, but I was a little concerned that maybe it would be hard to not let distractions get the better of me, like chatting on the phone or playing with my dogs, and thus getting behind.  It never happened.  I was able to handle the phone, the pups, and even breaks with relatively no problems. 

I also did occasionally go into the office when H&Ps needed to be done in the evenings, but the majority of my time was working from home.  About a year into it, the account I was working on was unfortunately going away.  They were very happy with my work, but as this was an account from Cleveland, which was about 45 minutes away, they had found a service that was right in town, and they would save a lot from having to drive that distance everyday for pick-ups and deliveries.   My boss did not want to lose me, but at that particular time, there were no other accounts for me to work on and no new accounts were coming in, so the most I could do would be the H&Ps when that was needed. 

They say timing is everything, and that was never more true for me, because the very day I was told I would be losing that account was the very day I got a call from the MT I mentioned above who worked part-time from home.  She had gotten a call from a physician’s office who wanted her to do his dictations on a regular basis.  He had a very large practice, and it was going to be a lot of dictation.  She felt she had no time to take this account on, so she called me, having no idea that I was losing the account from Cleveland.  I was terrified and ecstatic at the same time!  It was such a relief knowing I could possibly have work to replace what I was losing, but what would I charge, how would I handle turn-around time, what references would I need?  Those were just a few of the hundreds of questions that were running through my head. 

I needed the work, so I had to put those questions away and dive in to this new venture.  I did have a general idea of going rates in my area, so I knew what I wanted to charge, but I had no idea if this guy would go for it.  I pulled a resume together in short order and headed over to his office the next day.  Again, the timing was in my favor, because they were in an almost desperate situation to get someone on board because of the amount of dictation and at that point having no one to get it done.  They quickly saw by my resume that I had a lot of experience, and I even explained about my certification, which also impressed him and his office manager, since of course they did not know MTs had any kind of credentialing.  The hardest part for me was telling them my fee, how I counted the work for billing and such.  They were fine with it, and thus in December of 1991, I had my very first client!

I ran a very successful service through the summer of 1994, when I found myself moving from Ohio to Idaho, and thinking it will be nice to take about 6 months off and not work at all.  I wanted to get used to my new state, get things settled in my house, and get over my homesickness.  But 2 weeks after my arrival, you guessed it, I got a call from a practice needing help with their dictation.  No 6 months off for me! 

Before getting into that, I’ll talk a little more about my experience with my Ohio service, but let’s save that for another day.  Until then, have a great day and thanks for reading!