Chasing the long tail?

It's a been a great year for me. I hope you are feeling the same.
One of the things I like to each quarter of the year is look at how my business as gone and make any needed adjustments to it for the rest of the year. At the end of the year I take some time to review the year and dust off the business plan and make adjustments as needed.
We all love our practices working with people or animals or both, but may be somewhat ambivalent about the business side of our business.
One of the problems that I see with the body therapy world, a service business, is that we may get caught in the "Long Tail" of the service world. The long tail is a statistical term to describe an event over time. If we look at our practices as a service we may see some of the long tail in the way business has been: We open our doors and have a number of clients use our service, then someone else--the competition--opens their doors and our practice suffers. Rather than being happy that we have competition, which we seek for our own lives--we like that there are more than one oil change places driving price down--we get freaked out. Now instead of looking at our own business and why it's not doing as well, we chase after some other modality or product to offer, which returns us, if only briefly, peak before we're back in the long tail.
If you want to read more about this and some ideas on how to make the long tail profitable visit free articles at www.animalsi.com.