After you are thoroughly trained and confident in your skills, you are probably going to want to cut out the middle man (the national service), and contract with local physicians yourself. There is much money to be paid in launching out in this direction. You will first need to make sure that you have a good home office set up including a good computer system, quality printer, fax machine, and adequate office space. You will also need to decide how much you will charge for your services and what services you will offer. Are you willing to find addresses for letters? Are you willing to print the reports? Are you willing to mail letters? It is important not to undercharge for your services as this drives rates down in your area. The idea for a successful business is to charge competitively but to offer a few additional services. Start up Expenses Start up expenses vary greatly depending upon how many clients you want initially and if you intend to work from a home office or rent office space. You must figure the expense for an initial mass mailing, advertising expenses, initial office set up, and how you will pay for the dictation equipment, and or digital services. Most small MT businesses could get off the ground with just a few thousand dollars.Finding the Clients At this point, you are ready to find some clients. The first step is to take a survey of the physicians in your area. You want to ask the office manager the following questions to determine the need in your specific area:Do they have on-site transcription? -How much experience do they require? -What type of dictation equipment do they use- tapes or digital? Then you will want to create an excellent flyer outlining your services, and to do a mass mailing to physicians in your area.

Make sure you keep a list of the physicians that you will be mailing to, and then follow up with a telephone call to the office manager.A list of selling points for going with a service rather than having someone in-house do the transcription is as follows: -Save office space. -Save money on benefits packages. -Have vacation coverage. -Turn around time is faster because the focus is just on MT and not other office tasks. Once you get the appointment with the office manager or the physician, you need to sell them on the idea of using you as opposed to handwriting their records, or having someone in-house do the work. The benefits of transcription over handwriting are as follows:-HIPAA compliance. -Less mistakes. Explain that if the doctor is brought into court and asked to read what they have written but they cannot decipher their own handwriting, it could pose a legal situation. Additionally, if referring doctors cannot read the faxed record, and mistakes are made, it could pose legal issues. Also, you should emphasize why the physician should choose you to do his transcription. Some selling points include the following:-Quality transcription -Confidentiality of information -Excellent turn around times (TAT) -You use state of the art equipment -You are willing to do STAT reports whenever necessaryBeing OrganizedOnce you have established a few clients and are happily working at home for yourself making good money, you will realize that you need to keep track of income and expenses for tax purposes. There are several ways to do this. One is to rely on an accounting software program like Quick books. You can also hire an accountant who will have you drop off your receipts and bank statements monthly. You can also keep records yourself but this should be done in an organized way. It is suggested that you take a general bookkeeping or accounting course to make sure that you are doing this correctly. Also, it is never a bad idea to consult briefly with an attorney when doing a new business start up to make sure that you are complying with all local, state, and federal laws. Some people like to set up their business as a corporation, S-Corp, or sole proprietorship; others will do a limited liability corporation.

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