The Missing Link

A small boost can make a big difference

Written by Glenn Swain

During the spring of 2005, Abigail and Dan Wool became reluctant night owls. The two, along with their then 2-year-old son, Dean, had just moved to Phoenix from Southern California to start National Therapy Seminars, a company providing certified occupational therapist seminars in California in Abigail’s specialty of adult dysphagia.

Occupational therapists offering services in swallowing assessment, evaluation and intervention in California are required by law to demonstrate competency through post-professional education and training. Seminar attendees receive an Advanced Practice designation in their licensure; Abigail is one of only a handful of instructors certified to provide classroom hours toward the Advanced Practice designation. She facilitates at least six weekend seminars a year and does in-house consulting at hospitals and other medical facilities. She averages more than 30 students for each seminar.

After buying a mailing list and sending out 10,000 flyers, the Wools were suddenly inundated with mailings, faxes and phone call orders from medical professionals needing to renew their certification. After putting Dean to bed, Abigail and Dan were processing orders manually, which took an immense amount of time.

“We scheduled four seminars and we had no idea how many people were going to show up,” Abigail says. “We got many orders, lots of phone calls and faxes. We were getting overwhelmed. We had to do everything by hand. It was a six- or seven-step process. We had to take their credit card number, get online and verify, withdraw the information and then get approval. Then we had to send them a receipt and confirmation. We were staying up late into the night doing this. We thought the next time around we have to make this a much simpler process.”

“It probably took us 10 minutes or more per order to log it, get cleared by the credit card company, manually go into Word and print out a confirmation and receipt, mail it, then enter all the information into our database,” Dan adds.

Through a business contact, Dan, a director at Phoenix-based Barclay Communications, contacted a San Francisco programmer to set up an e-commerce section for the National Therapy Seminars Web site. Often, spending money on something new can be both a challenge and scary proposition for a start-up business, and for the Wools it was no different. The initial outlay for the Web site and logo design was $5,000; it took another $1,500 to add the e-commerce element, but was well worth it for the couple. The sleepless nights and extra work were taking a toll. It was a no-brainer.

“We knew from the success of our first seminars that people were going to come,” Abigail says. “It was an investment, in that we’re not going to go through this again where it’s taking up all of this time. We really needed it to be streamlined and easier.”
With the registration process now simplified, seminar participants go to the Web site, fill in their information, pay online and receive a receipt. Before the e-commerce addition, orders off the Internet trickled in; the vast majority of orders were done by phone or fax. Often, participants printed out the order from the Web site and mailed it in. Thanks to e-commerce, Abigail says that more than 80 percent of orders are made directly on the Web site.

“We were both shocked by the dramatic change for the good that it made,” Dan says. “Now we do very little, it manages itself. Everything is generated online. We also had the programmer create a terminal so we can go into it and manually do an order if we need.”

“More people today want the ease of just going to the Web site to sign up and not have to deal with mailing in a form or calling and reading out a credit card number over the phone,” Abigail says. “It’s a time saver for people.”

Although the e-commerce addition to her Web site immediately gave Abigail more time to plan other seminars and think of ways to expand her business to other medically-related areas, the impact is also being felt in her personal life. It has emancipated her from the time-consuming drudgery of processing orders manually to tending to her newborn James, who was born in August. She still may not be getting a full night’s sleep, but now the cause has changed: It’s James who needs the attention rather than another stack of orders. “Like James, our company is growing slowly,” Abigail says.