Although there a lot of intesting presentations at this year’s Healthcare Staffing Summit, one in particular stood out to PRN Funding’s president, Philip Cohen.  He asked that we share some details of Verne C. Harnish’s presentation for our blog readers.

Harnish is the CEO of Gazelles Inc., which is an outsourced corporate university for midsized firms.  He’s also the founder of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization and the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs among many other accolades. Click here to read more about Verne C. Harnish’s bio.

His presentation revolved around four simple questions that any business owner should be asking their clients on a weekly basis:

How are you doing?

What’s going on in your industry/neighborhood?

What do you hear about our competitors?

How are we doing?

The answers to these questions will help you get to you know clients more on a personal level so that you can adapt and serve their needs in a more professional manner.  Philip Cohen thought this was a great concept to share with our business owner blog readers.

At this year’s Healthcare Staffing Summit, Barry Asin (EVP & Chief Analyst of Staffing Industry Analysts Inc.) shared five trends to watch in the healthcare staffing marketplace for the upcoming year.  We’ve decided to share his points with our readers:

1. There’s a limited supply of practitioners, but there’s a modest increase in the number of nurses.  New grads, male nurses, foreign-born nurses and older workers who are interested in a career change.
2. There’s ongoing growth and demand.  Since 1992, there has been a 50 percent increase in healthcare employment. 
3. There’s a healthy competitive environment.  In 2006, 21 medical staffing agencies were over the $50 million mark, and 13 were over the $100 million mark, and the top ten firms owned 40 percent of the market.  There is a lot of growth in specialty industries such as radiology, pharmacy, CRNA and international recruiting, but nursing is still the largest.
4. Regulations / government intervention is portrayed in a positive light because it helps with nurse-patient ratios, overtime restrictions, licensing, immigration reform and visa shortages.
5. Technology trends are both good and bad.  About 12 percent of facilities have adopted a VMS and another 44 percent plan to adopt them in the future.  This is a slow train coming for the industry as a whole.  It’s only a matter of time before everyone’s using a VMS.  The internet has helped keep recruiting costs down with the rise in company web sites, job boards and the social networking.

In general Barry said that the public medical staffing company results were positive in the second quarter, and the trends are remaining very strong.  Net income and gross margins continue to grow.

Barry also mentioned that a good opportunity for medical staffing agencies is to look into non-healthcare-related positions within a hospital, which are usually filled by temporary workers. Examples of some of these positions include: janitors and cafeteria workers.

PRN Funding’s present had the opportunity to attend Staffing Industry Analyst’s 2007 Healthcare Staffing Summit in Chicago last month.  Written below are a couple of thoughts he wanted to communicate with PRN Funding’s blog readers:

With over 500 attendees, this was by far the largest Healthcare Staffing summit of all time.

The majority of attendees were involved with the per diem and travel side of nurse staffing.

As locum tenens and allied health staffing continues within the industry of healthcare staffing, these companies were well represented at the conference as well.  In fact, some of the presentations were geared specifically for these industries.

The depth and breadth of the speakers were impressive.

Overall, the conference was very well attended and very well-run.  It was a real learning experience for everyone.

We look forward to attending the 2008 show in San Francisco!

Theo Francis wrote a post The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog about the nurse shortage and some of its causes.  Although the outlook looks bleak, he mentioned a unique source of new nurses–Career-changers.  Crediting the Boston Globe, Francis explains how the healthcare system can cope with the nursing shortage by “tapping mid-career professionals who go to nursing school for a change of pace or after taking early retirement.” 

Click here to read the entire post with reader comments: Nursing crunch may be hard to fix.

This article appeared in the September 17 issue of the American Staffing Association’s Staffing Week E-newsletter.  Although aimed at all staffing agencies, medical staffing companies could be affected even more by client bankruptcy because the majority of America’s hospitals are already operating in the red.  The bottom line is to continuously monitor your clients’ credit terms and their payment trends.

With the U.S. economy showing some weakness in areas such as home construction and mortgage financing, staffing firms might begin to worry about the financial strength of their clients. Economic downturns can lead to business failures that put companies that provide services in troubled sectors of the economy—such as staffing firms—at increased risk.

Staffing company owners often wonder whether their firms have any basis for claiming priority status for unpaid client invoices when a client is in bankruptcy. Unfortunately, unless the claim is secured in some way, the answer generally is no.

Because employee wage claims enjoy priority status in bankruptcy, staffing firms commonly ask whether unpaid client invoices can be treated as a claim for unpaid wages. In most cases, however, the staffing firm has already paid its employees when the client’s claim in bankruptcy is filed, so courts treat such claims as for unpaid vendor invoices, not wages.

Some years ago, ASA considered seeking an amendment to the federal bankruptcy law to grant priority status to staffing firm claims. The association was advised by bankruptcy experts that this would not be feasible. ASA was told that, since 1898, Congress has granted preferences to just two industries—farming and fishing—and then only in very limited circumstances and with a low dollar cap (currently $5,400) on the amount of the claim entitled to priority status.

The bankruptcy experts concluded that there was virtually no chance of success in getting preferential treatment for the staffing industry. It was unlikely that Congress could be persuaded that staffing firms are uniquely different from other business services or are suffering significantly greater hardship. Moreover, any relief granted would be very limited in terms of dollar amount.

Given the remote chances of success, and the limited relief even if the effort was successful, ASA decided not to pursue an amendment.

Because of the “supplier beware” legal environment created by the bankruptcy laws, it is always a good business practice, regardless of the state of the economy, for staffing firms to be careful about extending credit to clients and to closely monitor their receivables.

-Ed Lenz

PRN Funding, LLC will be exhibiting at the 2007 American Staffing Association (ASA) Conference in San Antonio, Texas in booth 324.  We’re excited to see some of our old friends and greet the many new faces that will be in attendance.  We’re also just as excited to learn about business trends in the overall staffing industry, particularly the medical staffing industry.  We received a brief preview of a seminar that we thought would be of particular interest to our current clients in an email from ASA last week entitled: .

Negotiate a Competitive Advantage and Grow Your Bottom Line

All of life is a negotiation. Are you a world class negotiator or just so-so?

For the most part, staffing industry growth slowed this year. So if the pie isn’t getting bigger, you need to grow your slice of it. Learning how to negotiate on value instead of price will help keep you ahead of the competition.

Many workshops at Staffing World 2007, Oct. 9–12 in San Antonio, will help you succeed in the year ahead. One of the most important will be Negotiation Boot Camp: How To Make Better Deals, with Ed Brodow.

When your clients are using clever new tactics for negotiating fees, margins, and indemnity clauses, do you have the confidence and diplomatic skills to get what you want while still leaving them with a sense of satisfaction? Register for Staffing World 2007 today and learn these critical skills.

Brodow, chief executive officer of Ed Brodow Seminars, best-selling author, and one of the nation’s most acclaimed and innovative experts on the art of negotiation, will share proven strategies used by successful negotiators for making deals and getting what you want out of life. You’ll learn how to negotiate staffing contracts and communicate more effectively with clients, suppliers, colleagues, and employees.

Brodow will discuss negotiating techniques he has developed for clients such as Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, Philip Morris, the Hartford, Johnson & Johnson, Hyatt, Revlon, Kimberly-Clark, and the Department of Defense.

Brodow is one of many top-notch experts who will be impressing Staffing World attendees. He is a nationally recognized television personality, and has appeared on PBS, Fox News, Inside Edition, Fortune Business Report (New York), and KRON-TV4 (San Francisco). His two-hour PBS negotiating special garnered rave reviews and his ideas have been showcased in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Professional Speaker, Smart Money, Readers Digest, and Selling Power. “Ed Brodow is the king of negotiators,” says Harvey Pitt, former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Q: Will you be attending the 2007 ASA Conference in San Antonio?