Sustainability in Business series features entrepreneurs based in Portland, Oregon, who practice sustainable marketing and promote sustainability in business practices.
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Charles Grey owns Starside Healing Arts, a Chinese medicine healing services provider. He shared his views on sustainability in business at our recent meeting.
For Charles, sustainability is about relationships. “I can’t imagine doing cookie-cutter medicine,” he said. Because time is the main factor in healing services provision, many doctors and healers stack patients to achieve the best financial results. To do so, they spend very short time with patients from the outset. “For me intake is a crucial part of treatment.” Charles’s acupuncture appointments run for an hour, Thai massage can take up to two hours.
Relationships are the strongest element of healing and marketing. People have to like you to come back and to refer their friends. The accepted wisdom in the alternative health-care industry is that retention is a measure of success. Traditional health care fixes things that are broken. The goal of alternative health care is to maintain and improve health. Cultivating relationships depends on education and follow up. Both provide context and care.
Charles is optimistic about his and the medicine’s prospects. “Americans spend a lot of money of stuff they don’t need,” he said. “We’re going in the direction of investing in things that matter. People are learning to live more wisely and better.” Increased awareness of the consequences of our behavior is behind this as is a better connection to the whole world. “We’ll be taking better care of one another as well as ourselves.”
