The challenge many new or existing nursing staffing agencies face is maintaining their contracts with hospitals, nursing homes, or long-term care facilities once you get the contracts. A lot of time and money is spent getting contracts, so the last thing you want is to lose the business you worked so hard to acquire.

The loss of a contract can be directly related to your actions or the actions of employees. Whatever the reason is that you lost the contract at the end of the reasoning it is just the fact that you lost potential revenue and future relationships with this facility. Getting these contracts back is one of the hardest things to do, if you can ever get the contract back once you’ve lost it.

That is why I really believe in creating a PR campaign with the contracts you have and maintaining the contracts by making the client feel that they are the most important thing to you. The reasons this is critical is that when problems arise, hopefully those problems are not the reason you are being withdrawn from future business.

In the early years of my career, I was working as an X-ray technologist for a large medical personnel agency. I always performed excellently on my assignments and tried to make the clients I dealt with happy. I was the type of employee that many of the hospitals were glad they came to help cover the day shift.

It wasn’t until I was promoted to salesperson that I realized how important it was for employees to represent the company well because those employees will make or break your company. But, we cannot always control how employees interact with our customers and therefore we will discover problems once we receive a call from the facility that had a negative interaction with our employees.

This negative interaction will sometimes leave a negative impact on the client, especially if it is the first time you refer someone, or if the client has experienced one negative candidate after another and we do nothing to fix the problem. The key to keeping contracts is dealing with problems as they arise and reminding the candidate that you are here to fix the problems.

I have found that building a relationship with your clients early on will not eliminate problems, but it will help them to quit the moment you have a problem. Hospitals’ biggest frustration with staffing agencies is the perceived lack of enthusiasm on the part of employees, who sometimes see us as if we just want to be paid for the warm body. Your job is to make your clients feel that you are creating a relationship with them for a lasting focus on your company’s mission.

I realized early on that it is less costly to talk to your clients up front once contracts are secured than to try to win back a lost contract. It is easier to change candidates than to try to win back a contract once you have lost it. Constantly speaking and communicating with your clients is critical and crucial to the success of your staffing agency.

You will work very hard to secure contracts, you will spend money to secure contracts, and you will communicate with potential clients and have meetings to tell your story to secure contracts. You are going to waste a lot of energy, the last thing you want is to lose business due to misunderstandings. Very simple rule of thumb: I have to keep the contracts, talk to your clients.

Maintaining contracts and securing contracts is the lifeblood of your staffing agency.