Latest / Medsolve Dynamics / The Half-Million-Dollar Anchor
Transcript
- Yoel Bakas: Just this past week, I had an amazing conversation with a medical physicist friend of mine. And guess what? The number has not moved in 20 years. How much is the new thing? Half a million dollars. For those of you who were my customers for all these years, you recall me telling you to budget half a million dollars for whatever the next new thing was. And here's the funny thing. When we talked just the other day, it was the exact same number. As it was back in the day. Onboard imaging, half a million. Arc delivery, half a million. The next iteration of arc delivery, half a million. Half a million. couch upgrade on the older platform, maybe 250,000. The same couch on the new platform, half a million dollars. And that's funny because that number is not based on anything real. It's based on an anchor. And an anchor is what a vendor gives you to set your budget. That's what I used to give you to set your budget. But it's not defended on a business plan, on your business plan. So the most important thing you can do is not necessarily to negotiate that number, but to truly understand the business plan behind it for you, for your practice. Because then you can apply that same math. to whether it makes sense to purchase it. So just because the market accepted a number a long time ago and the new capability gets fitted to it doesn't necessarily mean you have to sign off on it. What it means is you have to do the math. So because it's an anchor, start with building a business plan for every new thing. Whether it's a piece of software, whether it's a new thing for your Linux, always build a business plan. We're here to help.