When Erin Nichol was just two years old her father was diagnosed with Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2), a genetic condition that causes tumours to grow on auditory nerves. Upon receiving surgery to remove the tumours, her father became deaf in both ears. Nichol says this experience made her acutely aware of the lack of healthcare resources available to residents of rural towns. Today, she’s working to help fill some of those critical gaps with her own practice.
Inspired by her father’s healthcare journey and her mother’s Bracebridge audiology practice, Nichol opened the doors to Lake Huron Audiology in 2021. The clinic is located in Kincardine, Ontario, a town of about 8,000 locals, and specializes in hearing and vestibular testing. Nichol is especially eager to help patients who are struggling with dizziness. “They are often pushed under the radar in our healthcare system,” she says. “They might tell their family doctor, and then their doctor might refer them on to an Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) specialist, which can take two years. From there, that ENT specialist may not really be able to offer them much help, and then they’ll be sent on for further testing, which is another two year wait. Simply put, people are waiting over four years or more with these symptoms.” Nichol’s clinic not only offers Kincardine residents an alternative to this four year wait, but it saves them a drive to testing clinics in urban centres that are hours away.
Currently, Lake Huron Audiology has two employees, Nichol and a receptionist who helps with patient communication and scheduling appointments. As a result, finding the time to focus on business development was challenging. So, when Nichol came across the Racialized and Indigenous Supports for Entrepreneurs (RAISE) program she saw an opportunity to help take her business to the next level. RAISE is a provincially-funded, comprehensive grant initiative that supports Indigenous, Black, and other racialized entrepreneurs in Ontario who are on the road to starting or scaling their businesses. In addition to grant funding, the program provides entrepreneurs with access to business development training, business coaching, and culturally responsive support services through the Parkdale Centre for Innovation’s Early Stage Entrepreneurship Program.
With the help of her Parkdale Centre advisors, Nichol built out a business roadmap to help her identify the key challenges she was facing within her business and create a plan to address them. The process helped Nichol get her ideas onto paper, and create measurable goals to help track her progress. Nichol says it was the first time she had analyzed past revenue and expenses in order to forecast growth. This helped her set targets for how many patients she would need to see each month in order to meet her goals, and also helped her assess how she should balance her time between hearing aids, her largest source of revenue, and vestibular testing, her newer offering.
With revenue targets in place, Nichol turned her attention to customer research and marketing. She describes her marketing tactics as ‘old-school’, but with first-hand knowledge of her customer base she felt confident that community-level marketing would provide the best results. So, Nichol focused primarily on print media in newspapers and doctors’ offices, and became involved with organizations such as the local Business Improvement Association (BIA) and Chamber of Commerce to make connections within the community. She also sent out questionnaires to her current patient list to get a better sense of what types of symptoms they were struggling with the most. “It was interesting and it was good for me to know because there is such a wide range of equipment to choose from. [This helped] me decide which equipment I should be focusing on acquiring,” she shares.
Using her questionnaire results as a guide, Nichol recently purchased her vestibular testing equipment, and is now focused on creating the right processes and testing flows for her patients. She says she’s not sure she would have taken the leap to purchase the equipment had it not been for the RAISE Program. Not only did the grant funds help with the cost of the equipment, but more importantly, she says forecasting revenue confirmed its purchase would be a worthwhile investment for her business. “It was nice to have that nudge of encouragement to see it through.”
