How To Run A Chiropractic Office That Gives You Your Life Back

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret about our profession - even the most incredible healers run the risk of burnout.

I now work with thousands of chiropractors and holistic healers, and I've been blown away by some of their stories: their data is skyrocketing, their practices are booming, and they're having incredible patient outcomes.

And then one day, they wake up and think, I just can't face the practice today. That burnout comes. I hope this isn't happening to you. But if it is, we are here to support you.

Today, I'm going to share with you the secrets to make sure you avoid burnout, or if you're already there, how to completely reverse the tide.

Secret No. 1: Understand Your Leadership DNA

You are innately born with a leadership style, a natural inclination towards certain tasks that you truly enjoy doing. Picture it as the blueprint of your inner leader, much like the DNA in your cells that guides your body to grow, adapt, and thrive. Your leadership DNA is what sets you apart.

To better understand that within your practice, answer this question - what are you doing on a daily basis that you love doing and wish you could spend more time doing?

Well, we’ve found that some doctors love more interaction with patient care. They don't necessarily want to deal with a team. They don't want to have to deal with the marketing or the systems. They just want to take care of patients.

Other doctors love hiring, onboarding, working with team members and building the team. They would rather spend more time doing that than actually being with patients.

We're all different, and that is the beautiful thing about this profession is you can choose what you spend your time doing. That is your leadership DNA.

To find joy and happiness in your work, you've got to give yourself permission to spend more time doing the very thing that fuels you. And the things that you don't find joy in doing, you can delegate.

We do a technique called “Time Study” where for two weeks, you write down, hour by hour, what you’re doing and spending your time on. This is what we call our cleaning your plate exercise in one of our programs.

It's identifying the amount of time that you're spending doing things that are below your pay grade. They are things that you shouldn't be doing because they're not the most viable things that the leader of the organization should be doing.

Can you think of a few of those things? Can you think of how much time you're spending doing things that don't drive as much value? They're certainly not the things that fuel your joy and happiness.

So doing this exercise allows you to see the things that you need to delegate and the things that you need to spend more time doing because they are the most valuable and bring the most joy to the practice.

Before I go into secret number two, I have to ask - are you ready to scale to 6-figure months? Are you ready to hit $100K in collections each and every month? If you are, then you need our Double Your Profits Formula.

The doctors in our community are diving deep into this formula, thoroughly examining and grasping its intricacies. And guess what? It's practically doubling their revenues. So if you're ready to double your revenues, just comment below I'm in in this video, “How To Run A Chiropractic Office That Gives You Your Life Back”, and we will make sure you get a free copy of the Double Your Profits Formula. Or if you want that delivered quickly, just DM me directly on Facebook, and one of our team members will make sure you get your free copy.

Secret No. 2: Understand Joy Comes From Progress

Human behavior means we need to progress to feel good about our work. Take a quick look at your last 90 days or even your entire year. Did you see progress? Do you feel like you're moving forward? Or do you feel stuck?

Feeling stuck means you're going to feel a negative connection to your practice. You're going to feel failure, like I'm not achieving the goals that we know we're capable of.

Now this framework that I’m about to share with you literally changed the way I viewed my practice. I began to understand the fundamental mechanisms, which are the flywheel effects. A flywheel is something that is heavier on one side, and as it begins to pick up momentum, it's harder to slow down.

Starting a practice takes a tremendous amount of energy, and the same goes for accelerating its success. But once that flywheel gets moving, it's nearly impossible to slow it down. And that's where I want you to be because that's where you're going to find joy. Let’s talk about these flywheel mechanisms.

Mechanism No. 1: Attraction

I’ve found that a lot of doctors have an ideal number of new patients that they want in their practices, but they haven't gained certainty about attracting that number of new patients, especially at a predictable new patient acquisition cost.

Large healthcare organizations become deeply committed and intensely focused on this metric because they understand that once they've established their systems to reliably achieve a set cost per new patient, it opens the door to increasing their marketing investments and, in turn, attracting more new patients.

The reason why you're not spending more money on your marketing is because you don't have certainty that it's going to produce more new patients. Certainty in the attraction flywheel comes from putting in more marketing processes than just paid ads.

To really nail it, you need to understand the six lead funnels of a practice. Once you do, you can confidently build your attraction mechanism, knowing that if you invest this much effort, you can reliably expect this many new patients to walk through your door.

When you get serious about your marketing, you’ll see a dramatic improvement in the acceleration of your practice.

Mechanism No. 2: Conversion

Now that we're attracting a volume of new patients, we've got to convert them at a high rate. This means moving a patient from just being interested to fully trusting in the transformative power of your practice, and they’re willing to overcome any obstacles to get that transformation.

Now we know the two biggest obstacles in conversion are time and money. Well, think about this for a second. If we don't have a patient who's willing to commit the time and money, it just means we haven't educated a patient enough to the level where they genuinely care about exploring the possibilities.

If your car broke down, and you're stuck on the side of the road, most of us would be pretty motivated to figure out our next move, right? Are we going to wait for a tow truck? And if the vehicle needs serious repairs, you'd likely find a way to cover the cost because, let's face it, most of us can't do without our vehicles.

Now, why aren't we treating our health the same way? What have we done to truly make people understand that a better quality of life is within reach and that the financial hurdles can often be overcome with a little bit of effort?

So conversion is where you're going to see a massive multiplier effect on the growth of your practice. But you've got to become an expert at helping patients see what's possible with your care plans and put in the frameworks to help them overcome the time and money obstacles.

Mechanism No. 3: Fulfillment

This is all about delivering your services to patients, and it starts with them coming into the practice, doing their home care, and getting the treatment you prescribed.

So the exam and case acceptance team hands the patient over to the front desk team member. This member is working closely with the treatment team to make sure the patient is engaged, to make sure that they're making their appointments from re-exam to re-examed, and that they're showing up to their appointments.

They know when the next appointment is, they know what health goals are in this sprint between re-exam and re-examed, and they're excited for the changes that are happening within their body.

As I built this, I had a team where I had one rehab assistant helping me with fulfillment, and believe me, I dedicated everything I possibly could to that rehab assistant who protected my time to do the most valuable things I needed to do.

But as my practice grew, and I had better attraction, and better conversion, I had to grow that from one rehab team member to two, to three, to four, and I continued to delegate everything I possibly could until I couldn't delegate the treatment anymore, like the chiropractic adjustment or something a clinician can only do.

So guess what I did? I hired another clinician, and we began to build that attraction and momentum mechanism to create enough demand that we needed two doctors. And then eventually three. That’s how you continue to grow and scale your fulfillment team which leads us to mechanism number four.

Mechanism No. 4: Retain And Refer

It's 10 times easier to get an existing patient to come back and go through a treatment plan with you than it is to go find a brand new patient. That’s because of the trust factor. They already like us, know us, and trust us. So we want to make sure that we're retaining our patients, we're giving them new opportunities - a new vehicle to solve whatever their health goal is now.

In the beginning, it might have been a treatment plan to solve their pain. But now, we want to give them a treatment plan to maintain a high level of health. There might even be a plan where patients want optimized health because you and I both know, that's a whole different ball game than just getting by.

Once you have all this in motion, and you feel the momentum of growth in the practice, and you're focused on doing the things you love in the practice, you're delegating tasks, you're building and leading a data-driven team, and driving your practice forward, suddenly, burnout seems like a distant memory. You will feel incredible, and you’ll be back to loving and enjoying every moment.

Secret No. 3: The Doctor-Preneur

This one’s all about embracing your entrepreneurial spirit. It’s where you have a lot of desire to grow the practice. You love being a clinician, but you also want to scale the business. You enjoy the business side. You actually like crunching numbers and marketing. You love building this flywheel.

If you're trapped as an operator, you're going to have a hard time finding joy. So this focus of understanding what you love to do in the practice has everything to do with what we call your Evolution Roadmap. Your provider evolution is helping you understand the different roles that a provider can play, a practice owner can play, and it starts with operations.

Let’s dive into the first persona: the operator. The role of the operator is to ensure the team is at a high skill level that’s needed to perform their respective roles.

Operators are the ones setting up the systems in the practice, ensuring there's a smooth process in place to get things done efficiently. They're the ones keeping everyone accountable, making sure team members are aligned with the practice's vision and values. In essence, they're the engine that keeps the practice running on all cylinders, propelling it forward.

But not all doctors love to be operators. The next level is what we call the leader. A leader is where you hire an operator and begin delegating operations. That operator begins doing the hiring, the onboarding, the training, and the cadence of accountability so that you can focus on the very things that you love doing.

A leader builds and scales and eventually delegates some of the patient treatment, so that they have an associate doctor, a junior role, a senior role, and they lead that team. They have an admin meeting that's a cadence for the leadership team to make sure the organization is growing healthy and profitable.

The leader role then can take the next step, which is what we call the high performer. A high performer is where you're really entrepreneurial. You love patient care, but that's not where you want to spend your time. You would rather delegate the patient care. You have to have at least two associates in place to take this step because this means you're now stepping out of patient care and only working on the business instead of in the business.

We've got a lot of doctors taking this step in our community, and again there's nothing wrong with that. I love patient care. There's nothing that fulfills me more than working with patients. But I recognized that I could impact more patients' lives by helping more doctors become better business owners. By doing so, we're essentially creating better systems that ultimately transform more patients' lives. It's like a ripple effect, and I find it incredibly rewarding.

So once you get to that high performer level, you now have time to dive into marketing strategies. You actually have time to work on practice budgets. You can now focus on analyzing your data and making sure everyone on the team is doing their part. You're now leading this team to scale an organization.

Now you might even take this one step further like the other members of our community who are now learning the frameworks of building multiple locations. We call that the expander role.

In fact, we just had an amazing event last summer in Chicago called, “The Mind Of An Expander”, where we spent three days studying and analyzing how a single location goes to two locations. How do two locations go to four locations? How do four locations go to 20 locations? 

That's a very different skill set. You have to have an entire infrastructure in place. And we have the frameworks in place if that is where you desire to go.

This is directly connected to your identity. It is what drives joy and happiness. If your life is not the way you thought it was going to turn out, there's internal conflict. That's where we feel like we're a disappointment, or we wish we were doing something that we're not.

It’s like there are invisible forces pulling us in a direction that we don't necessarily want to go. That's what drives disappointment, and I don't want you to be there. I want you to be in an identity of joy peace and happiness.

That’s because if you're burnt out, there are people who need a leader and aren’t finding one. It means that there are patients not getting taken care of. It's like you're holding back from unleashing the full extent of your potential. And trust me, you're capable of extraordinary things.

I'm just going to be real with you in the fact that I've been there. I've been at burnout where I didn't know if I could show back up to the practice. I had to get real with myself about where I was spending my time, and why I wasn't finding joy.

That's when I began discovering these frameworks of understanding identity and understanding what brought me a tremendous amount of happiness. When I began delegating, building, and focusing on the things that I really found joy in, that’s how we built the most successful practice in our state.

The next thing I know we're building a software company. The next thing I know I'm helping doctors across the world. You have that potential. You have the capability to live whatever life you want to live. You just have to make the decision that you're going to put in the work, you're willing to pay the price to find that happy state and to do whatever it takes to not be in burnout.

Now the reality is some of you are going to need help in that. It's hard to do that by yourself. So I'm inviting you to join our free Facebook group, “The Data-Driven Practice.” It's where I hang out and engage with you, or drop more frameworks of how to understand data, your marketing data, your case acceptance data, and your front desk data.

It’s where you can join the “Practice Profits Challenge,” which is a 5-day challenge where you can come be with me virtually. We’ll train you and help you put these frameworks into place. This challenge could be the very step that puts you on a trajectory where the concept of burnout becomes a distant memory.

You'll be so immersed in joy that you won't even recall what burnout felt like, all because you've discovered fulfillment in embracing your true identity. So join us, and turn your data into dollars. The next challenge starts soon. I will see you on the inside.