Discover Your Prime Mover And Skyrocket Your Chiro Practice

If you're ready to take your chiropractic practice to the next level, you need to focus on what we call the prime mover. It is the one thing that, if you can find and focus on it, it’s going to explode the growth of your practice.

The prime mover isn't just a concept; it's a dynamic force that, when harnessed correctly, can skyrocket your practice. So let’s delve deep into understanding, identifying, and strategically leveraging your prime mover.

Step 1: Shifting Focus

Building and scaling practices is no joke. It takes a lot of energy and focus. There are days when we just get exhausted and drained, and we need to recharge our batteries.

For me, I love mountain biking. In fact, we live where we live because down the road from me is a canyon where I literally can just ride my bike and be in the mountains for hours.

I was on a ride one day to clear my head. I had so much on my plate, such a busy schedule, and so many deadlines coming up that I just needed to unplug and make sure that I had the energy to serve the community I was called to serve —  just like you were called to serve your team and your patients. You've got to make sure that battery’s charged.

So, as I was up in the mountains riding, one of the things I noticed was that while I was getting clear in my head, my legs were getting tired. I started noticing that I was hitting every single rock. I was bouncing off roots and almost being thrown into the trees.

So I'm like, what am I doing? What is wrong with me? And I realized that as I was getting fatigued, I started focusing on the rocks, and on the tree roots. If we analogize that to your practice when we start getting fatigued, we actually start focusing on the problems. We start focusing on the things that need to be fixed, and we get obsessed with looking at all the things in the practice that need to be fixed.

I stopped for a second, and I really thought through what I was doing. Why am I hitting every single rock on this trail? I realized that I was focusing on them. That in which we look at, we tend to attract. So I had to shift my focus from the rocks to the clear path.

So, as I began climbing again, I stayed focused on where I wanted to go instead of what I wanted to avoid. Magically, I started avoiding all of the rocks and roots that I was running into. I was able to start accelerating my climb, and it was so much smoother and easier on my body. It was almost like a miracle.

It was such an analogy to being in practice and scaling a team that, too often, we get focused on the things that are in our way instead of focusing on the path.

As a leader, you've got to make sure that you understand the clear path for you and your team. Make sure they see that path every day, and they're staying focused on it so that we can smooth out this crazy thing that we call scaling.

So, step one is shifting focus. Let's shift it from the problems to shifting towards the clear path, and we're going to do that by finding your prime mover.

Your Prime Mover

Finding your prime mover is a lot like working with your patients. You have a process in working with your patients. It starts with a consultation, an exam, diagnostic testing, and then testing your hypothesis on those diagnoses to identify what the primary inflammatory trigger is and what’s continuing to drive chronic inflammation.

This whole concept of DC, Doctors of Chiropractic, seems more like Doctors of Chronic. We deal with a lot of patients who are stuck in chronic inflammation. As we know, uncontrolled chronic long-term inflammation is what breaks down tissue and begins changing the quality of function. That's where quality of life isn't there, and that's why these patients are suffering.

You're suffering in your practice because you have a breakdown of systems or a lack of systems. And if we have a lack of a system, then we don't have predictable outcomes. There are things in your practice that are driving chronic inflammation.

That's why you feel tension within your practice. You feel tension between team members. You feel frustrated that you have a good month followed by a bad month or maybe a few bad months, and now you’re stressed about paying overhead and payroll.

Step 2: Proper Diagnostic Process

Here at The Data Driven Practice, we want to remove that stress from you. There is a better way, and it's with a proper diagnostic process for your practice. To have a proper diagnostic process, you have to truly understand your numbers to be able to quickly assess those in a diagnostic way, just like you would an X-ray or looking at lab tests or an MRI.

You want to analyze the systems of your practice in a clear data dashboard. A data dashboard is where, at one glance, we can see all the systems of your practice. And with the BlueIQ app, you can actually see them by color.

Blue means that it's over-performing. Green means that it's on track, and we're winning. Yellow means it's slightly underperforming, and red means danger, or crisis, so pay attention!

The two colors that you want to pay attention to are, of course, red but also blue. These two mean that they're performing out of a normal range of operations, and if it continues, it's going to crash the practice.

Think about this for a second. If I came into your practice and unloaded 200 new patients into your practice today, do you have the systems to handle that? That would crash your practice. You don't have the systems built to handle that type of volume yet.

So, we want to make sure that we're paying attention to these two performance levels and analyzing the prime mover.

No matter the size, every person and every practice operates with the same number of systems. Picture it like a data waterfall, meaning that from one system, it moves into another, then another, and another. So whether you're a smaller practice or you're a multi-location site, you still have the same number of systems.

As we analyze the BlueIQ data dashboard, we can quickly assess where the big roadblock is. We can quickly assess the system that needs our attention because either it's blue or it's severely underperforming, and it’s red.

By giving focus to the systems and skills driving these areas, we can unlock remarkable transformations for your practice. In fact, there’s potential to double your profits once you grasp the true power of the prime mover.

Step 3: Build A Game Plan

So now that we’ve found the prime mover, we want to build a game plan. This is called a 90-day Sprint. It's our quarterly rhythm that we get into. We've identified the key metric that requires attention, and the next step is to dive into the process and figure out how to fine-tune it.

Now, I don't want you to go and try to fix this process yourself. Instead, I want you to sit down with your team and build a strategy for how they’re going to fix this.

I want you to ask them questions like what would you do? Where do you see the bottlenecks? Where do you see patients slipping through the cracks? What do you see as causing the problem of the outcomes? How do we improve it?

When a team member moves into the strategic mind, this is the frontal cortex moving them out of fear to faith, when they come up with a solution, they will own the solution. They will take responsibility for helping to implement it.

And you’ll be supporting and coaching them, and making sure they're coming up with the right system and processes to improve it. And when that prime mover hits its new goal, you and your team are going to celebrate!

Now this might happen before the 90 days are over, or it might take longer, but that's not as important as that we fixed it, and the team owns the process of fixing it, and that we now celebrate, acknowledge, and reward for what's just happened.

That celebration can be a team lunch, a barbecue in the park, going to the water park, a day at the spa, a cash reward —  come up with something that the team will be excited about.

When we gather to celebrate these achievements, we’re not just having a good time, we’re reinforcing the habit of identifying, strategically fixing, and implementing improvements which will take your practice to the next level. That is how you grow and scale a practice one prime mover at a time.

Now if you're as crazy about this process of scaling as I am, you must come join us at the “Practice Profits Challenge.” It's a free 10-day challenge where we'll connect with you in live sessions.

We're bringing together Data-DRIVEN Docs who are eager to transform their practices, shift from chaos to order, and transition from being the entire system to having a well-oiled operation.

We’re here to guide you from not knowing how to make data-driven decisions to absolutely owning them. We want to help you reach 6-figure months, and that’s what the challenge is all about. Click here to sign up, and I can't wait to work with you!