4 Methods To Reduce Stress In Your Chiro Practice

Why is it that only three percent of our profession has reached seven-figure practices?

Well, it's because it's a lot of work getting to seven figures, and there’s a direct connection between success and stress.

Today, I'm going to give you four great tips on how to handle that stress so that you can skyrocket your success with manageable stress. And stay tuned to the end because tip number four is a game changer.

Tip #1: Understanding Where Stress Comes From

Think about any business and how many moving parts go into making a business function. There's been a common thread in our profession that everybody must be cross-trained.

But think about this for a second: when there’s an emergency, we can't have everybody looking around waiting for somebody else to take action.

That would be like walking up to somebody who needs CPR. The first thing you do is clearly point to somebody and say, “Go call 911!” You don't say, “Somebody call 911!”

Well, we compare this to the practice of the daily whirlwind. The daily whirlwind is when we're in the flow of handling patients, phones are ringing, and patients are waiting to be treated. That's the whirlwind.

When we need to increase that flow, we have to have a team that is so well-trained that they understand their primary responsibility. That way, they know that they step up and handle the phones or handle the patients being put on care.

Now, if they don't have an immediate crisis, they step in for the cross-training and support the primary team member responsible for that role.

It's a very different training scenario, and it has changed the lives of our practice owners. That’s because they've finally shed the weight of practice stress. They're not worried about a patient not being taken care of or a phone not being answered because we have a team that is clear. They're clear on their primary role.

And when you get that right, your stress levels are going to come down, and it's going to change your world.

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Tip #2: How To Reduce Financial Stress

After working with so many of our practices, we have found this pattern where most practice owners have not nailed down their MVOO - their Minimum Viable Operating Overhead.

We all kind of cringe when we have to think about budgets, right? Nobody likes to have to put together a budget.

But there is a number that you need to know, and that is this: what am I committed to spending in the practice? Like every month, we have to meet this number before we turn profitable.

Well, this is understanding the financial systems that we have built for practices, and it's called the Profit Dashboard. It's a beautiful dashboard that allows you to see exactly how you're doing on your spending in your practice.

When you can see all of that laid out in real-time, it helps you have awareness; it's about taking control. Imagine having a system in place that ensures you hit your financial goals. Picture this: on the 13th of the month, you've got one target cleared; on the 10th, another one bites the dust. Maybe it takes until the 25th for you to conquer that final number – and that's when stress starts knocking on your door.

I want you to know your magic day - the day when we clear that MVOO. And when you do, that stress level is going to come down dramatically.

You also need a financial system in place that makes money coming in very easy and money going out a little harder. So there's a system in place for how we spend money.

It's not just a matter of swiping that credit card and snagging whatever catches your eye because "we need it." That's creating trauma to your financial systems, which again is stress.

So follow the financial system of understanding your MVOO. Go get your profit dashboard in place to see those numbers in real-time, and have a system in place of how money gets spent that you control. Reduce this financial stress, and your life is going to be glorious.

Tip #3: How To Reduce Team Stress

Have you ever been in a practice where, at the end of the day, you feel like you literally just ran a marathon while everybody else was kind of just standing on the sidelines cheering you on?

That is not a team, and that is not going to create your dream practice. Your dream practice is when you've all run the marathon together every step of the way. And the way that we do that is by having a cadence of accountability.

In your practice, it's essential for your team to gather and touch base, discussing the events of the day and addressing any challenges or obstacles that may crop up along the way. How do we make today successful? What are the opportunities of the day that we need to capitalize on?

We want team members who own their systems and who are accountable for delivering a product to the practice. When you get that right, at the end of every day, we celebrate together, rather than feeling like you just climbed a mountain while everybody else cheered you on.

To help you regulate the stress of the day, I want you to think about PIs or Personal Interactions that you should focus on engaging with your team. These are intentional interactions, not just passing them by giving them a high five or saying hello. This is engaging with them intentionally about the product they're producing for the practice.

When you get intentional about those personal interactions, we start to create a cadence of those interactions daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Those interactions have intention behind them to support the team member.

When they feel supported, they feel empowered, and your role as the practice owner, as the leader of this practice, is to empower them.

Now, someday, we want to help you get there to your provider evolution to where you get to the Clinic Director, and you have a team member, an office manager, who takes on that role. They become the developer and supporter of your team. They take that off your plate.

But if you're not there yet, you have to be intentional about these personal interactions and make sure that the cadence is clear. 

If you have that kind of communication with your team, not only do they feel less stress, you will feel less stress. That’s because you're getting regular communication with them about their performance.

Reducing that stress is another incredible key to helping you deal with the overall stress of running a business.

Tip #4: Understanding Productivity Bandwith

Now, this changed my life as an operator in a practice. I want you to think of a cup, and that cup is the capacity to hold volume. How full the cup is determines how much is in the cup.

So think about that with you. You have a large capacity to handle a lot because you're the practice owner. You've built this thing. As they come into your practice, your team members will have varying sizes of cups.

When hiring someone, I really want to get a sense of how they've dealt with high workloads and pressure in the past because that gives me some idea if I'm handling a 44-ounce size Big Gulp or if I'm getting a little dinner cup. I want to know what I’m getting!

Now, the workload, the productivity, is the volume of work that's going through that team member that they're handling on a regular basis, daily, weekly, and monthly.

Depending on the role you're playing, if you're the treatment provider, this is the volume of treatments coming across your plate and the amount of chart notes you're doing. When is the time for you to focus on marketing and work on content creation?

All of these things land on your plate. And when the list piles up, you better have a pretty big bandwidth. And you need to be aware of how full that bandwidth is because the more full the bandwidth, the more stress you're going to feel.

The problem is when your workload exceeds your capacity. This is where water starts dripping and spilling out of the cup, and it keeps getting poured in, but it can't hold anymore. That's when things start falling off your plate.

And you have to also think about that for your team. Are we pushing so much through a small-capacity team member that things are falling off their plate? Or are they a really capable team member, someone who's handling all the overflow from our plates, only to find themselves overwhelmed because we've loaded them up with too much?

Productivity bandwidth is key in assessing your organization and why work is not moving forward. And why do we feel like we're stuck? We're stuck because things are falling off our plate. Work is not getting done to move the organization forward, so the operational bandwidth within the practice may not be optimized.

In our systems here at The Data-Driven Practice, we have a regular cadence that helps you rate this, become aware of this, and know exactly what to do when we're dealing with a low-bandwidth team member.

These four tips in helping you reduce stress in your organization are the keys to getting to seven figures and beyond. It is the very things that we work with our high-level clients on in building data-driven practices.

It's why their lives have completely changed. That's why they're now taking their dream vacations. That’s why they're able to work less and earn more. Join our free Facebook group to learn more. We can’t wait to help you build your dream practice!