159 - Ten Chiropractic Tips for Success

Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.  
This week’s topic: Ten Tips for Chiropractic Practice Success. 

The KC CHIROpulse Podcast is designed for Chiropractic professionals ready to elevate their practice to new heights. Hosted by Kats Consultants coaches Dr Michael Perusich and Dr Troy Fox, both seasoned experts in Chiropractic care and business development, this podcast provides invaluable insights and actionable strategies to help you create a flourishing and sustainable Chiropractic business.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Ten simple things you can do right now in your practice
• How being present with your patients is important
• Why staff communication brings you success
• Maintaining a keen eye on how your patients see your clinic
• …and much more

In each episode of KC CHIROpulse, we delve into crucial aspects of building a successful Chiropractic practice, covering topics such as establishing a strong foundation, adopting a patient-centric approach, mastering marketing techniques, achieving financial fitness, fostering effective team building and leadership, integrating technology and innovation, and navigating common challenges in the field.

Whether you're a seasoned chiropractor or just starting your practice, the KC CHIROpulse Podcast offers a wealth of knowledge and practical advice to help you navigate the intricate world of Chiropractic business. Join us on this journey as we explore proven strategies, share success stories, and connect with industry experts to empower you in your pursuit of building a thriving Chiropractic practice.

Don't miss out on the latest insights and expert guidance. Subscribe now and unlock the secrets to taking your Chiropractic practice to the next level. Your success is our priority at Kats Chiropractic Business Advisors.

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KC CHIROpulse Podcast. Helping Chiropractors keep their pulse on success. Thanks for listening.

Transcript

Dr. Michael Perusich: 0:00

Chiropractors, are you looking for the inside track to success in your practice? Hi, everybody. Welcome to the KC ChiroPulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants, helping doctors keep their pulse on success. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Perusich joined with my co host, Dr. Troy Fox. Troy, everybody's always wanting to know what are the tips for chiropractic entrepreneurs to succeed? So I thought, you know, you and I Banter this stuff around all the time. I thought this would be kind of a fun

Dr. Troy Fox: 0:29

topic today. Yeah, most definitely. And they're probably more than 10, but I'm sure we can come up with 10 really easily. That will help your practice today. I mean, so get your pencil and paper out, right? Or get your laptop out. That's that's the more PC thing. And, you know, 2024.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 0:48

Hey, I got this new thing, it's called The Remarkable, I dunno if you've seen it, Uhuh, but it it, it's like a tablet only. It's thinner and it's super lightweight and you write on it and then it converts your writing. If it can figure it out. It converts your writing into, typed format. Well, there you go. Yeah, it's kind of cool. It's kind of, so there's one, there's one tip. Get organized, you know? Oh, part of, part of success is getting organized if you're not organized, and docs, when I say get organized. Usually we're so busy. You can't stay up well organized all by yourself. It requires help. So make sure you've got somebody helping you. You know, I can tell you, I've got always got somebody in the background helping me with my calendar, for example, just making sure that all my events and everything get on my calendar. And then they help me know when I'm supposed to do this or do that. And it. If you'd be shocked at how much that helps you stay organized,

Dr. Troy Fox: 1:44

well, it keeps you from being double booked, with outside commitments, because there are times when people come to you and ask you to be a speaker, maybe, or maybe you're supposed to record a podcast, like, you know, like we do, but we have an open time set up for that. But a lot of times, if I do my own booking. I will end up double booking myself because I don't look closely enough, you know, I'm in a hurry and I'll just go. Yeah, I can do that. And I will overextend myself. So having I do that all the time.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 2:12

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I've just gotten in the habit. You probably do the same thing. I've just gotten the habit of saying, you know what, if it comes to scheduling, you can jump on my calendar. Best thing to do is talk to Marissa. I don't manage the schedule.

Dr. Troy Fox: 2:27

Yes, that's exactly right. And I think that is with any busy chiropractic office as well is a really good rule to follow unless you're the only one there by yourself. If you have staff, they have moments in between at times when you're with a patient that they have time to look over your schedule and see what's going to fit best. Sometimes staff will. Back to me and say, Hey, here's two or three options for you. So I think that's important to stay organized. Uh, just, you know, that's the in side stuff, obviously stay organized with your patients as well. But on the outside stuff, I think it makes you look very professional when you don't have to call somebody back and tell them, Hey, I screwed up. I told you I could do this and yeah, I'm already booked with something else.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 3:09

So exactly. And you just made me think of another tip here and that is. When staying organized with patients, make sure you're keeping up on your patient records. I know EHR takes a lot of time and things, but keeping up on those records as best and quickly as you can is going to keep you from getting buried and feeling overburdened by the amount of paperwork.

Dr. Troy Fox: 3:32

Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. You know, it's 1 of those things that at the end of every day, it's not very fun to look back and go. Okay. I've got 1 patient record open because there were some notes that I still needed to add into it. You can either walk away. And then you got a problem now, you got an open note that's going to be there the next day. You know, and the next day, and then you're going to forget about it. And then you're going to have an open note, which is not good. Or you sit there and take the few minutes that it takes while you're still fresh to finish it. And that brings us into point number three. Here is point number three, be ready when you go in with patients. In other words, don't be that guy or gal. That comes flying into the parking lot 3 minutes before your 1st patient jumps out of the vehicle, dragging half your stuff behind you running inside in a huff to see that 1st patient. And you run in the room and you're not, you're not even remotely mentally there. Get yourself ready. What I say every 110 percent focused. I want to be ready for every patient that comes through my door. So I have the energy. To give to those patients. And it's a really simple statement to myself, but I tell myself that, and I will tell you that over time, what that has done has caused me to have an extreme amount of calm and peace. When I walk into the building in the morning, I make sure that I'm there in enough time. And when I say enough time, I mean, if I'm there 15 minutes before patients on a lot of days. It gives me enough time to actually sit down, take a couple deep breaths, check my adjusting, make sure my work area is ready to go. I mean, who doesn't like to have their work area ready? I don't care what kind of job you do. But that is what I do. I make sure that I'm ready. And if I have a patient that has a special need that maybe I haven't done, what if I'm kinesiotaping somebody? Just a quick look to make sure, okay, do I have enough kinesiotape? Not that I could fix it at that point, but Let's make sure that we're ready so we don't run into any hiccups. And then I'll run up front and I'll check with the staff. We do a quick, just off the cuff, you know, a quick meeting up at the front, a team huddle, and we go, Hey, this patient right here is going to require this. This is going to, and that's literally one of the biggest things that I do every day that makes my day run smoothly. So as an entrepreneur, I want to make sure that the patient experience is perfect.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 5:56

So. I think we kind of fell into another tip there too, but let me come back on something for just a minute. You said, you know, you'd like to get to the clinic 15, 20 minutes early. I like to get there 30 to 45 minutes early because I like to walk around the clinic and it just, it does two things for me. One, How does the clinic look from the patient point of view? Is it clean? Is it ready to go? And number two, it helps me just get in the zone of treating patients. And then you, you talked about having that, that, that morning meeting with your team just to get the team together. Team communication. This is the next step. Team communication is so powerfully important. Because if you all aren't on the same page with patients, if your staff, for example, is hearing things that patients are saying that could be pertinent to care, but they're not telling you and you guys aren't having that coordinated communication process, you could be really missing out on a lot of things.

Dr. Troy Fox: 6:56

Yeah, and I want to throw in real quick here. You know, if I just said that I get to the clinic 30 minutes to an hour ahead, Dr. Perusich would have said, I like to get there an hour to an hour and a half ahead. Well, of course, of course, whatever works. My difference is I'm in a small town practice 30 miles away. So I'm literally there over my whole lunch hour and all that. So some of the things that you do. In that 30 minutes, I show up 15 minutes early and over the lunch hour, there's a lot of times when I wander through my building and just go, I'll go sit in a room and just kind of look around for a little bit and see what do I see? Kind of like you, you do. So that's a good tip. I think it's something good for us to do. And I think it's also beneficial to our patients, you

Dr. Michael Perusich: 7:38

know, and from that patient point of view. Walk into your clinic sometime in the front door, not, not the employee door, the side door, the back door, and maybe the front door is all you have. But look around as if you're the patient. What is the patient see? And I can tell you a funny little story about that. We, uh, we had somebody call us 1 time. The practice wasn't growing. They just. When they weren't too far away, wanted me to come by and just take a look at it. Well, I can tell immediately why it wasn't growing. When you pulled up to the front door, there were weeds everywhere. The bushes out front were dead. You could barely open the front door. The carpet inside the front door was worn out, old pictures, stacks of magazines everywhere. Well, no wonder you're not. You're not growing your practice looks terrible, you know, so clean it up, make sure it's in, in good looking order and it goes back to being organized as well. You know, what's it look like behind the front counter? What a patient seeing because the front counter looks way different from the patient side than it does from your employee side. Yeah, sure.

Dr. Troy Fox: 8:44

I was going to say sight, smell and sound. Those are the 3 things walk through the door, you know, and that's really important. That's that's a pretty big tip. What is that? Is that number 5 or number 4? I think that's number 5. I think it's number. All right. Keep

Dr. Michael Perusich: 8:58

track of them, but I'm not organized enough to

Dr. Troy Fox: 9:00

sight, smell, sound. And what I mean is this personally, I don't like walking into an office. That's dead silent. I like to hear something and here's the thing you play whatever you want. I don't really care. You can play hard rock if you want to. I don't think that's probably appropriate in your office. You can play K love. Most people know what K love is. It's, you know, uplifting Christian music. You can play jazz music. Here's what I would say. I would play something that makes your office sound more sophisticated. In other words, Caleb is a great station or maybe some upbeat jazz music or piano music. It makes you, it makes you look more and sound more sophisticated than you are. And on the smell, you don't have to have it throughout the office, but I'll tell you what, a diffuser with a little essential oils at the front desk makes a huge difference. People into my office and go, it smells like a spa in here. And so it's a little tiny thing that we do every day that reaps huge benefit, especially with our female page, our males, you know, our working guys, they probably aren't super impressed with the essential oils, but our ladies that come in are like, my gosh, is that lavender? Yes, it's a, it's a very relaxing lavender. You know, we like to talk about it and I think it really shows the patient that we're trying to upgrade the experience.

10:18

And now here's a word from our sponsor, ChiroHealth USA. So we all feel it rent or dining out gasoline or movies. As a matter of fact, the dollar is not going as far for a whole host of reasons, and it's impacting everybody, regardless of your financial situation. Did you know that 38 percent of the overall population is having to reconsider? How they're spending their money just to afford the health care they need. And if you break it down further, 26 percent have actually delayed the health care that they need, including going to see you, the chiropractor. So here's what we need to know about the breakdown in demographics. You would think. That someone who's making 120, 000 or more would be continuing their care right now. But the actual number is 18%, 18 percent of that group is actually putting off healthcare. And that's a group of people making six figures. When you take that same information all the way down to a group making 40, 000, that number is much higher. It's closer to 40%. So it's never been more important than now to make sure you've made it easy for your patients to come see you. that you have choices for them and you understand what they're going through at home. We want to make sure your practice thrives during this time, and we encourage you to learn about what ChiroHealth USA can do for you and your practice and making it easy for patients to see you and continue care. And now back to the podcast.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 11:57

So here's a, here's a side tip to that tip. We used to buy our, diffuser incense from the, spa, the, the day spa down the street. Yeah. They mix their own. It smelled awesome. And so everybody coming in that was also a client at the day spa, they would smell that same smell in our office and they would recognize it. And it was just. Instant relaxation for everybody. So yes, highly recommend that. Put them, put a couple around the office. It's okay to let your office actually smell good

Dr. Troy Fox: 12:26

sometimes. Yeah, I have one of my adjusting room too, but I was, my point was at least put one at the front desk. But yeah, we put the same and we put the same scent throughout the office. So we're not mixing it up and it doesn't smell different everywhere. We use the same scent on a certain, on the set.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 12:44

You know, here, here's another tip. Make sure you look professional. Now, I'm never going to tell you how to dress, I'm just going to tell you how to look. I don't care if you're wearing a polo or shirt and tie or scrubs. I wore scrubs. Try. I know you wear scrubs. Yep. There you go. But make sure you and your staff look professional. Your patients coming in have a picture on their mind, especially your new patients have a picture in their mind of what a doctor and their staff should look like. Make sure that you're meeting. Otherwise you come in, they come in and they don't know if you're the doctor or if you're the janitor. So make sure that you look professional. Here's another thought on that same subject. When you look professional, especially if you're carrying your logo around with you everywhere. Take your staff out to lunch once in a while, maybe once a month or something, and let the community see you and your staff with your logo scrubs on or your logo, polo shirts, or whatever they might be so that they see you out in the community. That's a great way to help build your brand image. So I can think of so many, many tips, but, but. Here's another one that I think is really important. We talked about staff communication, but your patient communication is important. Make sure you're speaking to patients on a level that they understand what you're talking about. We don't need to tell them the difference between spondylolisis necessary unless that's pertinent to their case, but make sure that they understand in them. Basic, terms, what their care is about, how chiropractic can help them. Make sure you tell them your expectations for care and how often you expect them to be coming in. Make sure your staff is having that same conversation with them. And then make sure you're helping them understand as you progress through care, how well are they

Dr. Troy Fox: 14:42

doing? And with that said, you're the doctor. Listen, I know some of you go, well, I don't like to do that. I'll just tell the patient they can come back whenever they want to. You're the authority to tell the patient what they need. And here's how I like to, and I, I bought a practice that was basically that type of practice where people dictated their own care in a year's time practice of radically turned it on its head. And as a result, there's a lot of things that have changed my satisfaction level. As a result of that, our income is improved by leaps and bounds just because people are actually getting the care that they need and their satisfaction is high. But here's how I do it. Two rules. Number one, I work for you. Okay. But number two, we work together as a team, which allows me. As a team member to let you know what I feel like you need to do without any repercussions. In other words, even if you don't like what I have to say, we'll still be friends, but I'm going to tell you what you need because I'm remiss if I don't do that. I'm going to tell you what I would tell my own family member if they walked in the door with your condition. And so I think that's an easy way sometimes to approach, especially when you're trying to break that mold. It's an easy way to approach it because I approach patients in my practice that had for years dictated their own care and said when they were going to come back and, and, and you know, what's funny is my patient satisfaction to do the roof right now. And it's through the roof because folks are getting the care that they need. So don't be surprised if you make a change that it's not easier on you too, because you're not always dealing with acute care crisis situations either. And I love, right.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 16:26

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And I think drum roll, please. But I think this is tip number 10. Watch your finances. Keep control of your finances and your practice. The quickest way to have a not profitable business is to not watch your finances. So make sure that you're watching them and not spending money that you don't have. And I don't mean that. That month, once in a while that you might have where your cash flow is just a little short and you might dip into a line of credit or something for just a minute, knowing that you're going to pay it right back in the next month or two. Not talking about that. I'm talking about wild spending on advertising and buying equipment and things when you don't have the money buy things only when you have the money. And make sure that there's going to be a good positive return on the investment when you spend it

Dr. Troy Fox: 17:19

and make sure as well that you're not scramping either. In other words, I've walked into practices or we're talking about buying a new 100, 000 dollar piece of equipment, which seems unless unless your patient full dictates it. And some of you do, but. If you're seeing 15 patients a day, and we're talking about a 100, 000 piece of equipment, my immediate answer, probably before I even look at your finances is probably you can't afford it at this point. But here's the problem we run into. I walk into your practice and what I see adjusting tables with rips and tears in them. They look horrible. I mean, if you walk in and actually see it from a patient standpoint, it looks like a nuclear bomb went off on your table. Get those tables recovered. Yeah. Yeah. It's several hundred dollars. Those are the expenses that you really must spend because it goes back to some of the other tips that we gave you. Make sure that your, your rooms look clean. They're painted. Those are the things that you spend money on. Initially, once that's in place and you start to generate income, you start to generate a following. Then you can introduce a new technique that maybe takes a little bit more risk financially for you to place because I'm not saying this 90, 000 piece of equipment is bad. It's probably a really great piece of equipment for 90 K. But yeah. Is it something you can support so we don't want you to sink your ship when you're really what you're doing. You're reaching out, trying to figure out how to grow my practice. How do I increase patient satisfaction? We can do that very simply. A lot of times by recovering a table, putting a coat of paint. Some essential oils out there, maybe putting some jazz music on the, uh, on the radio there. There's some simple things, maybe, maybe go through your waiting room and do a couple of small upgrades. I went to a consignment store folks. I went to a consignment store in Wichita, Kansas and bought most of my furniture for my waiting room. My patients love it. They think it looks like a homey living room with a little. 200 fireplace hanging on the wall and we fired up when it's cold outside. We fired up like today we had it fired up. Patients love hanging there by the fireplace until it's their time to come back and see me. They feel like you're sitting in a living room and it's all groovy. It looks like 1970s. Cause I got kind of the, but those are things that you can do that don't cost a ton of money that really give a one up upgrade to your office.

Dr. Michael Perusich: 19:41

Yeah. And you know, you mentioned tables that have rips and tears and things that I'm in replacing the, the, uh, the vinyl on it. Sometimes the vinyl can be repaired and you don't even notice it depending on the color of your tables. I know we would do this all the time. We'd get little punctures or something. We had a guy basically on speed dial that would Run over to the office at lunchtime and he'd patched the table up. It'd be like brand new. So, you know, there are some great things that you can do for your practice to make it successful. So you don't have to spend tons of money. You don't have to go crazy with it. It's the little things. That matter. So yeah, I think that's our, our 10 list, if you will. So go check us out at Kats consultants. com. See what we're doing for doctors. Download some of our free resources, subscribe to the podcast. And above all, I'd like to thank our sponsor Chiro health USA tagging with us and being a part of our crazy podcasts every week. So appreciate everybody listening, tuning in every week to the KC ChiroPulse podcast, and we will see you next time.

Dr. Troy Fox: 20:46

See y'all later.