Kats Chiropractic Consultants CHIROpulse

187 Poor Communication Can Be a Business Killer

• Marisa Mateja

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Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.  

This week’s topic: Poor Communication can be a Business Killer

The KC CHIROpulse Podcast is designed for Chiropractic professionals ready to elevate their practice to new heights, and is hosted by Kats Consultants coaches Dr Michael Perusich and Marisa Mateja.  Both docs are 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:

  • How your communication strategy may be killing your business
  • How patients respond to discoordinated communication
  • Why the words you say are so important
  • How your staff may be miscommunicating to your patients
  • …and so 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.


DISCLAIMER:  The information presented in this broadcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to offer legal, investment, accounting, or medical advice.  Seek the consultation of a professional for advice in those areas. And remember…your results using this information may be different than described.



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



Dr. Michael Perusich:

Chiropractors is poor communication in your practice, killing your business. Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC Chiro Pulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants and ChiroHealth USA. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich and I'm joined by my cohost Marisa Mateja. Marisa, you and I talk about communication strategies. All the time with doctors, how important is this?

Marisa Mateja:

It's so important, missteps in your communication can affect the practice on Every level. It's so true. So we have to make sure that we are really focusing in and practicing our communication strategies often

Dr. Michael Perusich:

So in real estate, we say the three most important principles are location.

Marisa Mateja:

I'm going

Dr. Michael Perusich:

to tell you in business, especially in the chiropractic clinic, the three most important things are communication. And if you're off base with it, I don't care how great of a doctor you are. It will kill your business. It will just take you down a very negative path.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. And there's so many different levels to communication, right? It's not just thinking what we're saying to people, which is absolutely one of the number one things about communication, but it's also, how are we responding via texts, calls? Emails it's everything that we do,

Dr. Michael Perusich:

We often hear from doctors asking, why are my dropouts so high? What can I do to improve my dropouts? And that's, that literally is one of the costs of financial costs of. Poor communication because 99. 9 percent of the time, okay, I'll hedge 99. 8 percent of the time. The reason why you have high dropouts and low patient retention is because your communication is not on, on track.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. And we tell clients this all the time. It's not just you doctors and it's not just you staff. It's everybody on the team. It's everyone.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Repeat that because that's important.

Marisa Mateja:

It's not just you doctors and it's not just you staff. It's everybody on the team. And it's so vitally important that you guys all are working together and really practicing your communication strategies and talking through them. One of the things that I think People forget, especially if you've been somewhere and worked somewhere for a long time, is that while we've been saying things the same over and over again for years and years, we're really good at scripting, but buying habits change, economies change, all of these things. Things change. And if you're not keeping up with those things in your communication strategies, you could be losing patients. So I think it's so important to be talking to each other about what you hear, what how are patients responding to the communication that you have with them.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah, those things are huge. We need to take a step away to hear a brief word from one of our sponsors, but I want to come back and talk about what some of the common pitfalls are of, I'm just going to call it bad communication. So talking about communication in the practice, it's a coordinated event between you and your staff and your patients. We'll be right back.

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Dr. Michael Perusich:

Hi, everybody. Welcome back. We're talking about four communication strategies in your practice and how that can be a business killer. And I said, coming back from the short little break that I, Marisa, I want to talk about the pitfalls. I want to talk about what goes wrong, what happens when we have bad communication. And I want to talk not only from the doctor's standpoint, because that's probably most of our listeners out there, but I want to talk about it from the staff standpoint and what the effects are. On the patients.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. So I think number one, we have to listen to our patients. And if we, yeah. And if you're not picking up to the cues that they're laying down, then you may be really misstepping with them. And, so really listening and having good listening skills and being able to pick apart. What they're telling you underneath the surface, because most of the time, especially as a staff, we know when patients are giving us cues for things, we know when they're telling us, Hey, I'm not getting what I need from you, without saying that. So I think. Number one, having really good listening skills and being able to pick apart what patients are telling you and when you feel that moment, being able to control that moment with good communication skills and be able to help that patient through that and get them with the doctor, whoever, to be able to communicate well with them. So making sure they adhere to their treatment plans, they in care and become long term patients with us. All depends on how we communicate to them.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

It does. It totally does. And so oftentimes, and doctors were probably more guilty of this than staff even, but we're not clear about how we're meeting the patient's needs and that lack of clarity and where does it come from? We use big words sometimes that don't mean anything to the patient. Patients don't know. There's a difference between a spondylolisthesis and spondylolisis and any other kind of spondylo out there. Those are meaningless terms to them. And sometimes we speak in Dr. E's, but the patient's the one that has to make sense of the communication so they can make the decision, am I in the right place? Is this where I need to be? Is this the care plan that's really going to help me? So when we don't speak from a position of clarity, We begin to lose the patient. We don't just lose the patient. We lose the patient potential. And we talk about this with our cats members all the time. One patient has far reaching potential. So for example, what is it? Every, every household has at least 3. 5 or 4. 5 people in it. So let's just go with four. So one patient actually represents four people in the household, but how many other people do they know? And over the years, we've been able to interpolate the fact that every patient probably represents about 10 patients.

Marisa Mateja:

Are

Dr. Michael Perusich:

you losing one? You're losing 10, you lose 10, you've lost a hundred. So you've got to be really careful about your communication from that standpoint, because there's a chain reaction that can happen.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah, absolutely. And we talk often about coordinated communication happening within our practices. So when I said earlier, it's a team event communication is because on every single interaction, coordinated communication can change the path of what the patient does with our practice, whether they leave us or they stay with us. And if they are hearing. Good messages. And they're hearing good communication from us. And when I talk about communication, I'm talking everything from our initial phone call with them to the point that they go into wellness with us, including insurance conversations, all of those kinds of things are, they have to be on point. Everything.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

They do have, they have to be on point and part of that goes back to our listening skills. I think a little bit, and you mentioned this earlier that listening is such an important component, but it's not just the listening. It's taking it one step further and being good at asking questions as well and getting people to talk. We have a tendency to want to tell people about ourselves. too much. I'm here to tell you, doctor, staff, whoever's listening, your patients aren't coming to find out about you. They're coming to find out if you can help them with whatever their need is, get them out of pain, whatever. That's why they're there. So you talking about playing golf over the weekend or going on a vacation. Is superfluous conversation to the patient. We need to be asking the patient, how was your vacation? Are you going on vacation? What do you do when you're not at work? What do you do for fun? We need to be asking the right questions. Cause when we get patients to open up. Two things happen. One, we learn more about how we can help the patient and two, we learn more about that patient, which helps us build a deeper relationship with that patient.

Marisa Mateja:

Questions are amazing. That's all I have to say. Questions are amazing. The more you know about the people that you're interacting with, the better you're going to be able to interact with them. You're going to be able to help them in so many more ways than you even realize. Great example. I don't know how many times I had patients open up to me to tell me about heel pain and the next thing, yeah. And the next thing I knew I had, I'm back talking to one of the doctors about going on laser treatment, or having some kind of extra service that is going to benefit them because they're telling me. because I'm asking the right questions and I'm opening them up to giving us information about them. And it's so important. So through your communication, not only do you have to listen, but you have to ask those questions.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

You bring up a great point and that opens the door to. Finding new opportunities for extra visits, extra services. Patients need a brand new treatment plan that a patient needs. And the crazy thing is, and doctors, this a lot of times patients don't tell us all those things because there's this weird thing with doctor patient relationship where they don't want to waste our time. Or

Marisa Mateja:

that white coat syndrome,

Dr. Michael Perusich:

or the flip of that is they will tell staff stuff all day long. So we have to train our staff to make sure you're not only connecting with patients on that level and finding out those things, but then sharing it with the doctor

Marisa Mateja:

so the doctor

Dr. Michael Perusich:

can do something with it.

Marisa Mateja:

We're having a whole seminar in August and if this is past our seminar, it's still available on our website. But. It's all on how your front line affects your bottom line. And this is exactly what we're talking about today. Your. Frontline, you as doctors, everybody that interacts with that patient can affect how that practice does and what happens to the bottom line.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Absolutely. With that, we need to take a quick break here. Word from our sponsors again, when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about building that culture of good, effective communication in your practice. So we're talking about the effects of bad communication on your bottom line, how it negatively impacts you. We'll be right back.

Kats Chiropractic Consultants, your partner in chiropractic success. We are dedicated with one on one guidance to bring you all your practice management needs. Let's supercharge your practice. Give us a call today.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

All right, everybody. We are back. You're listening to the KC ChiroPulse podcast. We're talking about the effects of bad communication on your business and wow. Can it be impactful? Yes, it can. So with that in mind, we really need to be working on building. A culture in our practice of effective communication and spending the time to train and develop as a team. So we have that coordinated communication. So we're building those deeper relationships so that we become more empathetic with our patients so that we're finding those opportunities, but it takes a little bit of work, not a lot. And it actually can be fun working on strategies to improve your communication with your entire team. So I hear from a lot of you that yeah, we have staff meetings, but we don't really talk about months. We've dropped it to just once a month. Talk about communication, talk about. How to question patients and get to know patients and how important it is to find out that, oh, on the weekends, they go to soccer tournaments because their two kids are involved in soccer. And so they're sitting on those bleachers all weekend and carrying gear around and driving hundreds of miles to go to these soccer events. Could that be important to your patient outcomes? Knowing that

Marisa Mateja:

yeah,

Dr. Michael Perusich:

absolutely, but you have to work as a team to develop that I'm gonna go back to the term culture that culture in your office of that open communication

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah, the culture of communication Is something that I don't think enough businesses spend enough time on. If you start your day with everybody racing in, you open the doors at eight 30 and everybody's there at eight 25, does that give you enough time to start your day out properly and communicate about what's going to happen for the day? Who's on your schedule? What do they need from us? What are they coming to us for? What's their, why going to be for their visit today? There's so many Great opportunities missed with poor communication.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

And so right

Marisa Mateja:

is a big part of it.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Yeah, it is. And those little five and five or 10 minute rallies before you open in the morning and before you open in the afternoon, those are huge. And at the end of the day, if you had any kind of an issue or you got behind or, whatever it might be, have that conversation with your team. What could we have done better? Even if you had a great day, what could we have done better? Cause remember the path to success is not about perfection. It's about working towards excellence.

Marisa Mateja:

I was just getting ready to say, set your team up for success.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

For success. Exactly. And part of that is being great at effective communication.

Marisa Mateja:

Yeah. And if you are not spending the time working together as a team to talk about these things, change it today. Spend the time together to start talking to each other about what in the practice. What do you feel when patients are coming in? What happens? How are they feeling? What's going on with them? Ask the questions of each other because I guarantee you there's somebody on the team that knows something you don't

Dr. Michael Perusich:

and absolutely,

Marisa Mateja:

and it's going to open up a door that you didn't realize for patient care and outcomes that are very important.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

It's huge. It's a game changer for your practice, everybody. So work on your communication strategies. If you need help, go to catsconsultants. com. This is a lot of the stuff that we do with our clients who are just absolutely shooting the lights out. Be sure to subscribe and share the podcast. We're growing like crazy and it's because of you, the listeners, we really appreciate you out there. Marisa, anything else to add?

Marisa Mateja:

No, just make sure that you don't let your communication kill your business.

Dr. Michael Perusich:

Absolutely. So thanks to our sponsors, of course, Kats Consultants, but also Chiro Health USA and everybody out there listening, make it a great day. We'll see you next time.

Marisa Mateja:

Thanks everybody.