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Are you really talking with your prospective patient? Or are you talking at them?

The reason that most marketing doesn’t work is because it is outdated. A dinosaur from years gone by. Back when this profession was rather new and people were still discovering what it was. When there was only one chiropractor in town and all you had to do was put out your sign.

But today patients are much more sophisticated. They know about their own health. They have a billion more choices for a health care provider. And they simply ignore most marketing that does not speak directly to the conversation going on in their head.

And each condition is different. A neuropathy patient and a back pain patient can be having two totally different conversations going on with themselves about their problem.

So do how you find out what they’re thinking?

Real life research and discovery. I’ll let  you in on a little secret that I use when I write ads.

I’ve spent a lot of time researching what patients are thinking. Hours with real live patients in my practice. I’ve spoken to thousands of doctors about their patients. Spent time on condition-specific forums and read hundreds of testimonials. And the same words and phrases come up time and time again.

So even if I’ve never had migraine headaches, I can totally empathize with those who do. Because I’ve heard so many people (mostly women in the case of migraines), spell out exactly how they feel.

The point is…

Don’t be like the advertiser who thinks you can just throw money at a some fancy ad campaign like Microsoft or Walmart might use. Learn to speak directly to your prospect. Within seconds of reading your ad, you want them to think “Finally, someone who understand exactly what I’m going through!”

How long does it take to dramatically change your practice?

A lot faster than you think…

In fact, I find that most successful doctors I work with have a point in their practice where things really took off for them.

And from that day on, everything changes.

I know it was like this for me. Early on in my practice, I struggled for years trying to bring in enough new patients to grow and make a profit.

I tried all the normal stuff. Seminars, marketing gurus, chiropractic management groups, yellow pages, Val-paks, money mailers, ad displays, health fair and convention center booths, newspaper ads, spinal screenings – I even went knocking on doors after being in practice for almost two years.

After throwing countless hours and dollars at the “new patient problem”, I got a few new ones trickling in. But many of them were not very interested in care, and their conversion rate was terrible.

The problem is, that almost none of these approaches worked. Most of the marketing techniques were overpriced, outdated or too sleazy.

The problem is chiropractic marketing can be a “brutal – and very time consuming – challenge” to building and sustaining a growing practice.

For my first two years in practice, my frustration with getting quality new patients was agonizing, often making me depressed and bringing me close to tears on more than one occasion.

It’s not our fault really.

None of us learned about marketing in Chiropractic College. After spending four years and over $100,000 on my chiropractic education, I didn’t have one class on how to use effective advertising to grow my practice.

All of this led up to a fight for survival for me. Two years into practice, I was only averaging 3 new patients a month and collecting about $3000 – with an overhead of $15,000!

Describing how bad things were would not even do it justice. I was doing 2-4 spinal screenings per week and holding talks for audiences of one – both with awful results.

I got fed up with marketing, “pushing” patients to refer, hard-sell tactics – honestly I was ready to quit the profession entirely.

It wasn’t that I hated chiropractic. It was that no one could show me an effective way to market and grow my practice. I had spent thousands on marketing systems and coaches, but to what point?

My pregnant wife was struggling up three flights of stairs each day in our new “apartment home” – sometimes having to lug over 50lbs of groceries with two toddlers in tow.

This lack of effective marketing tools forced me to look outside the profession for answers. My practice depended on it. I had no time to “hope” something worked. I needed a solution fast!

At the “eleventh hour” of my practice (and just barely in time to save it) I discovered effective marketing strategies and put them into place for my practice. And I began to see results almost immediately.

Finally, real marketing that works for chiropractic. (Unlike all that other crap out there being pushed on us from advertising sales people and over-hyped chiropractic marketing gurus.)

Within 6 months from this point, my practice volume and income had increased by a multiple of 10! I was making $30,000 and could finally afford to take one day off a week to spend with my family. Later my practice continued to increase as I tweaked my marketing and conversion procedures.

Now $30k may or may not sound like a lot to you per month, depending on where you’re at now. But that’s not the point. The point is the change from $3,000 to $30,000 in such a short time span.

What this meant for me was that my kids could have a less stressful father, who spent more quality time with them. My wife could worry less about buying groceries or clothes. And we could go on that family vacation we always talked about.

What would your life be like if your income increased by a multiple of 10? What would change if it just doubled? And what would that really mean to you?

If you’re not using effective marketing, don’t wait. It can make a huge difference to more than just your practice.

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The question of fees will often come up with my conversations with Decompression Marketing Elite clients. How much should I charge? How do I keep fees competitive in my area?

These questions do not just pertain to practices with decompression tables. All of us, no matter what services we have in our offices, should be asking this question on a yearly basis.

How you answer this question can either ‘make you or break you’ in terms of business success. You may be the best doctor, the best adjuster, the most well-liked person in a 30 mile radius, but if you fail to set your prices correctly you’ll be out of business with a matter of time.

Most practices set their fees either based on insurance schedules or local competition. Neither of these is a smart way to do business. Let me explain…

Insurance companies are notorious for cutting what they will pay down to the lowest possible fee schedule. They are a “for profit” business, and expect to pay out a lower amount than what is regularly charged in your area. Using extensive research to justify they’re fees, they have calculated the lowest amount payable to you. So if you are setting your fees to match an insurance companies schedule, they are much too low. And if your fees are below the insurance fee schedule, you’ve been too low for a very long time. Not because you could have gotten more from the insurance company, but because you have been selling yourself short for a long time now.

Remember, not all patients are insurance patients. Many of you see a combination of PI, Work Comp, cash and other types of cases. To set your fee schedule based on one or two insurance companies reduced rates is hurting you all across the board.

The other common way to set your fee schedule by finding out what your competitors charge and trying to beat them with lower prices. Unless you’re running a non-profit clinic, this is the wrong way to set your fees. What if all your competitors are much lower than they should be? What if they still have the original prices they opened with 20 years ago? Maybe they do a ton of therapy, making their adjustment fees artificially low?

It is important to know what your local market is charging, but not so you can undercut their fees. You want to know the range of your competitor’s prices so you can set yours near the high end. That’s right, you don’t want to be the lowest in your area, but the highest. What other professional service is praised for their low fees? Do you go to the lowest priced dentist in town? How about sending your mother to the cheapest surgeon? Would you use cheapest attorney to represent you in a court case?

Here’s a case scenario. The highest price for a chiropractic adjustment in your area is $55, the lowest is $35 and the average is $45. What are your fees going to be for an adjustment? At least $55. But there’s not enough information here to effectively price your services.

Additional questions must be answered like…

• what other services will you be doing on an average visit
• how much will you be charging for these other visits
• how much time will be spent doing all the services a typical patient needs
• how many people do you have on staff and how much do you pay them
• what is your overhead
• and most importantly, how good is your marketing

If you’re marketing is good, you can charge a higher fee because you have plenty of new patients coming in. One person leaving because they are “shopping for a deal” won’t affect your business at all if you’ve got 30 more new patients waiting to get in this week. And this is fair, as prices are somewhat based on supply and demand.

The only exception to this rule of being at the top of your market’s price range is when you make a special offer. When running an ad in the paper with a special offer, for example, don’t try to have the most expensive exam and x-rays in town. This will only deter people from responding to the ad. Without seeing your office, meeting you and your staff, having their problem explained to them, etc., prices will speak loudly. So be sure to give them a good special offer to come, but make sure they understand it is a special price and this isn’t what all your fees will be like in the future.

This week I’m in L.A. at a conference, but I wanted you to see one of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written. It was also the most controversial. Tell me if you agree or not. Read it and leave your comments below.
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Have you ever been told you needed to see a large number of visits per week to be successful in practice? While it’s not going to make some of the coaches who read my blog happy (yes I do look at my subscriber list), I’m going to let you in on a little secret…

You Don’t Need High Volume To Be Profitable In Practice

I’m not certain where this got started.

It was likely back in the early days of chiropractic, where chiropractors only did adjustments and everyone charged the same price. Under those conditions, it makes sense that the more visits you see the more you’ll collect each week.

But to believe that today is simply false.

Every doctor has different prices, different therapies, different equipment.

You see, most chiropractic coaches lead you to believe that high volume (or at least more visits) is the way to go. Some even make you feel bad about your practice if you’re not seeing what the top doctors in their coaching group are doing.

Here are some of the ways the high volume lie is used by coaches to make doctors feel guilty…

-when you do an event like a P.A.D. or dinner workshop and you don’t get 60 new patients from it

-when you’re not seeing 1000 visits per week many will say you aren’t “sacrificing enough” or “you don’t have a big enough mission yet”

- if you’re not getting “x” number of referrals per week like the big guns are, you’re not “on purpose”

Number of visits per week is only part of the practice success formula I teach. Dollars of income per patient visit is a much more telling number.

Here’s how you cut through the fluff and find out how these high volume doctors are really doing. Ask them for their average collected amount per visit. Not there “estimated care plan” numbers, but the real deal. I’m about to reveal to you the secret formula no high volume coach wants you to know….

$collected each month divided by your monthly patient visits= average $ per visit

Wow, eye-opening isn’t it. (But believe it or not, this stat is does not show up on any of the coaching group’s statistics forms I’ve been a part of in the past.) Turns out most high volume doctors are making less than $30 per visit, some even lower than that.

Funny story about coaching groups and high volume real quick…

One group I was a part of did put your monthly collections number on your name badge at the seminars. They did it as a mental boosting type of thing, where you were excited to show up and get your new badge when you hit a certain goal.

The thing I really like about it was this…

No one could come up and B.S. you about their practice. A guy could come up and talk all day about seeing 300 a week, but if his “badge number” was lower than mine, his advice went in one ear and out the other. Turns out high volume guys weren’t the mentors everyone looked up to in this group, it was the “high income” guys instead.

I’ve seen moderately high volume and I’ve seen what most would consider low volume. Guess which practice was more profitable, had lower stress, and allowed me to take time off?

When I was “higher volume”, I was was flat broke making $17 per visit because I was giving away care for free. At the lower volume, I was getting $90 per visit. Maybe I wasn’t making as huge an impact on the planet as the guys seeing 1000 a week, but you know what…I was making a huge impact on the patients I did see each week.

And I was making the biggest impact of all…being there as a father for my children!

What’s really going on here is that these coaches are imposing their values, their goals in life, they beliefs on you. If you really want to see 1000 visits per week, that’s great, go for it. But don’t believe the lie that you can’t be happy without seeing high volume, or that high volume equals high income.

It urns out the low volume practice fit my lifestyle better. I wanted to help people get well, make a good living, and spend time with my family. None of those things require high volume.

What about you? What do you want out of your practice? If you want a high volume practice, tell us why? Let us know in the comments below.

We all want to grow. We want our practice volume to grow, our income to grow, and our positive influence in the community to grow. Often times in our quest to grow we jump at every strategy that comes our way, thinking we’ve finally found “the secret” to growth.

But the truth is there is not a huge secret to growth. There are 5 simple strategies to grow. If you improve in these 5 areas, your practice could not keep itself from growing. If your struggling to grow take a look at this list and find the one (or more) strategy that you need to work on.

1. Acquire More New Patients

As I’ve said, there is not secret and this point proves it. Everyone realizes you’ve got to get more new patients to grow. While there are plenty of business coaches telling you to plug the “leaky bucket” and not worry about new ones, common sense tells you that new patients are the life blood of your practice.

So if everyone knows about this strategy, why aren’t more people successful at it?

Well, knowing about it and being good at it are two different things indeed. Most chiropractors (any health practitioner for that matter) have been told various lies about marketing, like: it’s degrading, it’s not for doctors, and my personal favorite “marketing is unethical”. Of course there are snakes out there doing these things. Yet one bad apple doesn’t mean all the rest are bad too. If you’ve got a website, that’s marketing. A business card, that’s marketing as well.

You get the point. Marketing is extremely ethical, especially if you’re in a profession that can help people. It would be unethical to be able to help people and then keep them from finding you for your services. So the question you really need to ask is “how do I find and use effective marketing?”

The general answer is to find and use marketing that proves itself. If you have proven yellow pages work in your area within the last year, by measuring the ROI, then keep using them. If your town has a newspaper, then you should know if a good ad will work there. The specific answer is to look at the links above in the menu bar and the Other Tools where I recommend other people’s products.

2. Get Stronger Conversions

What good goes it do to get 30 new patients a month if you only convert one of them to care? I struggled with low conversions when first starting in practice. Some of my problem was confidence issues, but the bigger part was poor presentation. No, you don’t have to be a sweet-talking care salesman, but you’ve got to present your case with truth and certainty. Imagine going for brain surgery and the surgeon is nervous, uncertain and not very trustworthy. Would you “start care” with him?

The easiest way to get better conversions is to bring in better qualified patients. Patients referred in by others are usually very qualified for care and have already gotten a recommendation from someone else. Also, by using effective marketing like I mentioned above, you can market to certain conditions which are more likely to follow through with your care recommendations.

For more tips on conversions, see my article entitled “14 Ways to Increase Your Conversions“.

3. Collect More Per Visit

How much do you collect per visit on average? Not a guess, but the actual number?

If you’re like I was the first 2 years in business, I had no clue. I thought that since my charge for adjustment was $45, that was my average. Imagine my surprise when I actually did the calculation and found it to be $17. No wonder some coaches tell people “not to worry about the numbers” — wow! How many visits do you have to see at $17 to make a living these days?

So the point is figure up your number and know it. Take all the gross collections you made last month, or last year, and divide by the number of visits in that time period. You may be surprised at what you find.

So how do you increase this amount?

You need to add more services that the patient wants or needs. Easy ideas are massage, nutritional supplements, rehab, weight loss programs, etc. I’m not saying you’ve got to be a Walmart and offer everything under one roof. But adding a couple of extra services you and your patients are interested in will only benefit everyone. Another thing you can do to collect more per visit is raise your fees a little. The costs of running a practice do go up over time, so don’t be shy about raising your fees to make up for it. If you’ve been holding off for years from doing this, now is the time.

4. Increase Your Patient Visit Average (PVA)

Of the 5 things listed here, this is one of the most difficult. I know, you’ve heard stories about people having a PVA of 100+. And they may be using the easier way to increase PVA, which is to discount everything down to nothing (like the $17 a visit mentioned above!)

But for the rest of us, we realize that human nature is what it is, and we live in a world that does not like to commit. It’s nothing for people to have an excuse for missing appointments. Other may not like the perfume your front desk wears and they’ll go down the street to see someone else.

The best way to increase PVA is simply to tell patients at the beginning how many visits you recommend. Not scaring them into it or anything like that. But simply saying here’s how many I think it will take. Other strategies that help are patient education, front desk follow-up, in-office marketing, and having a good rapport with patients.

5. Lower Your Overhead

The one everyone body loves to hate — overhead expenses! But the easiest way to increase your income is to keep more of what you make.

Many doctors think there is nothing that can be done about their monthly business expenses. But this is not true. Everything is negotiable, from lower rent and CAM charges on a lease to a lower monthly cell phone bill. Simply contact all your vendors/suppliers and ask them for lower rates.You’ll be surprised how many will budge.

Also, paying interest on debt every month can kill a practice. What if you kept all your debt payments every month and pocketed them. How much would that add up to? Develop a plan to repay your debt as soon as possible. I followed and recommend the Total Money Makeover.

Some doctors cut out their marketing budget to reduce expenses. But this is very, very dangerous and can send you into a deadly spiral (which I wrote more on here.)

Which of these 5 strategies do you struggle with? Leave a comment below.

There is an internet marketing secret that most “website guys” would rather you not know. It has to do with something you hear about all over the internet regarding the word “traffic.”

The secret is…

“When it really comes down to it, the amount of website traffic doesn’t really matter.”

This applies to website visitors specifically, but more generally to office visits in your practice as well. Let me explain…

Regarding the internet, there is no end to the amount of techniques you can use to get visitors to your site. You can use Facebook, Twitter, social media, social bookmarking, Google organic search, Google Adwords, YouTube videos, article marketing, Yahoo organic search, Yahoo ads, Bing organic, Bing ads, Ebay ads, and on and on.

If the yellow pages rep. stops by your office and says he can guarantee you 300 clicks a month for X amount of dollars, what do you say to him? I would say, “so what, what’s 300 clicks to me! How about you get me 300 qualified clicks to my special landing page?” Of course he’s likely to say that’s no problem. But from my experience, these ad reps are clueless about how to really market online. They are still thinking in terms of how many people see your ad, like all the newspaper and yellow page reps have done for years.

But it’s not the same online. What you want to buy is qualified traffic. People who are interested in what you do and how you can help them. A patient with severe sciatica is 100 times more likely to respond to a special page on your website discussing sciatica, than is a person with only a stiff back.

But even if you get qualified traffic, that’s still not what you care most about. What you really care about first and foremost is conversions! You want your website to convert visitors to patients. Who cares if your site gets 1000 visits a day (which could be some bored teenager in China or something), if you don’t get any new patients out of it.

How do you track conversions from your website? The same way you do (or should be doing) with any other type of marketing. You ask the new patient where they heard about you. It’s best to have some check boxes on your intake forms with the major types of marketing you do, i.e. website, newspaper, referral, etc. Of course you can leave an “other” check box so they can write in someone other than the selections you’ve given.

So how does this apply to your office?

In a general sense, this is true of all your patients that come in. You want to measure and watch your conversions to care. If you spend $10,000 this month on marketing and that brings in 30 new patients, how many of them stayed around for your recommended care plan? What was your conversions percentage? How much are they paying per visit?

You see, if all you cared about were the total number of visits to your office (or total number of new patients), you’re missing the most important numbers to track. Would you rather see 500 visits per week and make $5000, or see 100 visits and make $10,000? ? In chiropractic its common to hear people talking about how many visits they see per week. Yet you’ll rarely hear anyone say how many conversion they had this month, or what their gross collections were or how much they average per visit in collections.

If the only thing you cared about was visits per week, you could have someone stand out in front of your office on the road with a sign that said, “Free care for everyone!” But unless you’ve got a huge trust fund tucked away, this “free care” strategy will run you out of business.

The point is don’t just measure the total number of visitors to your website. Or the total number of patients you see a week. This numbers might be used to check growth, but they don’t tell you much in and of themselves. More importantly you need to measure conversions on your website and in your office recommendations.

Advanced articles on this subject:

Your Website is Not Enough

6 Chiropractic Internet Marketing Tools

14 Ways to Increase In-Office Conversions

The end of the calendar year, what many Americans call the Holiday Season (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years), is quickly approaching. For many chiropractors, this is a bustling time of new patients and high profits to finish out the year strong. For others it represents some of the hardest and leanest months on record.

Why the difference?

It comes down to your view of marketing. There is a myth that’s been perpetuated in our profession for many years. The myth that says you shouldn’t market in certain months because of holidays and vacations. Have you ever heard such nonsense?

I actually had a consultant when I first started out in practice that went through all the ‘bad marketing’ months. January is insurance deductible rollover month. Feb. was probably okay. March was spring break, so not good there. April was tax month, so that was out. The summer was out because everyone went on vacation. December was bad because of all that Christmas spending, no one had money to come in. Plus insurance plans were maxed! And on and on. I think he ended up listing at most 2-3 months out of the whole year that I should use paid marketing!

You may remember the Dynamic Chiropractic poll which was taken awhile back on this issue, finding there was no difference between summer, fall and winter when it comes to marketing. The interesting thing was that 22%, a fourth of doctors polled, said it the season didn’t make any difference in their marketing.

Now that’s the attitude you should have. If anything the Holidays are an excuse to ramp up your marketing because your marketing will stand out even better as your competitors will have believed the myth and pulled back on their spending. Many doctors have realize this little secret and done very well.

Sidenote: In case your not familiar with this blog, when I say “marketing” I mean effective, proven marketing strategies, methods and techniques. I’m not speaking of getting more brochures printed up or drop a few business cards off at the local restuarant.

I’ll never forget the year I put an ad in the newspaper the week before Thanksgiving. It was later in the month I would have liked, considering I believed at the time I shouldn’t be marketing at all near the end of the month. And my ads usually have a 2 week deadline to take action on the offer. But things just didn’t work out for me to get it in earlier. “Oh well”, I figured, “at least they’ll have 1 week to come in.” The results surprised me. A few came in that first week, but we actually got swamped the three days before Thanksgiving Day. I think we had 7 or 8 new patients the day right before, meaning when came back the following week I was going to be doing multiple report of findings. What better thought to have on a 4 day holiday?

Let’s look at the reasons why you should market heavily during the next two months.

• Bad weather means more accidents, whether slips, falls or auto accidents. People will need your services.
• Holidays can be a great time of year to hold a special new patient event like a Food Drive, Toys for Tots drive, Angel Tree program, and more.
• Winter sports are in full swing, causing many athletic injuries that need your care.
• Competitors marketing is usually lessened, which makes yours stand out.
• Discounts can be had from many media, especially newspapers and magazines.
• People are home more often, which means it may be time to try some telemarketing programs.
• More people are online shopping, which means they may come across your website.
• Many are looking to use up there Health Savings Accounts by years end (especially considering people are concerned these benefits will disappear under Obamacare.)

Now I’m not saying you should ignore certain aspects of the Holidays when you do your marketing plan. I would not put an ad in the paper on Christmas Day or New Years day for example, or even the day before. Also, you shouldn’t run ads when you’ll be closed unless you have a good answering service.

Here’s where my focus would be on marketing in the next two months.

Newspaper Adveritising: Run a chiropractic ad or decompression ad at least once in November and once in December. Twice each month would be even better, but in December run your second ad before the 20th. I would also have an ad coming out the very first week of the new year. (Look for a special New Years ad I’ll be mentioning in a few weeks.)

Internet Marketing: I would keep it running right along smoothly with article marketing, email marketing, SEO backlinks and Google Adwords. Now there is a trend at the end of the year on Google (see chart below) where people do search less for the term “chiropractic”. But we need to consider a couple of things here. First, since you only get charged when your ad gets clicked, if no one is searching for this term your ad won’t show and you won’t get charged. Secondly, even if someone does click your Adwords ad, they are interested and have just as much chance of coming in as someone who clicked your ad in April, or June, or any other month. Thirdly, you definitely should be marketing to other keywords than just chiropractic. In fact all keywords take a dip in mid December on Google (except for toys, gifts, etc.), but they also spike quite a bit right after Christmas.

For example, take a look at the chart above which is a Google Trends graph for the search term “sciatica”. See that spike right at the end of the year. You want to be running your ads then for sure. And lastly, it’s been confirmed from Google Adwords experts that one of the worse things you can do is to turn off your ads. This messes up your past history of success with Google, jacking with your bid rates, quality scores and more.

Referral Marketing: Continue with an effective internal marketing plan, but adding to it at least one special event near Thanksgiving food drive, Christmas toy drive, or New Years “get back to health.” As Dan Kennedy says, these are great times to create a special marketing event. Don’t waste it. Also, these events allow your patients to give to those in need helping others to enjoy the holidays.

We’ll look at more ideas in the coming weeks. Have you laid all this out on the calendar yet and put things into action? If not, what are you waiting for, Christmas or something?

Dan Clements was kind enough to answer a few questions regarding his new book, The Practitioners Journey.

1. Dan, can you give us a bird’s eye view of what your book is all about? (Or maybe this questions is better phrased “Why did you write the book?”)

After a number of years of working with practitioners, and growing our own business, it was becoming more and more evident to me that the biggest challenge facing practitioners wasn’t information, it was complexity.

Time after time we discovered that practitioners had plenty of information, and no shortage of things on their to-do lists. What they had trouble with was how to look at their practices in a way that made it easier to make decisions and continue to move forward.

2. In the first section of the book, you use the metaphor of traveler getting lost in a cave. I see a lot of chiropractors lost in dark caves like you explain in the book. Do you think we’re seeing more chiropractors lately wandering into the darkest parts of their career?

Between economic shifts, health care changes and the sheer amount of competition in some places, I think the idea of being lost in a dark place is something that resonates with many chiropractors.

What’s important to remember is that being lost is temporary. The cave—how we describe that dark stretch—is really a tunnel. There’s an end, and finding it is something that’s within your control.

CE credits aren’t usually what you need to get out of the cave—the dark parts of your career are almost always related to a lack of NON-clinical development. A new technique or tool might be part of it, but it’s usually about embracing the idea that you’re in business, and continuing to develop that side of yourself.

Invest in your non-clinical education. Learn to manage, to lead. To take risk. To market what you offer. Each lights the way a little more.

3. I’m always telling chiropractors that they need to niche their practices, focusing on certain conditions or types of patients they like to work with. How does this compare to your metaphor of “the crystal” and the story of Maya the chiropractor?

Maya is like many other chiropractors today. She’s in a busy market, with competition right down the street. The appointment book is never as full as she’d like. She’s struggling, and stressed.

The real reason that her competition is a problem, though, is that what she offers isn’t any different from other DC’s.

That sameness means she has to compete. And when she competes, there will always be someone who will be cheaper than Maya. Or closer. Or open later. Or with better parking.

The result? Her existing patients don’t have a compelling reason to stay, and new ones don’t have a compelling reason to choose her. Focusing on one type of problem, or one type of patient is one way to avoid that no-win competition.

4. One line I really found helpful in your book is on page 31: “And there’s the great irony of the CAM industry: no one starts out to be in business, yet everyone has to be in order to succeed.”

I think cash practices are on the rise in chiropractic. It’s going to become the new normal. And that means that you don’t just get to be a chiropractor. It means you run a health care business in which you also happen to be the person providing chiropractic services, too.

It’s not a choice. You have two hats to wear (at least), and you have to find a way to get comfortable in them. Your DC hat only gives you the license to provide services. It’s the business owner hat that lets you find the people to deliver them to.

5. There a great section in the book where you give 6 tips to help alternative health professionals bridge the gap between them and MDs. How important is this?

For me, it’s critical. MD’s are still the gatekeepers to the sick in our culture. If you want to reach and help more people, you need to go where they are. In our society, a huge number of them are still in hospitals and MD offices. And that system is being overwhelmed.

Continuing to fight over the same people who already use chiropractic is a race with no winner. The real opportunity lies in the huge chronic health challenges in our culture, and most of those people who need that help are still inside conventional care.

6. Your second strategy for finding more time in our busy lives is to follow Parkinson’s law. What is Parkinson’s law and how can it help chiropractors?

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fit the time available for it. In other words, if you give yourself a “day” to do admin work in your practice, it’ll take all day – regardless of how much of it there is to do. The same goes for patient hours. If you offer thirty patient hours a week, it’s common to only bill for half of those or less.

That makes Parkinson’s Law critical for balance. What most DC’s miss out on is the fact that they can almost always earn more in the same time or less. My suggestion is to put your focus on your percentage booked. Start measuring it in your practice, and if you’re not consistently booked at a rate of 75% or more, start cutting back your available hours.

7. How do you think your book can help chiropractors thrive in this tough economy?

I recently interviewed Dan Clements, author of a very helpful book entitled The Practitioner’s Journey.

People find three things helpful in the book. The first is simplicity – the book gives practitioners a way to rise above the overwhelming minutiae of day-to-day life in practice.

The second is a practical way to look at growing your practice. The framework of the book is the same framework we use to do our strategic planning every year—it’s a way to look at your practice from 50,000 feet and make smart decisions about what needs to change so that you can find success on your own terms. When you take a simple framework, and combine it with small, practical and consistent steps forward, you get something very powerful: progress.

Last, I think it’s a book about hope. About believing that there’s no special advantage required to find your way to success – that if you’ve made it far enough to be in practice, you have what it takes to do it successfully.

Thanks for the interview Dan.

Dan Clements, B.Comm., B.A. is the author of The Practitioner’s Journey, and Escape 101: Sabbaticals Made Simple, which has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Success Magazine and on A-list blogs such as Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek.  Dan and his wife Tara Gignac, ND operate StoneTree Clinic in Collingwood, ON. Together they are Contributing Founders of IntegrativePractitioner.com, the premier online community for integrative health care professionals, joining such health care luminaries as Joseph E. Pizzorno, Jr., N.D., Mark Hyman, MD, Alan Gaby, MD and many others.

Their popular practice management blog, www.practitionersjourney.com, attracts thousands of practitioners in diverse health care professions.

Dan lectures at The Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine on practice management, and speaks regularly on health, business and work-life balance.

Cash practices have been around for a long time in chiropractic. For the first few decades of our profession, all chiropractors ran a cash-only practice as there was little to no health insurance in those days. And even if there was, it sure wasn’t going to pay for chiropractic.

I previously wrote on the pros and cons of a cash practice here. In that article, I mentioned that I’m seeing more chiropractic (and even medical) doctors consider going to a cash practice. Many give the current health care environment as the reason why.

Here are just three pieces of news I’ve come across lately regarding the state of affairs in chiropractic.

#1. In Texas, the Medical Association is fighting (and currently winning)
a battle to keep chiropractors from diagnosing.

#2. On the east coast, insurance giant Kaiser Permanente has declared
they will no longer pay for cervical adjustments.

#3. Obama’s healthcare plan will be fully implemented by 2014. No one
knows for sure what it will do to chiropractors, but chances are it
will not be good.

One of my goals is to provide the information you need and want to
help you thrive in the midst of upcoming challenges.

To do this, I need your help.

I’ve put together a simple 10 question survey that will only take
you a couple of minutes to complete. This is your opportunity to let
me know what you think about this mess.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YJ5FMV

Whether you’re for a cash practice or against it, let me know by
answering these short questions. And as a thank you for filling out
the survey, I’m going to give you a free bonus: “The Coming Crisis in
Chiropractic and How to Beat It in 2011: A Blueprint for Success”,
which includes the 3 most effective marketing strategies, the 3
advertising strategies you should stop doing now, and the big secret
that cash-practice gurus never, ever tell their clients.

After completing the survey, leave your email, and as soon as I get
the blueprint done I’ll send it to you.

Click this link to take the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YJ5FMV

Yours for greater success,
Michael Beck, D.C.