I just received the DVD set from the NeuropathyDr conference I spoke at last summer. Here’s the first 10 minutes of the talk, where I showed the audience why some chiropractic ads bringing in little-to-no results. I’ll be posting more videos from this DVD in the future, but if you like this one, please click through to Youtube and choose “Like” or thumbs up.

I often get asked about running my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads as inserts in the newspaper, as opposed to a space ad inside the paper. Many chiropractors have never tried inserts and are quite surprised at the return on investment they can get.

If you’re using my ads, I strongly recommend testing inserts for your zipcode at least once. (Of course you can try inserts even if you don’t have my ads, but I can’t promise you’ll get good results.) If your ad cost to run in the main section of the paper is going to be above $1,500 or $2,000, you should try inserts as your first three runs.

If you’re running in a major metro city paper, inserts would be better to start with because you can just run in the zip codes for your area.

For example, if you were out on the edge of a big city, like in a small suburb, you’re not going to have that many subscribers in some areas for the major paper. In this case you should run inserts for your zip code instead of paying full price to run in Section A, the news section. Running inserts in a large city paper is a very good thing when looking at your overall marketing plan. It can give you a lot of options and multiple places to run your ad.

You could run a half-page ad in the small, local paper, and then inserts in the big city paper for your area. This allows you to run basically two different ads in the same exact area in two different papers.

With my ad kit you have plenty of ads to rotate and run, and although it’s possible, don’t just build your practice on one ad.

Typically inserts will be a little bit more expensive than running a half-page, a full-page, or a quarter-page ad, but many times inserts will produce better results.
There are different reasons for this, not that it really matters, because the fact that you get a better result is good enough.
But in case you’re curious, let’s look at what advantages inserts offer:

- people can hang on to it longer, putting it on the refrigerator for example,
- the insert’s easier to handle and read
- inserts fall out of the paper, so prospects are more likely to notice it
- it looks a different color than the “gray” newspaper
- inserts are a different size
- inserts stand out from the rest of the paper

All of these factors have an effect on the insert’s higher response over a “display” or space ad. One of the major benefits of an insert is that it’s not right next to any other ad. You don’t have to worry about losing the person’s attention. It’s not mixed in with other articles either, so they can’t really skip over it.

Many newspapers will allow you to bring already printed inserts to their facilities, and they will charge you what’s called an insert fee. There are two fees sometimes quoted regarding inserts: a printing fee and an insertion fee. The insertion fees is where someone actually is putting an insert into each of the papers before they go out in the morning.

In my experience, the insert fee usually the bigger expense. For most papers it’s more cost effective to have the newspaper print the inserts, as opposed to taking them to your own printer. You will have to shop around with your local printers and compare prices to determine which route is best for you.

I know for one of the major big city papers that I ran in, the insert fee was about 70% to 80% of the total cost that they quoted me. Which meant it wasn’t likely I would save much by printing the inserts myself.

But I would shop around and at least find out.

I compared it to the option of paying a local printer, then driving the inserts over to the newspaper’s facility, and paying the insert fee.
It was going to cost me double the price to do it this way! So I decided to just let the newspaper handle everything.

Sometimes newspapers will even have specials on inserts. That’s something you’ll want to ask your ad rep about. If they’re trying to get more inserts into the paper or they’re trying to get new business, the ad rep will give you a special discount.

A couple of years out of chiropractic college, I had hit rock bottom. No money for rent. Barely enough for food. And certainly no money for Christmas presents for our little daughter at the time. (If you want an exercise in empathy, try telling your two year old that there’s not enough money for even a single gift!)

Not being able to provide for one’s family is a heart-wrenching affair, which can send any “tough guy” into a deep depression. And that’s when I had a huge business awakening. Here’s what I learned:

“It’s not just about your patients!”

I know, you’re probably thinking this isn’t any huge breakthrough at all. But here me out a bit. I had been told over and over in school, by consultants and many industry leaders that “If you take care of enough people, they’ll take care of you” or “Don’t worry about the money, just take care of the patients.” Now both of these have an element of truth. You certainly can’t focus your life on the ‘love of money’. You also can’t be worried about ‘numero uno’ all the time. But the problem with these coined phrases is that they don’t tell the whole story.

You see, I had plenty of patients at the time. But I was giving away so much free care and discounted care that I was barely able to feed my family. People would pull up in Porsches and Jaguars to my office, while I was parting my old jalopy at the other end of the parking lot. I realize now that I was ‘doing stupid’ by the shovel full, but at the time I was under the impression that I just needed to see more patients. More visits from more new patients would solve my problems.

Except that it didn’t solve anything because I was marketing to the wrong patients! And on top of that offering them severely discounted care plans!

That’s why it was a huge breakthrough for me. Because for the first time in practice I realized that patients didn’t give a darn whether I drove a jalopy or a Mercedes. They just wanted their care. And I had a lot of nice caring patients, but in the end it didn’t matter to them how successful I was.

So why on earth am I so worried about what they thought of my recommendations. An extra $10 a visit was nothing to them, but a huge blessing to me and my family at the time.

This is one of the reasons I went from an average of $17 a visit to over $80 a visit — in just a matter of 4 months.

Now it wasn’t just charging more that turned my practice around. Thankfully, I was blessed with a wake-up call on how to use effective marketing too. My marketing plan before had simply been this: whoever calls or comes by asking me to market, that’s what I’ll use to get more patients in the door.

A few thousand dollars later and very few new patients I realized the famous “marketing doesn’t work” saying must be true. Little did I know that this saying was both right and wrong. You can guarantee that crappy marketing does not work. But effective marketing does indeed work. The key is being able to determine between the two!

Lessons to learn from this true story:

#1. If you’re not struggling now, make sure you never have to by doing right things right now. Don’t wait to market when you need new patients. Put a chiropractic ad in the newspaper every month. Make sure your internet marketing plan is up to speed. Send your patients “stick letters”.  And more.

#2. If you are struggling, stop wasting money on ineffective marketing and get some good marketing. Passing out business cards and brochures isn’t going to cut it in most cities. Get an ad set up to run before Christmas. (My Ultimate Chiropractic Ads have a 90 day guarantee. What do you have to loose?)

#3. Be thankful for what you’ve been given. I learned my lesson the hard way. But not a Christmas or Thanksgiving holiday rolls by without me thinking back on those hard times, and being thankful for the blessing I now have: a great wife, four beautiful children and I get to help chiropractors grow their business every day!

With the internet being all the rage, many chiropractors have been told that newspaper advertising is completely useless. Is there any truth to this claim?

No. Chiropractic newspaper advertising is still going strong. It is certainly true that some newspaper publishers are struggling to keep up with the recent recession and all the new media in the past few years. But this is an advantage to you, since you can get better prices in most markets than you could 5 years ago. You’ll still get a good return from newspaper ads and a much quicker one than from a website.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying you should do newspaper advertising in the place of internet marketing. I’m saying you should do both. Why must it be one or the other? One is a quick influx of new patients when you run the newspaper ad. The other is a constant trickle of a new patients from your website and other online marketing methods. I for one like money that comes in big and fast, and money that flows in consistently over time. How about you?

If newspaper ads aren’t working anymore, no one has notified my ad customers who are getting tons of new patients. Like Dr. Merritt, who had 50 new ones after running his first neuropathy ad or the doc who called us and mentioned that his phone has not stopped ringing after running his first ad. Or Dr. David Rusick who just today emailed me this:

My first ad worked great! We have seen 22 new patients in one week from this ad alone and they are still calling, and 18 have agreed to prescribed care plans. Not a bad ROI, when my average case is $1,400.00 and my first 1/2 page ad cost was $1,500.00 . It sounds too good to be true, but it works. It has been amazing to see the reponse from the patients.They feel like the ad was written specifically for them. They are all ready for care when to they come to my office. Thanks Doc.

Here’s a short clip from a webinar where I cover the actual numbers released in a study from the Newspaper Association of America.

(If you have a decompression table and would like to watch the full decompression marketing webinar, visit http://www.decompressionmarketingelite.com)

Often doctors will ask a spouse or front desk CA to look over their ad before it goes to print. A common response these parties give when looking at a long copy ad, like the ones picture on the left, is “who’s going to read all that?” Sometimes these answers will influence the doctor’s decision to run the ad or not.

A professional marketer might ask the same question, but in a slightly different manner saying “is long or short copy more effective?”

Let’s take a look at what some of the best marketers over the past 100 years have said.

David Ogilvy, famous ad marketer, in his book Ogilvy on Advertising said:

“Long copy sells more than short copy, particularly when you are asking the reader to spend a lot of money. Only amateurs use short copy.”

Victor Schwab, How to Write a Good Advertisement –

Mr. Schwab tells the story of Max Hart (of Hart, Schaffner & Marx) and his advertising manager, George L. Dyer, arguing about long copy. Dyer said, “I’ll bet you $10 I can write a newspaper page of solid type and you’d read every word of it.”

Hart scoffed at the idea. “I don’t have to write a line of it to prove my point,” Dyer replied. “I’ll only tell you the headline: ‘This Page is All About Max Hart’.”

Jay Abraham, marketing expert says:

Should your letter or E-mail be long or short? Make it long enough to tell a complete, informative, and interesting story.

Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerilla Marketing Handbook with Seth Godin writes:

Don’t be afraid to use lengthy copy. It’s been statistically proven time and time again that ads with more copy draw better than those with less.

Claude Hopkins, author of the classic book Scientific Advertising writes:

Some say, “Be very brief. People will read but little.” Would you say that to a salesman? With the prospect standing before him, would you confine him to any certain number of words? That would be an unthinkable handicap.”

As you can see, all of these marketing giants recommend a longer copy ad over a shorter one. Why? Because it works. More specifically, because long copy allows you to have all the effective components in the ad (like the important ones I mentioned in “5 Secrets to Powerful Chiropractic Ads“).

So who’s going to read all that copy?

A patient who’s looking for a doctor that finally understands them, that finally can relate to their problem, someone that has expertise with their condition that they’ve been suffering from. Put these elements in your long copy, niche-specific ad, and I guarantee patients will read it.

Here are a few cases where patients did respond to the ads. (This does not mean you’ll get exactly the same results as they did, as it’s likely yours would be within the range mentioned here.)

So the point is save your short copy ads for the yellow pages, but use long copy in the newspaper, in direct mail and online.

One of the most frequent questions we get about the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads (and even Decompression Marketing Elite) is…

“Can you send me a sample of one of your ads?”

In most cases, I understand that this is an honest, sincere question to see what type of ads I write. Usually, it’s to compare to past advertisements the doctor has used in his office. So I realize people aren’t out to steal my ads. But there’s a big problem with this request. To me, this question might as well be…

“Can you send me $50,000 in cash as a sample, to just look at?”

Why would I equate the two requests? Because unlike custom made advertisements, where a copywriter sends over samples he’s written in other industries, my ads are ready to go for one specific industry. That means any chiropractor can quickly change their name and number, insert them into the paper and start getting new patients. (Like the customer who called us yesterday from North Carolina and said his phone has not stopped ringing after running the neuropathy ad one time, scheduling over 40 new patients so far!)

You see, the ads I write aren’t “samples”. They are real ads I’ve spent quite a bit of time and money researching and writing. We don’t have any samples. The ads are all ads, ready to go and bring in quality new patients. Even if we did have samples, reading it would tell you very little. Unless you’ve spent thousands of hours studying copywriting and testing ads, you’re not going to be able to see the nuances of how my ads work.

That’s not being harsh, just being honest. I’ve had two chiropractors, who’ve spent years writing their own ads, now use mine and love them. They’ll be the first to tell you that their own ads worked okay, but after using mine they won’t likely ever go back.

An advertisement works because it produces new patients. Not because it looks beautiful or professional (although I think my ads are both!) Even if the words of an ad are the most beautiful prose ever written, if they don’t bring in new patients they are rubbish.

To ask the question a slightly different way is to say…

“How are your ads different than what I’ve used before?”

Now this is the question most people want to know, and 90% of the time the ‘question behind the question’ of “can you send me a sample”. There are really only 2 reasons to want a sample. Either to run it and see how it does or to see how it looks and reads to differentiate it from other advertising the doctor has seen in the past.

As an aside, sometimes we get the “if you’re ads are so good, why don’t you let us try one for free, then we’ll buy the rest” type of request. I guess we could do that, if we were willing to get our attorney to write up a very long, lengthy contract, making this requester promise to pay a percentage of what he makes, with various clauses for defaulting on the agreement, etc, then pay said attorney thousands of dollars to prosecute violations of this contract, which we all know would be numerous. OR I could just give you a 90 day trial period with a money-back guarantee, and save both of us some legal bills!

But seriously, if you’re struggling in practice ( I feel for you, as I was once there myself), as hard as it  is to sometimes admit it to ourselves, if the 3 payments are too steep for your budget right now it’s time to hold off from buying. If $365 is too much, then you aren’t going to have the money to run an ad in the paper once you get them. And I know for a fact my ads will not work if you shrink them down to a tiny little business card-sized ad to save money.

As to the question of “how are your ads different”, let me attempt to give a quick summary. (More detailed information about these differences are given on the websites linked above.)

• They work better at bringing in quality new patients. Why? Various reasons: they employ empathy, photos with captions, effective offers with a deadline, etc.
• You get 40 different ads (Or a new decompression ad every month in the Decompression program.), as opposed to a small handful.
• You get multiple sub-niched ads, including neuropathy, fibromyalgia, numbness, sciatica, back pain, headaches, decompression, laser, scoliosis, etc.
• You get a money-back guarantee for 90 days on the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads and an area exclusive 60 day trial (nonrefundable) with no long term commitment with Decompression Marketing Elite. Do the other ads give this?
• You get the “how-to” reports. How to get the best ROI with these ads. How to save money with your newspaper ad rep. How often to run the ads. What size. Which ones work best.
• You get bonus marketing letters that you can use via mail to get more referrals, re-activations, new homeowners and more.

I could go on and on, but these are just a few that I’ve listed here. We really have tried to come up with the best chiropractic marketing product available for you to bring in quality new patients. If you haven’t tried them out, what are you waiting for?

There are 5 lies every chiropractor has been tempted to tell himself at one point or another. Some of us have only fallen prey to 1 or 2 of these lies. Others of us have succumbed to all 5 and felt the devastating effects on our practices.

Where do these lies come from?

Many of them come from chiropractic consultants, especially numbers 1 through 4. The 5th lie is one we usually come up with on our own during desperate times.

Which of these chiropractic marketing lies have you believed? Do you agree with these or disagree, post your comments below.

1. I’ll just cut back on my marketing expenses for awhile, since I’ve got so many referrals coming in.

This one gets a lot of chiropractors. Usually the doctor is looking for ways to cut costs or maybe is just tired of having to “market my practice.” It’s not that marketing has been a failure, as much as it takes a bit of work to measure return on investment (ROI) and keep track of what’s working. Plus, there’s the added task of trying something new occasionally. Why not just take a few months off and let the referrals keep coming in?

Of course the problem is that many of these referrals come from the “marketed to” new patients. For example, a new patient comes in from a chiropractic newspaper ad and after starting care refers their husband in to you. The husband refers a coworker. The coworker refers their spouse in. By this time, you may have forgotten where this process started. Don’t cut the referral generator off at the source.

2. Marketing isn’t professional.

Thankfully this lie isn’t believed near as much these days. During the Mercedes 80s, chiropractors could get new patients simply by putting a sign on the door and getting on the best insurance plans. Who needed marketing?

Chiropractic schools sometimes give off the aura that marketing is not professional. How many marketing classes did you get in school?

Times have changed. Insurance doesn’t pay what it used to, nor are you going to get flooded with new patients by joining the local networks. And everyone has to agree that chiropractic school does not prepare you 100% for the business of chiropractic. What profession doesn’t market themselves? Hospitals have billboards, newspaper ads, and more. Dentist advertise in the phone book, newspaper, TV, radio, etc. Attorneys, medical doctors, surgeons, orthodontists — if they are successful and growing, they advertise.

3. I want MD referrals, and MDs won’t refer to me if I advertise because it’s unprofessional.

I first heard this one from a prominent consulting group. They wanted me to pay them $40k to show me how to get more referrals from MDs. And of course I’d need to tone down my other marketing, since it wasn’t professional like MD marketing. Plus this consultant would show me how to get so many MD referrals that I would never need to spend money on marketing. A pipe dream for sure.

Back on planet earth, every business has to market their services. Certainly there are sleazy, hyped up ads, but not all marketing is like this. Marketing and advertising does not have to be unprofessional. Many MD’s and D.O.’s will refer to you because of your marketing. I ran newspaper ads for years, and never met the big medical practice down the street, yet I got referrals from them for years. Why? Only thing I can figure is they read my ads in the paper on the different conditions we help.

4. If a marketing strategy or tool is good, it will bring me 100′s of new patients per month.

We’ve all heard of the proverbial marketing “magic pill.” Problem is that it’s a fairy tale. Everyone knows this. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and doctors expect the next thing they buy will produce 100′s of new patients. What if you only get 10 new patients for $1000 spent?

Two different perspectives can occur here.

#1. One doctor says wow, one marketing tactic got me 10 new patients, that’s awesome!

#2. Another doctor says “man, I needed 20 new ones this month to remain profitable. This only brought in 10. Guess that strategy didn’t work well at all. Time to trash it and try another one.”

Some of you may be thinking #2 is a made-up doctor, no one with this thinking really exists. But trust me, I see it every week. See the blog post “Chiropractic Math and the Struggling Practice” for an in-depth example.

Now we mustn’t over do this and say all marketing is equal because there isn’t a magic pill. There is certainly a dividing line between effective marketing strategies and crappy, waste-of-money marketing strategies. There are tools which will bring you 20 new patients a month, but even then you should not focus 100% of your money and time on that one stratagy. One month you may only get 5 new patients instead of the normal 20, so make sure you have multiple streams of quality new patients coming in.

5. If money gets tight this month, I’ll cut the most expensive advertising out.

What’s wrong with this one?  After all, when things get tight you’ve got to cut something out, right?

That’s true. But it doesn’t follow that you base what your going to cut out simply on how much things cost. If it did, then you should cut out your rent first. And your payroll. Plus your salary.

You should determine what you’re going to cut out based on what’s effective. If an ad has been working in the newspaper, why would you stop running it because it’s the most expensive marketing cost you have? Better to cut out all the little things that don’t work, like maybe yellow page ads or poorly done static websites.

The cost of advertising tells you nothing about how many patients it brings in. For that you need to figure ROI and compare your returns across multiple marketing strategies.

Make sure not to cut the advertising that is actually keeping you alive. Cutting off the hand that feeds you will only result in a downward spiral that makes it very difficult to come out of.

We get quite a few questions about my Ultimate Chiropractic Ads, both from those interested in buying and from doctors who are using them. Today, I wanted to let you in on the 5 biggest questions (and the answers) we get from doctors using the system.

What’s the best ad to start with?

We recently conducted a survey of all the doctors using the chiropractic ads. One question in the survey asked “Which ad has brought you the most new patients?”

The winner by a long shot was my neuropathy ad. This is not surprising since neuropathy is such a hot niche right now with one else really marketing to these patients. While not everyone will get these kinds of numbers, some chiropractors have reported 20-30 and up to 50 new patients from one single run of this neuropathy ad.

A three-way tie for second occurred between my fibromyalgia, sciatica, and numbness/tingling ads. If you haven’t tried these ads yet, I would recommend you do so soon. Also, the winning decompression ad was my “Decompression Sciatica” ad, which has been a proven winner for over 2 years now.

What about making an offer when I’m in an insurance contract, my patient have deductibles and copays, etc?

We get this question a lot from doctors who’ve never run special offers before. And as much as I wished I could answer this one directly, it’s just impossible. Every insurance company is different. Every contract with an insurance company is different. What I can say here is that if you’re in the U.S.,  Medicare and Federal BCBS do not allow offers to be made to their insureds.

Many doctors want us to give free billing, coding and legal advice in addition to the great marketing tools we provide in our kit. While I did put together some great chiropractic appeal letters a few years back, billing and coding is just not my expertise. Marketing is, and those who use my ads are happy that it is.

But I’ve seen doctors so scared of 1 insurance company that they won’t even run an ad with an offer period! Even though there are thousands of new patients out there with other insurance plans or no insurance at all. Do what is right and legal, but don’t let insurance companies cripple you’re marketing. If you’re going to let that happen, you’d be better off going all cash.

I don’t have an x-ray machine, what do I do?

This is probably the most common question we get. Since none of my chiropractic ads are built around “x-rays” or even spend much time talking about them, the answer is fairly simple: take that bullet point out.

Now its best if you can offer some type of objective test that gives your offer some value, like surface EMG, thermal scan, computerized ROM, etc. But it’s not necessary, and the ads will be ok without any mention of x-rays. This is especially the case if you are marketing to a specific niche, like neuropathy or decompression. These people just want help and they see any qualified doctor’s exam as a step in the right direction. But the more perceived value you can put in the offer, the better.

What size ad should I run?

The answer to this question will depend on the size of your marketing budget and the newspaper you run in. The Ultimate Chiropractic Ads includes large and small ads, but doctors using the large ads are getting the best results by far. The “large ads” are ready to go as an insert and can easily be printed as such once you change your name and contact information. Half page or full page is also recommended. In a large paper, sometimes a quarter page will work. Any smaller than a quarter page and you’re results are going to be slim.

What I strongly discourage is cutting out sections of my ads to make them fit into a tiny ad that saves you a few bucks. Better to spend a few extra dollars and run the full ad to bring in 15 or 20 new patients, than to chop the ad up and get nothing for your money.

I can not tell you how frustrating it is to see an ad I spent weeks writing — and proven to work by doctors for years — to have someone say “it doesn’t work” when they have completely butchered it. I’ve seen newspapers change up the ad, replace my photos, and even had doctors put their contact info in huge letters that are bigger than the ad headline itself. For example, someone just sent me a copy of my ad where they paid thousands of dollars for a full page numbness ad, then put something like this at the bottom:

Dr. Messup DisAd DC CCSMP, PSST, BS, BA
201 Anywhere St., Anytown, PA, 12345
815-999-1234
MOST INSURANCE ACCEPTED

Actually this is about to 50% scale, but you get the point. Now he still got some new patients, since the rest of my ad was still intact above this monstrosity. But he was not pleased with his response. Hmm, can anyone determine why his response was low?

Hmm, I wonder where the reader is going to look first? The headline, the copy, nope…the reader is going to look right down at the bottom of the ad, say “this looks like another stinking advertisement”, and turn the page. Nowhere in my kit, nor on my blog, nor anywhere have I ever recommended, implied or suggested doctors do this. It’s like the doctor thought to himself “well, I know Dr. Beck is the copywriter and his ads brought in over $20 million for chiros last year, but what does he know, I want to get my name out there so everyone doesn’t miss it.” Come on! My ads aren’t designed to get your name out there, these ads are designed to bring in new patients! If you want to get your name out there, take a full page ad with just your name, address and phone number.

Ok, I’ll get down off my soap box now.

There’s one question left, and it’s a big one. But since I spent so many words on the last question, this post has already exceeded it’s intended length. We’ll continue next time with the #5 question that’s most commonly asked.

If you haven’t grabbed the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads yet, click here to do so.

In a recent decompression marketing webinar, I answered one of the most common questions I get about my ads: “Do newspaper ads still work?” This question doesn’t just apply to those with decompression tables, but to everyone in chiropractic.

Here’s a clip from the webinar where I cover the actual numbers released in a study from the Newspaper Association of America.
(If you have a decompression table and would like to watch the full decompression marketing webinar, visit http://www.decompressionmarketingelite.com)

If you haven’t picked up the Ultimate Chiropractic Ads, click here and start using newspaper advertising to bring in more new patients.

This week, I read Jim Collins’ new book How The Mighty Fall: And How Some Companies Never Give In. I knew this book would have application to chiropractic offices as soon as I read the back cover in Barnes and Noble.

“Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.” – Jim Collins

How true this statement is. Not in a mystical, ‘think and it will happen’ kind of way. Not in a flippant statement some consultants throw at their clients for a ‘pump-me-up’.

But simply a statement of truth.

The success of your practice depends on you! Not the economy. Not the size of your town. Not where you practice. Not the government’s attempts at screwing up healthcare. Not Obama’s spending that you’ll never see a dime of.

Sure, these things make practice a bit more difficult. No one would say they don’t have an affect. But they are not the determining factor in your success.

You would be amazed at the doctors who’ve simply given up marketing their practice the last couple of years. And paid dearly for it. Some haven’t done any outside marketing in 10 or 20 years, but now find themselves forced to due to a declining practice.

Granted, most marketing out there sucks at bringing in new patients. Yet there are proven methods and strategies that work.

And the simple fact is that if you’re not marketing your services to the public, it’s just a matter of time before you’re practice will decline.

Back to the book. Collins has taken various failed companies and studied them to determine what caused their decline. Based on this he has uncovered 5 stages of decline.

Below I list the 5 stages and show how they apply to a chiropractic office. I’ve chosen to give our imaginary chiropractor a name, Dr. Decline, so as not to insinuate that all chiropractors are declining. But it’s very likely many of my readers will be in one of these 5 stages, whether they know it or not.

Hey, I admit I went through stages 1-4 in my early days of practice. Most of us do at some point. But hopefully reading this will help you to recognize it better next time.

Are you in one of this 5 stages?

1. Hubris Born of Success

Hubris is a word from ancient Greece that means overbearing pride or presumption. It’s the thing in Greek mythology that always brought down the hero. It’s what Proverbs 16:18 says well “Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall. ”

This is what Dr. Decline says at some point, “Things are going great right now. I’ve done well. Money is coming in. Why should I even pay for that ad in the newspaper anymore? I can cut back and just rely on referrals. After all, my patients refer because I’m the best doctor in town, not because of some words they read in my newspaper ad or website.”

2. Undisciplined Pursuit of More

Collins thought his data would show declining companies had become complacent and lazy, watching the world go by. But his data showed quite the opposite. He found “overreaching much better explains how the once-invincible self-destruct”

Here our doctor says to himself, “Maybe I’ll buy that new decompression table or new rehab equipment. What’s a big fat lease payment when I’m doing this well. We better hire some new staff too, to get ready for big growth. Things have been busy lately, after all. And I’ll have money because I’ve cut back on my marketing expenses too.”

3. Denial of Risk or Peril

This is when the effects of stage 1 and 2 are starting to set in. Money is still coming in, but signs of danger are starting to appear. There aren’t a lot of new patients on the books next month. The bills are starting to pile up. But the leaders deny the risk.

But our good doctor says, “Ah, it’s probably just the economy or the summer slump or insurance companies. Things will be fine. After all, I’ve been in practice over 10 years, and I’m still here, right?”

4. Grasping for Salvation

The risks of stage 3 have now become a reality, throwing the company into a sharp decline. Collins says this is a pivotal time and brings up the critical question of “how does its leadership respond?”

Does Dr. Decline grasp for a savior in the form of a charismatic chiropractic coach, a “bold but untested strategy” or any other number of magic pill solutions? What he does here is pivotal because once in stage 5 below, there is no coming back.

5. Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

“The longer a company remains in stage 4, repeatedly grasping for silver bullets, the more likely it will spiral downward”, says Collins. The leaders abandon all hope and either sell out or liquidate assets.

This is a sad state for chiropractors when this happens. Let’s hope Dr. Decline never gets here. But the truth is some chiros do.

So how do you prevent the 5 stages of decline listed above?

It’s hard to say for your particular case. But a couple of general guidelines are “don’t ever stop using marketing that works” and cut, cut, cut your expenses.

Oh, and kill that awful sin we all struggle with: pride!