Are you a chiropractor that wants to build a successful Cash Chiropractic Wellness Practice?   It all starts with how you market your chiropractic office in the community, how you present your care to patients and what you discuss during follow up visits. For now, let's focus on the latter... what you say during follow up visits. Do you discuss their pain relief when speaking with patients? Or worse yet do you discuss topics that are not chiropractic, their health, subluxation or spine related during the visit? If so you are wasting valuable education time.... time that will help improve a patient's understanding of chiropractic wellness care - for life. The principle of Cognitive Fluency says that as someone hears something enough they will stop dismissing it and instead grow to understand and accept it. THE GOLDEN QUESTION (Early in Care) When trying to grow a chiropractic wellness care office, and especially if you want to [...]

You do the Chiropractic Marketing... You Run your Cash and/or Membership Practice Like a Top... You Work on Growing your Business every day. But how much time are you spending on making sure your cash chiropractic business is GOING in the right direction? Markets change. And if there is one 'thing' I see with my Cash Practice Clients (and insurance based practice clients that I used to have before I made the switch to cash and membership practice models), it's that they typically duck their head and ignore market forces and competition. Instead they just plug along oblivious to everything and everyone else. Is that approach broken? Well, if you position your practice in a unique enough way where you render the competition irrelevant and cater to the 'wants' of people in the community well enough then you can go a long time with great success doing the 'same ol' thing.' For the vast majority of [...]

Online marketing is a never ending platform of opportunities to promote your cash practice. Unfortunately, it is also a common source of confusion. This post gives you a synopsis of the 3 categories you will target at promoting your business on the internet. 1. Social Media Marketing 2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Marketing 3. Advertising (Online Ads such as Google Ads) Marketing Social Media This literal universe of faddish websites allows you to keep up with friends, family and celebrities. However it is also a great way to create and maintain contact with patients and prospective patients alike. In short you want to select the top 4 or 5 most popular sites (think Twitter, Facebook, Google +, YouTube and Instagram) and set up your business page. From there you will simply post and repost high quality content that gives people simple education or points of interest. More selectively and less frequently you can provide insight into [...]

We are well aware that the better you are at retaining patients, the less chiropractic marketing you need to do. This especially holds true in the Chiropractic Wellness Practice where our entire goal is to help patients understand the need for and follow through with lifetime spine checks. Sometimes an adjustment, or even the entire visit, just doesn't go as well as you had hoped. This can make a visit with an existing, but especially a new patient, very awkward. So beyond explaining how you are reducing subluxations and reduction of pain is a side effect of this and Not Your Goal with care, use these additional tips to not only reduce the chances of a bad first visit but also how to restore and clean it up should it begin to head that way. PREVENTION: 1. Build a bond with all NPs by meeting them in the lobby first. You should always have an ear [...]

Just as there are a host of problems an insurance based practice must contend with on a daily basis, a cash practice that offers ‘membership’ as a way to pay for services, comes with its own set of obstacles and issues. The good news is they are far, far less than those of an office that accepts 3rd party payments. I know – I’ve practiced on both sides of the fence. Regardless of whether you have an insurance, cash, membership or practice transitioning from one to the other, one common concern doesn’t change. How can I build a bigger patient base? […]

The people in our community that we target as potential customers, patients and practice members have been spoon fed the same old health paradigm since birth. No Symptoms = No Problems. That is a huge obstacle to overcome with retaining patients but is something you could obviously use to your advantage when marketing for new patients. But be careful!... If you want to build a chiropractic wellness patient base that ultimately grows into a high-volume cash practice, you cannot directly market pain relief care. Well, actually you CAN but the lack of congruency you will generate in your office will either just shape your office into a pain relief center – by default – or at the very least sabotage the growth of your ‘wellness’ practice. If your goal in the office is building health rather than simply reacting to the decline of it, then don’t market pain relief as a service. It’s not needed because [...]

Preparing for the Transition from an Insurance to Cash Practice Before beginning the actual steps of transitioning from an insurance based model to a non-insurance based cash chiropractic model, there are a number of variables to consider and decisions to make. The good news is that you are probably going to make it a bigger deal and task in your head then it will be in reality. Nevertheless, if you get scared about letting go of the ‘mental safety’ that you believe you have by being attached to third party payers, if you take a dip in volume or income during the process or just temporarily lose focus, take a few minutes to reflect on the disaster that is our failing healthcare system… one that is focused on sickness care. Think about the stress you have endured by being a part of it for as long as you have and how much closer you are to [...]

Just as with an insurance based practice, there is no one magic bullet to success when building a chiropractic cash practice. Below is a summary of the keys to success you should internalize and never forget – from day one of starting the journey – if you decide to transition towards or open a cash chiropractic office. 1.       Always be Marketing – From the clothes you wear to how your staff and practice look and feel, you are always marketing whether you want to be or not. Customer volume solves most business issues so always have at least 4 or 5 ‘marketing poles’ in your community pool bringing patients through the door. One fishing pole might be as simple as asking for referrals or reviews while another is a simple online ad and yet another as complex as an outside health fair event. Either way, always have a marketing plan in action - not place - [...]

There are 2 ways to run a service based business. 1. With Systems 2. Without Systems Without systems means you are depending on the God given talent and past learned behaviors an employee has – personality, decision making and critical thinking skills – to get the job done right. With systems means you depend on protocols and scripts to overcome the ‘shortcomings’ a person, including you, will inevitably prove to have. […]

If you are new to the membership type of business model, you may liken it to a gym or tanning membership in that customers are able to pay per visit at a higher fee or save money by signing up for a membership. To ensure the cost for the services can be kept at a reasonable and lower fee schedule than most clinics, we set all membership customers up on an auto-debit system. This simply means that a customer’s credit card, debit card or checking account information is managed and processed monthly by a reputable 3rd party service. By using an outside service the office does not require the extra man power associated with tracking and taking a payment from hundreds of patients monthly. This saves the office money which is passed on to the customer as a lower fee for service and lower fee for monthly memberships. However, that doesn’t answer the question of ‘WHY’ [...]