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The million dollar gap

Many years ago, a reporter asked the president of Sony to describe his five year plan for the company. The president said, "We've been finished with our five year plans for sometime. What we're focused on currently is where to best position our company fifty years from now." The reporter was so stunned, he promptly concluded the interview.

Vision is a necessary component to any successful venture. However, even the strongest vision can perish...to the degree there is separation between your vision, your core beliefs and your actions. As a performance coach, I often see incongruities among these entities.

It isn't until you're able to spend enough dedicated time with this concept that real change can occur. While vision is often stimulated by one source -- your core beliefs -- from another source, the quality and frequency of your actions come from an entirely different source.

A doctor can have a vision to serve lots of families. Perhaps he or she watched someone else do it once and it suddenly became his or her vision for what a successful practice should ultimately become. Yet, in personal experience working with families, the belief has been formed that adjusting families is "a drag."

Kids are always running all over the office, the parents use the doctor's time to have their disagreements with each other, and there always seems to be a question about how they're going to pay for their care.

The D.C.'s actions clearly show that families are seldom scheduled as new patients together, workshops infrequently include spouses, and team trainings are rarely focused on how to properly attract and serve families of patients. In other words, this doctor's vision of an ideal practice is not supported by his or her core beliefs or actions in serving or promoting families.

This type of discrepancy or "gap" is responsible for the biggest loss of practice growth and personal income a chiropractor will ever experience. Chiropractors can practice their entire career and never discover their specific gaps, let alone how to eliminate them.

The real tragedy is that, while virtually every gap I've ever encountered has been resolved, clients have suffered for years in practice before realizing their dilemma.

Perhaps you envision yourself in a busy practice seeing 400-500 patients weekly. Your vision is strong but your belief about high volume practice is impersonal service, mass production rather than quality care. Your actions result in belabored office visits, idle chat with patients, and little (if any) clustering patient visits. As you can see, the vision-core belief-actions paradigm is not congruent.

The pattern isn't always a strong vision followed by weaker beliefs and actions.

For example, I recently began working with a chiropractor who took massive action: four spinal screenings per month; telemarketing every month; two workshops weekly; and 60 work hours per week -- every week.

However, his belief was that most people couldn't afford him, even though he thought his fees were reasonable and virtually everyone needed his care. He admitted his vision was somewhat cloudy, yet felt that for the most part his attitude was positive. He had been stuck at the same volume for more than two years. By the end of each month, nothing really ever improved, no matter how much action he had taken.

As soon as he recognized the pattern, we put a training solution in place. The result? He now works 32 hours per week, conducts a single workshop weekly, and does two spinal screenings every month. There are 200 more patient visits a week -- and, oh yes, a fee increase!

The "million dollar gap" winds up being several million dollars each decade of practice. More important, the gap leaves hundreds of people stranded without chiropractic care because the vision-belief-action paradigm has become a trigger that fires with the lightest of pressure.

If you suspect there may be some kind of incongruity between the vision you hold for your dream practice, the core beliefs that must accompany such a dream, and the level of action taking needed to make that dream a reality, you're probably right.

Make it your number one goal this year to really identify what gaps may exist and establish a training solution that will eliminate them and allow your real potential to fuel your new success.

Half-hearted action plans and limiting beliefs are debilitating and gaps are even more detrimental to the growth of your practice. Since our practices mirror ourselves, the most successful way to improve your practice is to improve yourself. "ADIO" can be considered as above from God, down through you, inside through your patients, and out to your community. You must learn to get out of your way and allow the process to unfold.

If you currently have a professional coach, make sure he or she is identifying your gaps and organizing a training solution for you. Simply helping you with practice procedure isn't enough. If you don't have a coach, make that your next action step. For the small investment coaching requires, you can reclaim a million lost "in the gap."

For your own sake, the sake of your family, your practice and your community, get rid of the gap -- and get ready to soar.