April 2009

Can you tell me what I'm supposed to do?

by CJ Mertz, DC

More than one hundred chiropractors contact the Team WLP headquarters each month. All are in search of a better way to practice and a better way of life. The vast majority are good people with good hearts and good minds. However, ironically, in one form or another they are all asking the same question. Recent change in the economic playing field has added tremendous clarity to the answer.

When times get tough, people tend to change their spending and investing habits. It all becomes simple, basic and fundamental very quickly. Every generation in the past 150 years has gone through a difficult time, and each time people's core values rise to the top. The blessing is, what matters most, still matters most. Now is the time for people to invest (and reinvest) in themselves and their families.

In 2009, we are witnessing wide-sweeping changes in corporate policies in order to remain solvent. Airlines are reducing routes, employers are reducing payroll, and manufacturing is reducing inventory supplies to create new demand. Despite all of these changes, there is a specific group of chiropractors whose practices continue to grow and prosper.

This is an extremely critical time for chiropractors and chiropractic colleagues to reinvent themselves and their identities. Perhaps there has never been such a time when there are as many chiropractors going out of business as there are chiropractors setting records in practice (the same holds true for practice consultants). How is this possible? The answer: paradigm.

In the last nine months, we've made five major observations about elements, characteristics or conditions present in practices that have either dropped in income, or been forced to shut down. The five are:

1. A steeply imbalanced insurance-to-cash ratio. A practice should collect enough in cash to cover all of its monthly operating expenses. Any team waiting for insurance payments in order to pay bills has put itself (unnecessarily) in a high risk position.

2. Predominant emphasis on pain relief. People are simply not investing $200-400 a month to reduce aches and pains. This style of practice will experience both new patient slow down and unstable retention.

3. An ineffective patient education program. Practices on the rise are filled with patients who have been properly led to use chiropractic as a lifestyle (life repairing) resource. This can only happen through an organized, dynamic and powerful patient education process.

4. An unplanned or poorly designed marketing campaign. Your practice should be bustling with referrals and your phone should be lit up due to effective, overlapping marketing opportunities. This is not a time to put your head in the sand and hope for better results. Chiropractors must boldly retool and invest in those marketing programs that have already been proven to work.

5. "Do-it-yourself" management. How much is this costing you? My research shows the average practice has dropped nearly $5,000 per month in the last six to twelve months. That's $60,000 per year of loss (nearly all coming out of the chiropractors personal earnings). At the same time, 90% of the practices that are growing are using a coaching system that leads teams into the correct practice paradigms. Not only have those teams with the right coach and right paradigms not experienced loss, but they've seen their income either holding stable or achieving new growth. On average, consulting fees are around $750 per month. You do the math.

Accomplished farmers know that great harvests only follow seasons of great planting and gardening ("garbage in, garbage out" is what any successful programmer would tell you) and 2009 has been coined "the year of harvest." Your practice is just 12 weeks away from its biggest breakthrough yet. It simply comes down to how badly you want to grow.

Successful farmers (and chiropractors) don't plant and garden when they feel like it. They don't plant only when the weather is nice and conditions are favorable. And they surely aren't reinventing the wheel of planting and gardening and making it up as they go. Your record-breaking harvest comes down to the decisions you make in your practice over the next 12 weeks.

Can I tell you what you're supposed to do? Of course. But you need to allow a "boot camp" environment of change to come over you. The paradigms you move forward with this year are either nailing a coffin or nailing a goal you have always wanted to reach. Put your ego and pride aside and let's plant and garden a brand new harvest. Call me today and I'll schedule a time to personally show you exactly what you are supposed to do to thrive in this economy.

(Dr. CJ Mertz is the founder and head coach of the prestigious Waiting List Practice chiropractic training organization. See the WLP 300 patient per week opportunity on the back page of this issue. For seminar tickets and information on WLP coaching services, please call The Waiting List Practice at 877-TEAM-WLP).