Faith Demands to Make a Difference

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Edward Petty

December 30, 2021

A year ago, who knew what the next 12 months would be like?

Yet, here we are today.

As the New Year is just before us, again, one can only wonder at what the future holds. Is this the “New Normal?” How far will it shift in the next twelve months? For you, your patients, and your business?

Whatever new realities lie ahead, we are ready to help you and your business. We will be launching a new approach to practice and business building with the theme of Faster to Your Future in January. It is based upon the book the Goal Driven Business.

But just before we start the New Year, I wanted to pass along a message of encouragement.

It often amazes me that with all the wars, both “hot” and cold, the greed, the fear, and tyranny, with all of mankind’s utter insanity over the centuries, we are doing as well as we are. Somehow, as Abraham Lincoln predicted in his first inaugural address in 1861, “…the better angels of our nature…” came through and prevailed. Whatever challenges we may have, his were enormous. He was facing a nation divided, secession of the southern states, the policy of human slavery, civil war, and a world of other conflicts.

But in the end, there is something about the Innate Goodness of Life that seems to propel mankind forward towards a better future, however slightly. I think that the more we trust in the Better Angels of our Nature, and in the Goodness of Life itself, the more sure our road will be toward a better year for us all and a happier future.

“I have one life and one chance to make it count for something . . . I’m free to choose what that something is, and the something I’ve chosen is my faith. Now, my faith goes beyond theology and religion and requires considerable work and effort.

My faith demands — this is not optional — my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”

― Jimmy Carter jimmy carter supervising

So with this, we look forward to working with you to help make 2022 both prosperous and rewarding.

With admiration from all of us at Petty Michel and Associates,

The Mental Immune System

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Edward Petty

A healthy body has a well-functioning system to protect it or make it physically immune from disease. I am sure you have seen this occur with your patients as you adjust and treat them.

But there is no doubt that the mind also affects the body. In your practice, could you improve your patient’s mental immune system? Of course, and already do. I am sure you bolster your patient’s mental immune system even though you or your team may not have looked at it this way. Providing your patients with genuine positive feedback and showing them gratitude for their regular visits can go a long way in enhancing their mental well-being.

A mental immunity system would help individuals be protected, or immune, from negative influences or circumstances in the environment. This would be the ability to “roll with the punches” and keep one’s stress level low despite potentially stressful situations. You can’t be expected to help your patients achieve this in all areas of life, but you can help them with this regarding their health.

Your patients and clients are under a constant deluge of frightening and drug-related messages that can be demoralizing and lead them to less than optimum health choices. There is not much incentive for large corporations to promote exercise, eat organic food, take vitamins, and encourage people to be nice to their neighbors. Instead, there is more money in promoting drugs and fast food, and beer. It took a long time and great expense to stop cigarette advertising, but pharmaceutical advertising has now taken its place.

So, it is for this reason I recommend positive health advertising to your patients regularly. The more they know and understand how to maintain their physical health, the better prepared they will be to critically interpret the corporate advertising of products masquerading as “healthy.”

Here are some methods to improve your patient’s mental immune system regarding health:

Extraordinary customer service. Through empathic communication, get to know your patients so that they know you care about them and can trust you. You are in their corner and have their “back.”
Positive reinforcement. Genuinely recognize their good efforts to improve their health and any positive responses to your program of care.
Table Talk. Listen to their stories and provide quick positive educational tips about health related to their story.
Educational themes. Pick an educational them each week and have literature for patients.
Patient successes. You can include notable case successes with your education themes each week or each month. Spread the good news!
Lending Library. Stock your book shelves with books on subjects you would like your patients to read. Encourage your patients and staff to study. (See a sample list of books we selected a few years ago over at pmaworks.com.)
Workshops. These can be done virtually or in person.
Newsletters. These can be electronic as well as hard copies by snail mail. They help “keep the conversation going.”

You are the positive lighthouse of health in a storm of gloom and unhealthy corporate products. You can improve the physical immune system of your patients by also improving their mental immune system regarding health.

Image from: Kellogg, Yevgenia Nayberg

KINDNESS and the Strength of Your Practice

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Edward Petty

A practice is a network of relationships
that is created and sustained through communication and service.

I have used this definition for ages.

Customers, potential patients, and clients, seek you first and foremost for your services and results. This could be relief from a troubling condition, or perhaps general wellness care. Therefore, in marketing, you want to promote that you can deliver the outcomes people are looking for, and prove that you can produce them. There are many ways to do this, but this is the basis of direct marketing.

Next to results, your patient wants to be understood. They know that no matter how competent you are, unless you really understand their condition, you may be applying the wrong remedy. Plus, you may come across like you really don’t care. You show how much you care by seeking to fully understand how they feel about their condition. This is called deep empathetic communication – feeling how the other person feels.

I think just being genuinely interested in the other person brings about this kind of communication and feeling on the part of the patient that you do care.

This type of communication determines the quality of the relationship. But I believe that it can go deeper. Let’s look…

KINDNESS

Kindness is more than empathy.

It acknowledges not just how the other person feels, but in fact, that the other person is privately fighting their own personal battle.

Every one of your patients is suffering — to a greater or lesser degree — though they may not fully confess it. Yes, people are tough. They must be. But when they see you, they hope that you will understand their struggles, their fears and their challenges.

There are many ways you can let them know that you grasp their situation. Most of all, seeking to understand their feelings and letting them know you, now, have a better sense of what they are talking about is sufficient. You can repeat some of what they said to emphasize that you heard and understood them. You can let them know you have experienced something similar, if you have, and sometimes, as appropriate, touching them on the shoulder compassionately can go a long way.

But there is no gimmick that expresses kindness – it is just deep human empathy.

Kindness doesn’t cost you anything, except a few moments of present time consciousness and mindfulness. Yet it strengthens trust, alleviates fear, and can help your patient improve faster.

You want to be a positive coach. But in the beginning, all your advice, adjustments and treatments, education, scheduling, and payments, must be based upon the trust you earn from your patient simply through your empathy and kindness.

Patients will seek you for your services, but they will stay with you because of their relationship with you.

Deliver excellent outcomes and promote them, initiate and maintain empathetic communication, and be kind. Include these as your goals in your mission, core values, and complete outcomes and see your practice and business grow.

Edward Petty

“…in the world, what counts more than talent, what counts more than energy or concentration or commitment, or anything else – is kindness. And the more in the world that you encounter kindness and cheerfulness … the better the world always is. And all the big words: virtue, justice, truth – are dwarfed by the greatness of kindness.”

Stephen Fry (azquotes.com)

Download PDF copy

Goals, Games, and Groundhog Day

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Edward Petty

It is a New Year and already we are knee-deep in its work.

But it is a NEW YEAR and it is important that you take time out to make new plans and then review them often.

Life Works in Cycles

Each year in Wisconsin, the leaves fall and then the snow falls. But by July the strawberries are ready for the pickin’. Every month, we can see the full moon. Each day, we can see the sunrise – if it is not cloudy.

In human endeavors, we seem to follow this natural rhythm of following cycles. After we finish the 9th grade, we are ready to begin the 10th grade. We are excited to finish when we get out of school for the summer, and then again, eager to start the new grade when we begin again in the fall.

These are all cycles.

What would happen if you stayed in the 9th grade, year after year? How would you feel?

Yet, in our work life we fall into the trap of doing the same thing over and over and over. This is not the first unique and special patient you have ever seen…this patient is a customer just like all the others — just another case. Today is not the first day of the rest of your life, it is just like yesterday which is the same as a long line of days that go on and on. And on…

We get beaten down by the tedium, working endlessly for some forgotten purpose, as if the assembly line we were on never stopped and was always the same.

This is a major cause of stress.

Groundhog Day Syndrome

You can’t do one thing forever, like in the movie “Groundhog Day.” In it, the main character visits a town in Pennsylvania where everyone watches to see if a groundhog can see its shadow. This is traditionally on February 2 (This year, it is on a Saturday.) The only problem is, for this character, the day keeps repeating and repeating, the same each day. It drives the character to suicide, but even that doesn’t work. Finally, he falls in love and wins the girl and has a new life.

Anything in life that begins, it seems, must end. It can start again, but it must end so that a new iteration can be created. It is the cycle of life.

Goals and Games

This is an important factor in what is called Gamification. With the advent of computer games, design elements are added in to make the game fun, challenging, and motivational.

But games are nothing new. Baseball is a game. It has a season and games and innings. It has cycles. Games have been part of human behavior since the beginning. The Olympics started in 776 BCE.

One aspect of games that can be overlooked is the fact that they are just an activity for play. Play is something we do naturally as toddlers. As we grow older, this activity becomes structured into organized sports and games, but at the core is the desire to have fun. To play.

We can lose this sense of play when what we do has no end and no beginning. Persistence is a good quality, but it can lead to an enforced dullness that buries our enthusiasm.

It is important to keep in mind that in business, as in sports, keeping the perspective of play is more effective than bearing down on one’s duties with serious gravity. Practices that incorporate some of the components of a game into their operations are more productive and have a better time.

What are your goals for 2019? For the 1st Quarter? For this month… or for today? Higher numbers? New team members? Community wide outreach program? New training and greater knowledge?

As soon as you make a goal, you start a new cycle and begin a new game. Try to win. But you could lose. Either way, don’t get too serious about it and just be grateful to be able to be in the game.

Set new goals and play. Play — to win. Have fun. Smile a little more!

Yearly Goals…Be a Homesteader

Posted on January 10, 2019 by Edward Petty

Sometime back in the late 1800’s, my great great grandfather homesteaded land in Oregon. The way I understand it, he found a plot of land he liked in the southern part of the state. This was his goal. He and his wife then settled on it.

You too can be a homesteader.

You have a chance to stake out your own plot in 2019. You can define where you want to be in the future… and then work it so that it is yours. And if you don’t, well, you will still be somewhere, just not where you want to be.

Life is this river and it just keeps rolling, and we are on it. We are not leaves floating rudderless. We have some choice about where we want to be 12 months from now. We can set a course and navigate and sail or row or jump out and paddle ourselves to where we want to be.

This is why we set goals and a course of action. We don’t want to wind up broken and dead on the rocks, or stuck idle in a rancid stinky lagoon that goes nowhere!

But when you do set goals for your business, or even for your career, they are often too lop-sided. They are not holistic. You might say that they are symptomatic. We may only shoot for the amount of money we want to make. This isn’t bad, it just isn’t enough. It is too superficial.

If you want to make more money, you have to see more people. If you want to see more people, you have to take better care of them. To do so, you have to improve your services. To do this, you have to improve your expertise and the expertise of others who see your patients. Lastly, you can’t be an old grouch, unhappy with a poorly managed personal life.

You are in the business of improvement! To improve people, you also have to improve your business. To improve your business, you have to improve the professional skill of each member of the business. Lastly, each member of the team has to work on self-improvement.

Make these into your goals.

DRIVE each other to achieve these goals.

Be GOAL DRIVEN!!

IF this is done, how could you – or anyone lose? Everyone wins.

So, to keep it simple, see the attached worksheet. Set your goals for each area, and every three months, ESCAPE to a place where there is no interruption, your “laboratory,” to confront how you did and make any necessary adjustments to your plans and continue your journey to your yearly goals.

Yearly Goals Worksheet — Link

Set aside 2 or more hours at the beginning of the year and the beginning of each new quarter (3-month period) to review your past and set new goals.

To do this, you must get away. Turn off the phones and remove ALL distractions. You are going to your Goals Laboratory and humbly review the past and boldly make new plans for the future.

You will fall off the rails, so every three months, you will have already scheduled time to review your failings and triumphs and reset. You can now get back on track and re-plan and go forward to the next three-month marker.

Use the worksheet to help you have a Goal Driven year.

Good travels and Bon Voyage.

— Ed

Yearly Goals Worksheet

The Real Reason For Low New Patients

Posted on August 17, 2017 by Edward Petty

Why Two Chiropractic Doctors Couldn’t Grow Their Practice

A few years back, a long-time client of ours gave me a call and said that he had hired two new doctors. He asked if I would visit his office and see if I could help them grow their caseloads.

I told him that I was happy to pay him a visit. A month later, I was touring his office and interviewing his team. I then went out to lunch with the two new associate doctors.

I got to know them and asked them questions. They were not shy about their goals. They told me that they wanted a “high volume” practice. They boasted that they felt that it would not be difficult to see as many visits per month as the senior doctor by the end of the year.

They went on about philosophy, BJ Palmer’s “Green” Books, clean food and wellness. Both were young and looked fit and seemed eager.

They said that they wanted marketing help. They talked about how they had been working on social media, but felt that the owner doctor wasn’t supporting them enough by buying advertising. It wasn’t blatant, but they seemed to be blaming him. I acknowledged this and said that was something we could look into.

I knew that their practice statistics were very low. I told them that marketing comes down to caring about people – caring enough to talk to them, and caring enough to be honest about how you can help them.

They nodded like zealots. “Absolutely!”

I then said:

“OK, look around this restaurant and describe a possible health issue with some of the customers. Just pick one and do a very preliminary screening based upon the way they are sitting or walking.”

This didn’t go as well as I had thought it would. Both doctors, I discovered, didn’t look at the fellow customers in the restaurant. So, I prodded and finally got one of them to mumble a possible health issue with someone who was walking out.

I then asked each for their business card. Neither had one on them. I paused to give them a look: “What?”

I had taken a couple of their cards each before lunch and placed two of them in front of each doctor.

Then I said:

“I liked what you both said about wanting a large practice and wanting to help more people. I would like to help you. So, to start, I would like you to get up from this table and find someone in the restaurant, introduce yourself, and hand out your card. If possible, make an appointment for them to come see you.”

They both looked at me as if they saw a ghost. Gripped by fear, they both slumped down in their chairs. Neither would do it.

Seeing this, I suggested they talk to the cashier or waitress, or the manager. Now the fear turned to a dismissive attitude, as if this exercise was beneath their dignity.

We ended lunch and went back to the office. We met with the owner doctor and discussed the situation. Over the following weeks the two doctors agreed that the relationship wasn’t working out and decided to leave on good terms to start their own office.

— — —

You don’t have to be a hyper-extroverted charming salesperson to be an effective marketer. In fact, this may act against you. The largest office I have ever worked with was seeing over 2,000 visits per week. And the owner was serious and gruff, and talked like an angry fishing boat captain.

Marketing starts with a burning desire. It begins with an almost obsessive drive and purpose to help others by getting them into your office. Marketing then depends on your belief and confidence in your skills and service. And it hinges entirely on how much you really care and empathize with each patient or prospective patient. And then, there is the effort you put in. You gotta do the work, and this means sometimes long hours, long weeks, and long months.

And as the C.E.O of your business, it also means getting the rest of your team to feel the same.

Again:

Desire. Drive
Confidence and belief.
Compassion and empathy.
Effort. Work. Sweat!

There are thousands of different methods to market your services. These may include “social media,” big goals, and “philosophy.” They may include newsletters, workshops, or back to school promotions. But in the end, marketing is communication, whether done electronically, through print, in groups, or one on one. It is always and especially – one on one. In time, you will find what works best for you.

But no number of manuals, books, or coaching will do a damn thing for you if you don’t have the desire, the belief, the empathy or put in the work.

Chiropractic Spring Marketing

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Edward Petty

(Free sample marketing planner below.)

Practice marketing may not be entirely what you think it is.

If you are having challenges with your “marketing,” or you just want to generate more new patients, you need to consider something.

There are many good and great marketing activities you can do. (You can go to our website under “Free Resources” and find buckets of marketing. And, for those of you who are active members, there are mountains of even more marketing programs for you on our Member’s site.)

There are many paid programs you can purchase that explain different methods of generating more new patients. You have seen them, perhaps purchased them: DVD’s on dinner talks, workshops on how to present to businesses, Facebook and print advertising programs, and automated newsletters and Facebook posts.

These all can be useful in generating new patients, but the results often fall short from what the few successful doctors who promote the programs claim. This is usually because there were two major components missing in the marketing.

When doctors return from marketing programs, I like to ask them what they thought of the material.

“Yes, I liked it. It was good info. Learned a lot.”

“Great.” I say. “So, who is going do it?”

“Well, Susan can do it.”

“Oh really, when? She has a backlog in insurance and is working overtime trying to work with your sketchy notes as it is.”

“Hmm, well, we’ll hire someone.”

“Great. Who is going to train them? You?”

Not trying to be a jerk, but part of any good consultant’s job is to provoke analysis!

Besides the marketing event or procedure, there are two other critical elements to practice marketing that have to be included for the promotion to work. These are not always taken into account.

This was the basis of the Marketing Manager System I wrote and published some 17 years ago.

Most companies, as Simon Sinek talks about in his TED talk*, boast about what they do, or how they do it. It is all about them. Look at us!

But the better companies talk about WHY they do what they do, and they do it for YOU. They do it for your kids, grand kids, community, and the betterment of the world.

This is practice marketing. It is personal. You tell people why the heck you do what you do — and you say all this with genuine care and confidence – in your own VOICE. You do this in your newsletter, in your talks and in your ads. The best marketers do this – often naturally.

So, the first missing component that must be included with your marketing is motivation. Marketing must have a mission and it has to be embraced by everyone on your team.
The second missing component is organization. The events and procedures must be assigned to different people with enough time for implementation.

Complete practice marketing then, has three major components:

Motivation. Why. Make sure you and your team WANT more new patients. Get that accomplished first. That may take a while. An office staff and doctor who are backlogged with their paper work, already working full time and more, who also may have a few inter-office unexpressed grievances, confusions, or doubts about your service or you… no matter how many programs you sign up for, nothing will work.
Organize. Then, work out who will be doing what. Spread the marketing around to everyone and put someone in charge just to coordinate.
Marketing Procedures and Events. With the above 2 components in place, you are now more likely to “rock” your marketing efforts more successfully.

Increase the WHY, increase the CAPACITY, then yes, please — lots of marketing activities.

Let the party begin!!

Ed Petty

Spring Marketing Planner- (DOC) Sample Marketing Planner for Spring

*TED Talk link: www.pmaworks.com/observations/2011/02/10/leadership-in-chiropractic-the-golden-circle/

Observations

observations from our travels in the world of chiropractic

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