Tag Archives: practice management

Why You Shouldn’t Have Promotions

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As a chiropractor, there are many reasons why you shouldn’t have practice promotions.

Hundreds.  You can come up with 10 right now. Your staff could think of more. So could your family!

Most of them would have something to do with not enough time to do them, or too much of a hassle, or it might cost too much. Then, there is also:  not sure if they would work, or what do we do and how do we do it?  Maybe you are really too frightened, embarrassed, or burned out to promote.

Now, you could say:  “Hey, I already have more patients than I can see.”

Yes, maybe you could.  But then you would have to ask yourself: “is everyone in my town getting proper chiropractic and natural health care?” “Is anyone in my neighborhood receiving unnecessary drugs, surgery?”

On the other hand there are only a few reasons you would want to have practice promotions. These would include:

  • Help more people
  • Fill up your office
  • Make more money
  • Make your services and those of chiropractic more popular

In terms of traffic lights, promotions are GREEN.

 In your office, what light is flashing? Yellow, red, or green?

Green means GO! Promotion = pro + motion. The word comes from “forward motion.”

Ultimately, there are three basic reasons for not promoting:

3. Not knowing what or how
2. Lacking the motivation
1. Lacking the organization

In our upcoming webinar, we cover the what and the how and the why to get your promotions going, fill up your office, increase your revenue, and make your services more popular.

Hope to see you there.

Best regards,

Ed

 

3 Goals Management Introduction

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3 Goals Management System

How to Achieve Financial Abundance and Practice Freedom
A unique practice development strategy and process created by Petty, Michel & Associates

An Introduction

Goal Driven
We all have goals.  When we were younger, they might have been brighter than they are now, they might have been clearer, or seemed closer.  Maybe yours still are. Or, maybe, they have become dulled with wear and tear, with disappointments and frustrations.

But we are goal driven creatures and our goals stay with us. The better we can define these goals in concrete terms, the more likely we are to achieve them.

What All Doctors Want — The 3 Goals
Ultimately, all doctors would like to create a practice that allows them to provide the highest quality care to the most people for the most profit.

Most doctors want to do this with professional and personal integrity. Maybe most importantly, they want to be able to do this in such a way that they are not chained to their practice, slaving at their work at the expense of their personal and family lives.

This is a fundamental goal for all doctors, so fundamental that we call it Goal 2.

Even more fundamental, however, is basic survival and solvency. We call this Goal 1.

But nobody works just for money.  Whether it’s saving the planet, helping your grand kids, assisting the poor, or funding your church, we all have higher goals.

Goal 3 are your higher purposes.

All three goals can and should be achieved, and with over 20 years of experience, we have put together a practice development system that allows doctors, and their teams, to achieve all three goals.

The 3 Goals Practice Development System is a step by step approach to help your practice grow naturally to its full potential and stay there.

Goal 1
Goal 1 is survival. In business, this means solvency. Are you making enough profit to pay your bills? To achieve Goal 1, solvency and survival, you have to move fast.  It requires passion, energy, and an aggressively friendly approach to getting your services known and delivered. For the patient, you can think of Acute Care. For a staff position, you can think of 20 – 30% proficient.

Goal 2 and the Practice Development Process
Goal 2 is a fully functional, franchise-able, sale-able, and sustainable business that is very profitable.   For a patient, it is a maximum spinal correction. For a staff position, it is 100% proficient and competent, rain or shine.

After you have achieved Goal 1, you can now start identifying those procedures that worked best. You can write these down on checklists. These checklists will become your Practice Playbook.

With more staff training, you can delegate more procedures to staff. As you continue to grow, you refine your procedures and continue to train your staff so that they become more competent.

Every 2 months, or as needed, you assess your list of successful procedures and add to them, or revise them.  Every week you work on improving them, and train your team on them.  Much like any athletic team, you practice and review your plays and procedures.

We call this process the Practice Development Process. It helps you to continually improve the practice and gradually take the office to Goal 2.

Getting Organized: The Baseball Diamond
To get to Goal 1, organization is not vital. Production, speed, and promotional activity is. However, getting to Goal 2 requires good organization.

Imagine a baseball team that stands around the pitcher’s mound with the pitcher. A batter hits a fly ball to the right field. The whole team goes to chase it. Once they reach it, they realize that no one is on the first or second base to throw the ball to in order to stop the runner. They are all out in right field.

Many offices operate this way. For example, in some offices the front desk does insurance, the insurance department does therapy, the therapist schedules appointments, and the doctor takes time off to buy office supplies.

Moving the office upward to its peak capacity includes all areas of the office improving: first base, third base, centerfield, etc.  If you only have a few of the departments doing well, the other departments will hold down the entire growth.

Goal Three
Our greater goals give us meaning.  These are the accomplishments we want to have said we achieved at the end of our lives. They are based in love, hope, and faith. They are for our heritage, our parents and those upon whom we owe so much; they are for our legacy, our children and their children; they are for our community and the fellowship we share with rich and poor.

Goal three is your “Give Back” goals, to your family, to your community, and to yourself.

All Three
This is your road map up and out of the roller coaster. These three goals form a sequence, but you have to keep all of them in mind as you travel up your road to success.

This is directed to a business owner, but also applies to team members and how they can improve their competency. It applies to patients, and how they travel from acute care, structural care, to wellness.  It actually applies to many activities.

You have to be willing to shift between goals, and if you find yourself suddenly in the poor house, you have to lose your self-important attitude and run like a rookie again until you build your business back up to Goal 1.

Where many doctors fail is that they are not willing to shift, either up, or down, as needed. Having achieved Goal 1, they are two insecure to delegate their duties to staff and procedures, or work on improving themselves. Many doctors, having achieved Goal 1 who should be working on Goal Two, feel the need to keep doing what they did to get to Goal One and so, quickly find them selves back down struggling just to survive.

It is easy to get lost, but now, with the 3 Goals Management System, you have a road map.

We have seen too few doctors achieve financial abundance and practice freedom. Hopefully, with the tools provided in the 3 Goals Management System, more doctors will be able to reach their dreams and help others do the same.

For information on our coaching and management consulting programs. LINK

(3 goals image copyright 2009)

Your Chiropractic Practice Marketing Plan

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How is your marketing plan?

Do you have one?

You really should have a marketing plan for your chiropractic practice, and it should be updated monthly, nudged weekly, and totally reviewed every three months.

This may sound oversimplified, boring, or too too obvious, but in our experience, it is a major key to practice building.

Sure, there are many other factors behind a successful business, but constantly marketing is essential. And, if your practice is not growing, it may be because you are not routinely marketing.

And how do you make sure that you are marketing? Have a plan.

A Marketing Plan Is Simply Marketing Activities Scheduled,
Assigned, Regularly Supervised, And Measured.

The key to effective marketing is simply planning. This is because marketing often just does not get done.  It is not that your marketing did not work. More than likely, it just didn’t happen.

To overcome this, you need to schedule short planning times each week, and longer periods each month.

This is the core of the Marketing Management System as we have developed it.

Your marketing plans should include the following:

•    Recurring Marketing-Oriented Procedures. These include not only your internal marketing procedures, but recurring clinical and administrative procedures as well. They are the usual recurring procedures that go on regularly in your office. Often overlooked and neglected, they are the most important form of marketing. They need to be reviewed and practiced regularly to be keep fresh and important. Because they are so routine, I usually schedule them last.

Very successful offices rely mostly on these types of procedures. When you hear chiropractic doctors say “We don’t do marketing”, it is because they have their marketing as part of their internal procedures and they do these extra-ordinarily well. These could be the way the phones get answered, the report of findings, the new patient lecture, the simple consistency of patient flow procedures, great internal staff and doctor communication, staff training procedures, staff meetings, etc.

•    Special Promotions. Hold special promotions every now and then. These could include a Kid’s Day, a donation drive, mother’s appreciation day, teacher’s appreciation week, etc. I walked into an office a few days ago and in the middle of a very cold, snow packed winter, the doctor and staff were wearing summer clothes, offering smoothies (without the run), with a big sign saying: “Welcome to Chiroville”, no doubt referencing “Margaritaville” and warm ocean lifestyle. What a refreshing and friendly surprise greeted each patient that day!

•    Patient and Community Education Programs. These are usually held in your office. Educate your community through your office and patients by providing special workshops that are chiropractic or health related. Or, you can sponsor a special “Awareness Week”, such as a Headache Awareness Week, offering no charge or discounted condition specific screenings, consultations, and or exams.

•    External Community Services and Networking Events. These can range from spinal screenings, to in office ergonomic workshops, lunchtime “Lunch & Learns” for local businesses, setting up referral sources with business or other professionals, or working in the food pantry twice a month feeding the homeless.

There are other procedures, such as advertising, PPO soliciting and reviewing, yellow pages, web site, but many of these can be put onto a yearly, quarterly, or monthly recurring checklist.

The above are various categories of marketing. But again, the most important part of marketing is doing it, and the key to getting marketing done is to schedule it and assign it and measure it.

For the best reference, review the materials in your Marketing Toolkit which is part of your Marketing Manager System computer software, if you have it.

Here is a sample marketing calendar for a chiropractic office.

NOTE TO CLIENTS AND PMA MEMBERS: You may find a customizable sample calendar on our PMA Member’s web site.

What the Moon Has to Do With You Success

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The moon is back to normal again.

Just a few hours ago, though, standing in the middle of a snow-covered playground near Lake Michigan, in the night sky at about 3 degrees above zero, it looked like a smudge. A grey brown spot that was almost black, like someone had tried to erase it with an old eraser, but part of its image still remained.

For a few hours, the earth blocked out the sunlight to the moon, at least from our perspective. These unimaginably huge spheres of matter, nearly perfectly in balance, were gracefully moving like billiard balls in a ballet.  Compared to this, all else really seems insignificant.

Before street lamps, car lights, TVs and late night computers, the night sky entertained us. Everyone could recognize the constellations, and an interplanetary event such as an eclipse was a very big deal. All our ancestors were stargazers – the night sky gave them the comfort of familiar signs, as well as wonder and awe. And mystery.

Besides the city lights to distract us, we have our daily duties and deadlines that rivet our attention to the near. Your patients, your notes, your computer, staff members, phones; most things are just a yard stick away.  Like a ping-pong game, your focus has to be complete, quick, and close, or, you lose.

When your attention drifts, patients think you don’t care, staff thinks you take them for granted or are displeased, and insurance companies can’t read your notes.   Success in practice requires keen attentiveness.

You can’t survive asleep at the wheel, dreaming or daydreaming. To be a winner you have to be alert and actively attentive to your job each minute you are at the office.

And if that is all you do, you soon will burn out.

Studies have shown that you have to, now and then, disengage. Take a break. Learn Japanese. Play with your kids. Help the poor.  Pray. In their best selling book, The Power of Full Engagement, the authors offer studies and examples on why it is important to become involved in disrelated activities to balance our hectic if productive lives.

All this goes back to the moon and the sky.  I don’t think we look up enough. The sky, the stars, and the whole natural God given world are about us, mysterious and awe inspiring.

In business, we have to focus on the short term and build for the middle term. But it is the far away that calls us, if we can stop to listen.  What makes you curious, fills you with awe, love, and seems a mystery? What does your future whisper back to you, as if you could hear your eulogy years from now? What are your greater purposes?

Balancing these three is the key to a successful practice, business, and life.  Your first goal is to play each day fast, full out, like a basket ball game you have to win. Your second goal is to gradually build a strong organization with the right teammates and the best plays that have proven to work for you. But your third goal, and there may be many, are why you work at all.

If your business has plateaued and stopped growing, it is because one or more of these goals is not being worked on correctly.

We have developed a general pathway and framework for doctors to move upward so that they can correctly work on and achieve all three goals. It doesn’t matter what technique you use, therapies, providers, or offices.

We are excited and pleased about the development of this new approach to practice management and marketing and how it impacts our consulting and the results our clients can see, as well as our own business and personal lives.

We will be publishing and just talking more about these three goals, but we encourage you to come to our seminars.   You can learn more about them by clicking here. 3-Goals Seminars

And, in the meantime, as my old pal, Jack Horkhiemer the stargazer always says:  “Keep Looking Up.”

photos from Microsoft and NASA

The Four-Handed Chiropractic Office

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We once knew of a dentist that was able to see hundreds of patients each week. Just himself.

How?

He had four hands. Actually, he had about 40 hands.

Four-handed dentistry became popular in the 1960’s and is a procedure that utilizes a dental assistant at the chair side of the patient with the dentist.

The two extra hands of the assistant allows the doctor to do the essential work on more patients. It is actually more than just adding two more hands. It includes all aspects of cooperation and coordination, allowing for maximum production through improved efficiency.

But his success was due to not just having extra “chairsides.” He had everything delegated, had separate departments in his office systematized, and had manuals for each department from which he constantly trained his staff. And, he had a fast and efficient management system to keep it all going. This permitted him to work with patients and develop the personal rapport that helped to keep them coming back to complete their treatment programs and refer their family and friends.

All of this leads to a key concept: capacity. Capacity is the ability and “room” to produce. Four-handed dentistry increases the capacity for the dentist to serve more people.

The reason why many offices stop growing is that, simply, they run out of room. It could be that there is not enough physical space or not enough effective staff. It could be poor patient, staff, and paperwork systems that clog up the flow so badly that even a can of Drano or a visit by the Rotor-router man couldn’t fix.

And, sometimes, even our mental capacity can get “filled-up.”

A well-organized office allows you to leverage your abilities and create more production. It also opens up the room to produce.

Imagine trying to play a football game on a 10 yard by 10 yard field. This is what many of us are trying to do, yet we just don’t know it. If you are having a hard time growing your office, you may have unseen capacity constraints holding you back.

A four-handed chiropractic office would be an office where there were many “hands” efficiently doing all the work, allowing the doctor(s) to focus only on those key actions necessary to treat patients and run the office.

Give this some thought and we will SOON show you some specific examples and what to do about capacity restraints in your office. Stay tuned…

P.S. If you know any doctors or marketers who would enjoy this article, just send them an email with this link: http://www.pmaworks.com/main/Four-Handed_Chiropractic_Office.shtml
P.P.S. E-mail addresses are never shared.

You are free to use the material from these articles in whole or in part on your web site or eZine (email newsletter) as long as you include the attribution below and also let me know where the article will appear.

“This article is by Ed Petty of Petty, Michel & Associates. Petty, Michel & Associates web site is a comprehensive resource on practice development for chiropractors. For free marketing resources and valuable development tools visit http://www.pmaworks.com”

Chiropractic Practice Bottlenecks: How to Increase Capacity by Removing Hidden Barriers

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The theory of capacity management, as developed by Eli Goldratt and explained in his books, including the best selling The Goal, discusses the theory of constraints as applied to a manufacturing environment.

The same principle applies to chiropractor’s business. According to Goldratt, “Capacity is the available time for production.” A bottleneck is: “what happens if capacity is less than demand placed on resource.”

Bottlenecks can be hide anywhere in an office.  For example:

  1.     Peak Periods. Between the 4-6 pm slot, where there is extra traffic, extra staff or increased capacity is not provided.
  2.     Paperwork. Old forms that are redundant.
  3.     Poor scheduling of patients: (not cluster booked, not booking for NP paperwork)
  4.     Doctors waiting for therapy patients. (No CT or therapy after adjustment)
  5.     Front Desk doing insurance and scheduling at each visit (no MAP and PIA)
  6.     Not enough exam rooms
  7.     Clutter in front desk/insurance area
  8.     Quitting time. After a long day, all staff and doctors are looking forward to leaving and really don’t want extra patients to call or come in. Patients are inadvertently discouraged to come in extra, bring in friends or family , or call in during the last hour.
  9.     Backlogs. Undone reports from the two summers ago, partially completed projects, cluttered desks or office space, all discourage more an increase in production. You only have so much mental capacity, and if it gets frittered away on projects that are not completed, you will have “too many irons in the fire” to add any more. Finish what you started, and make room for more.
  10.     “Difficult people“. Some staff, or patients, will seem to drain you of your energy, or consume too much of your time trying to keep them happy.

Warning: Too much capacity can also be a barrier.

A) Personnel. A staff that has to make up work can retard production. Happy staff are productive staff, and the opposite is also true. Unhappy staff will not make for happy patients. This will also suck up the doctors time to try to remedy his “staff problems.”

B) Space. Too large of a space can disconnect the staff from each other and the patients and minimize the synergy.

 

Exercise – Getting Rid of Capacity Restraints and Bottlenecks.

Make a list of any bottlenecks in your office. Start by considering the flow of patients, of paper, and anything that slows it down or gets in its way. Consider patients waiting, paperwork waiting, any times of the day or days during the week where there is a slow down or back log. You can organize it into four categories:

Physical space
Personnel
Procedures
Difficult people
Incomplete projects

Once you have listed these, give yourself 30 days to fix all these capacity restraints.

NOTE: Bottlenecks can sometimes be difficult to locate, and even more difficult to remove.  Need help: Give us a call. (414) 332-4511