If you want to grow your practice without major stress or wasting time and money on things that don’t work, this is for you.
Every Tuesday, I host a live video with my thoughts, advice, and suggestions on anything and everything chiropractic. I’ve been in chiropractics for many years now, and while I am confident in my knowledge today enough to mentor others, that wasn’t always the case. After all, I’m only human and have made mistakes too.
But the most important thing one can do is to learn from mistakes. And so, this week, I’m covering common mistakes that I see many people making (or ones I have made in the past), how it affects you and your business, and most importantly, how to avoid or fix them.
By applying my methods for avoiding or solving these mistakes, you will start to see growth again in your business as your stress decreases, and your income increases. Let’s get started:
1 – Assessing Your Team and Hiring Systems
By far, the most common mistake I see is having team members who don’t meet the standards you need. This could mean hiring the wrong person for a job, avoiding hiring entirely because you try to do everything yourself, or simply having people on your team that don’t properly fit with their position or your culture. A lack of cross-training is another common mistake I see because people often underestimate the impact of losing a team member when nobody else knows how to do their tasks.
The key here is to look at the team you have, the team you want, and the team you need. You start by assessing your team, honing in on who is a “10,” who isn’t, and what you can do to improve the latter group. Work with these people and see if they can be molded or coached into what you need. If not, it might be time to part ways, because having the wrong person in a position is just stressful for you, them, and ultimately your entire team.
2 – Care Plans
The type of care plans you offer is vital. The exact kind of care plan you offer can vary; maybe you want to break the plan down into steps, or perhaps, like me, you prefer to lay out an overall lifestyle plan.
What matters is having objective criteria that clearly explains the care you offer to practice members: How often, when, and client needs. You will also need to think hard about your agreements with practice members. It needs to be understandable to your practice members, but also your team members. In short, everyone involved needs to be completely clear on what the agreement covers, and what the expectations are from everyone involved.
3 – Managing Hours and Duties
Another common mistake people make is with their practice hours: These need to fit into the lives of several people. Too often, I see people set hours that either don’t meet the needs of their own families, their team, or the needs of their community.
It’s also important to properly allocate your day’s hours if you want to make the most of each day. To help sort this out, I basically “sort” tasks by type: You need to commit time to service hours to help people, admin hours to take care of your administrative tasks, and hours spent to improve your visibility and attract new people. And yes, it’s essential to even devote time to the appreciation of current (or even prior) people.
But none of these other tasks should happen during, or overlap with your care time. Trying to do these different types of tasks at the same time is just going to diminish your ability to focus on any of them, and you do not want that to happen.
4 – Visibility
It’s far too common for chiropractors to underestimate the need to remain “visible.” It’s an easy trap to fall into: You just got a bunch of new practice members, so you feel there’s no need to work as hard at attracting new ones, right?
Eventually, you’ll find you need to bring in more practice members, and if you’re not prepared, it can be a detriment to your growth. Attracting new people and remaining visible must be a constant, ongoing process, and not something only done in a reactionary method.
Now you have an idea of my 3 Big Ideas, and I go into even more detail in the full video. Watch below so you can start implementing these ideas into your practice now:
