Chiropractic Coaching: How Much Is My Office Visit Worth?

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. This Thrive in Five is called What is my office visit worth. Now if you’ve watched the old MasterCard commercials, and you probably know that your adjustment is priceless, there’s no way you can put a number on the right adjustment at the right time. It’s a life altering experience, but unfortunately, that doesn’t fit well into a, an insurance form, so we have to come up with some kind of value. Well, it reminds me of the, uh, the old story, the dumb guy who bought 500 watermelons for 500 bucks and put up a sign by the side of the road, watermelon’s a dollar. So his friend says, dumb guy, how do you make any money? How do you make profit on that? And the dumb guy smiled and said, volume, of course.

Now, if there’s no profit built into the system, it doesn’t matter how many you sell. And that’s the trap that so many of us fall into when we’re trying to assign a relative value for our adjustment. We have to pick a number that represents not only what we believe it’s worth, which of course we agree is priceless, but we also have to make sure that the sufficient profit built into it so that when we do run a business, we can continue to run the business and help as many people as we possibly can. So what’s profit? Profit is the amount that you make above and beyond what your expenses are. So that means that in order to compute what your proper fee should be, you need to know what your expenses are. So I’m just gonna pick an example. You can do the math yourself, but what we need to know is how much does it cost you to run per month, and how many office hours do you have in a month so we can figure out what the cost is per hour.

So let’s say for the sake of argument that your office costs $12,000 a month to run. Now yours may cost more or less, doesn’t matter. It’s just an example. So let’s also say for the sake of argument that you practice 30 hours a week or something like four weeks, 120 hours. So $12,000 divided by 120 hours means that in this example, it costs a hundred dollars an hour to run. Now, if you charge 50 bucks a visit and your visit takes 30 minutes, you’re selling watermelons because two visits an hour times 50 bucks is a hundred, and it costs you a hundred. That’s bad math and it’s bad business. You need to build enough profit into your fee so that it’s reasonable for you, but also fair for the patient. Now, what does that number look like? Well, most of the conventional wisdom says that you need at least two and a half to three times your cost per hour in order to be profitable.

Well, how do they get that? Well, your overhead is about 50%, usually won’t give or take, and then you have to pay tax on top of that. So if you’re only at two times your cost, you’re probably trying to make due on about 25 to 30% of your, of your income. It’s not enough. You have to aim higher. So if it costs you a hundred, you wanna at least make 300 or so per hour. Well, what does that look like? Well, you might, if you can see six people in an hour, then to make 300, you would charge 50. But if you can only see four people in an hour, you have to charge 75. You see, this gives you a scientific and mathematical method of being able to ascertain what your fee should actually be. Now, you also have to factor in star power.

If you are an exceptional chiropractor who does an exceptional job, then you may want to charge more than that. You may wanna charge a multiple of four or a five. That’s perfectly fine. As long as you are clear about what it is that you’re charging. Then you’ll put out an attraction beam that will bring people in who feel comfortable paying that fee. So decide based on what you’re spending on your office, your monthly overhead divided by the number of hours you work in a month, that gives you a monthly number, and then aim for a multiple of at least three or so. So if it costs you 18,000 to run and you have 120 office hours, now it’s $150 an hour. So you need to be able to demonstrate about $450 an hour in order to be able to be profitable. You can do the math, and for some of you, maybe that number’s a lot lower.

That’s perfectly fine. But you get to decide and you get to arrange your office and fee policies so that they support you in the way that you wanna be supported. Now, if you like information like this, one of the greatest things that you can do is join us at SuperConference on October 5th-7th this year in Buckhead, Atlanta. SuperConference is gonna have a variety of different classes that’s going to cover material. Not unlike this, in fact, we have a financial advisor coming in who will explain in clear terms exactly what you need to do in order to parlay your practice income into a nest egg, and into the wealth accumulation that you ultimately want. This seminar is the sum total of the distilled wisdom that my partner Bob Hoffman, and I believe is most important for you to learn in 2023 in the post Covid era era. This material is going to help you run a better practice. It’s gonna help you lead your staff better. It’s going to help you, um, develop a better reputation in town. And above all, it’s going to give you the kind of certainty that you need to create exactly what you want in practice. 

Now, the QR code that you see in the corner of this screen, all you need to do is pass your camera over that, open your phone, click on your camera, and pass it over that QR code and will take you to a landing page that will explain everything that you need to know in order to prepare to attend SuperConference, which we’re calling Future Focus. The reason we call it future focus is because it’s really important for you to not only be present in the moment paying attention to this now, but also to be able to look down the road and see how your decision making today affects your future in practice and in life. That’s one of the reasons why we at, we’re inviting you to join us at SuperConference for Future Focus because you’ll then get distinctions and better strategies on how to create the ideal future for yourself based on making today really count. 

As usual, it’s always a pleasure to be with you here. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman, signing Off of Thrive and Five from The Masters Circle Global where legends are made and legendary practices are built.

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