Chiropractic Coaching: The Hidden Patient Friction in Your 6 Essential Strategies

Welcome to this Week’s Thrive in five. I’m Dr. Bob Hoffman for The Masters Circle Global where legends are made and legendary practices are built through chiropractic coaching. Today I want to discuss the hidden friction with patients in your six essential strategies. 

As we have discussed previously, today’s most successful business model is based primarily on the six essential concepts, and yet 99% of our profession is unaware of any of these concepts or how they support or interfere with your ability to run and grow your practice. To remind you, the six essential concepts are first friction, then pricing and fees based on your value, followed by clinic, operations and implementation. Then becoming a passion brand, then persuasion, and finally getting inside the head of the decision. 

Today we’re going to dig deeper into the first essential, which is the hidden friction interfering with your patient, either wanting your care, accepting your care, or following through with your care, causing you to always be on the hunt for more new patients and then more new patients after that.

To remind you, friction is anything that slows down, disrupts or prevents the organic and natural growth of your business. And from the patient’s perspective, friction is the patient understanding who you are, what you do, and how effective what you do is so that they trust you, feel safe and secure with you, and know for certain that they’re in the right office to finally feel then function and finally to live better. Without this understanding, way too many patients think of you either consciously or unconsciously as a back doctor or a pain doctor, or a glorified massage therapist or a physical therapist, and they’re confused. 

I have always said that if you confuse them, you’re gonna lose them. And many of you have lost way too many of them, or perhaps your patient’s friction comes from not understanding your communication or your education because quite frankly, most DCs are not really good at being communicators.
Or maybe your message goes over their head or doesn’t even address their primary concern, or you fail to earn their trust, or maybe you don’t make them feel safe and secure. Patients not following through on your recommendations is a huge problem on many, many levels. Or maybe you struggle with running a business and your intake is too complicated, too many pages old fashioned or just too long. Or maybe you further confuse them by doing a similar exam as every other doctor they have ever been to and those doctors have failed to help them. 

Another patient friction point we often find is the challenge of your staff understanding what outstanding customer service truly is. Not knowing the patient’s name or putting them on hold when they call, or even occasionally being accidentally rude to them, which of course comes from you not interviewing the right people to hire, not training them properly, not accepting their lack of production and their errors, errors of omission.

It is far better for you to raise your standards and lower your tolerations or perhaps your patient friction is that they almost always enter your office as a last resort, stressed out, pessimistic, scared and afraid, making it even harder to connect, even harder to earn their trust and almost impossible produce miracles quickly or predictably. These are just a few examples of patient friction, and I’m certain that if you’re honest with yourself, you know I’m talking about you, your patients, and your office, you may not intend to or even realize it, but any or all of these points of friction has the potential to sabotage your results, your reputation, and then your income. These examples of friction can cause you to burn out, give up, or seek chiropractic as a job instead of a calling, and you lose your passion, your purpose, and your personal power.

I can assure you that there are hundreds of additional points of friction slowing you down and holding you back, but right now the most important question is this. Is it possible for you to succeed or to express your unlimited potential or to feel the joy and fulfillment you are meant to feel each and every day. If you’re not aware of any of these examples of doctor or patient friction or how to reduce them or eliminate them, and how can you ever hope to reduce or eliminate or correct any of these points if they remain invisible to you? The master circle has tremendous experience helping doctors just like you learn how to find the points of friction holding them back, and better yet, how to prioritize which to eliminate, which are the most damaging, so you can move closer and closer to your legendary practice. And quite honestly, this is what expert coaching, mentoring, and having a chief operating office it can do for any practice.

Regardless if you’re barely getting by or seeing hundreds of visits a day, expert Chiropractic Coaching focuses you on what is the best and the easiest way to get from where you are currently to where you want to be. So with all that said, here is my first suggestion. If you want to reclaim your passion and purpose and reclaim your joy and happiness, if you’re finally serious and realize that you need to adapt to grow your practice like never before. And if you want to locate and then eliminate these points of friction right now on your screen is a QR code, take out your phone. Go ahead, take out your cell phone. I’ll wait just a moment. Take out the camera on the phone and scan it right on that QR code. 

Go ahead and do that. It will take you directly to a special site where you can learn more about these six essentials and to find out either how well or unfortunately most of you, how poorly your practice complies with these six essentials.

I’m urging you to get off that merry ground of continuing to do the same thing over and over again and hoping and praying that magically it’s gonna get better this time because the calendar has marched forward. I’m urging you to end the misery of I have a deal for you, buy program, and I’ll get you 30 new patients in the next 30 days, which we both know never works. I’m urging you to pay attention to the franchises in our profession that are growing by leaps and bounds, by eliminating, uh, friction. So right now, my friend, go to that QR code, take out your phone and learn more. Take action, not for me, but for yourself. Place your camera on that code and learn about the six essentials that you need to master. Have a great day and we’ll be back next week with another Thrive in Five just for you.

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