Chiropractic Coaching: The Six Essentials and The Pediatric Practice

Hi, everybody, and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman, and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. This edition of Thrive in Five is called The Six Essentials and the Pediatric Practice. You may remember that the six essential strategies for a legendary practice are reducing and eliminating friction, establishing fair and profitable pricing, assigning chief operating officer or COO responsibilities, creating a passion brand, mastering persuasion, and getting inside the heads of the decision makers.

This model was evolved to address the factors influencing the growth and optimization of any chiropractic practice. In fact, of any business striving for greater success. But they are of special significance in a pediatric practice. Pediatric practices aim to serve families and especially children, and there are some common traps chiropractors fall into when developing this type of practice, and some powerful action steps you can take to optimize your policies and procedures.

If it’s appealing to you to expand upon this aspect of your practice, this will be very helpful for you. So, let’s explore how to adapt the six essentials in the context of the unique needs of the pediatric practice. In a pediatric practice, the first essential strategy of reducing and eliminating friction comes to the forefront, since it affects literally every detail of your office.

Reducing mechanical and physical friction is obvious. If you leave lots of breakable glass knick knacks on low surfaces in your reception area, they will get broken, or eaten. If your office flow is complicated, there’s more chance for friction when little people are involved. Pick the simplest procedures possible.

If you want to cater to kids, have a place for them, and something for them to do while they’re in the reception area, or else they’ll be bored and look to entertain themselves, which may create friction for you and yourself. Your team must therefore be patient and flexible, since a practice with more young people is often more fluid and less predictable than a practice with mostly adults, like business people and workers.

Emphasize resilience in your training and compassion, too. In a pediatric practice, the second essential strategy of fair and profitable fee policies must be addressed, since there will usually be multiple family members who will engage in chiropractic care. Often, out of the goodness of their hearts, chiropractors may establish family plans without fully factoring in their costs of operation.

Family plans are often desirable, but only if they’re fair to the doctor and staff as well as the family. For you to be profitable, you must earn 250 to 300% of your expenses. In other words, you must earn at least $2 and 50 cents to $3 for every dollar you spend. The reason for this is that between your overhead expenses and your taxes, you end up with about 30 or 35 percent or so of what you earn.

So it makes sense to aim for at least around three dollars in return for every dollar you spend. FYI, many practices earn five, seven, ten bucks or more for every dollar they invest. Just so you know, it’s possible. Pediatric practices may have a higher overhead than a general practice due to increased staff, advanced training, and time consuming office visits. When these distinctions are figured in, you can make the fees as reasonable as possible for the families. and still profitable for you. In a pediatric practice, the third essential strategy, effectively assigning COO responsibilities, is a little used but profoundly powerful secret to enhancing the patient’s experience in your office.

Your off site COO or coach will help you design protocols that streamline the family’s experience and reduce inherent friction. Automate what you can. Scheduling and rescheduling appointments, daily and longer term recall, email or text drips or alerts, even payment options can be addressed from home or on the patient’s phone.

Make your office operations easy and convenient for the patient. Consult your coaches and advisors for perspective. Often you’re too close to the policies and procedures to be objective about them. That is the job of the COO or coach. Especially important in a pediatric practice, of course, because these are people’s children, and you must strive for zero tolerance for deviations from the practice model for quality control purposes.

Choose coaches who are experienced in overseeing pediatric practices and are adapting that knowledge base to practices like yours. Because usually most coaches coach many doctors, it makes it possible for the typical chiropractic practice to afford a coach where a dedicated on site COO would be cost prohibitive.

A coach is most field practitioners best shot at having the benefit of a COO. In a pediatric practice, the fourth essential strategy, inspiring your patients with passion branding, will turbocharge your growth. Why do people line up at 4 a. m. to be first to get a new iPhone? Why do baby boomers pay a thousand bucks a seat and more to see their favorite rock stars of their youth?

These are examples of passion branding where consumers are so enthusiastic about a product or service that they’ll go to extremes for themselves and share their passion with all who will listen. The pediatric practice version of this is to engage patients whose kids have had miraculous responses to your care as part of your marketing and sales team.

Many patients are happy to share their success stories in your office. It’s the best advertising you can get and their enthusiasm is authentic. So their circle of influence is likely to respond to their congruency. A practice only needs a few bird dogs to create a buzz. Reward the behavior you want and show your appreciation for those who spread the word.

In a pediatric practice, the fifth essential strategy, mastering persuasion, will pave the way for better understanding and engagement by the families you serve. Why do people do what they do? There are two basic reasons. Either because they want to, Or because they have to, to seek pleasure or to avoid pain.

In the beginning, your patients tend to come in because they have to. In other words, to get relief, they have little choice but to come to see you because they’re motivated to get out of pain. But when they start to feel better, that have to incentive disappears and you must move them toward want to, you have the opportunity to persuade them to stay on for wellness care.

So they become regular chiropractic patients, not just being treated for their conditions, but enhancing the quality of their lives. If you fail to move them from have to to want to, they may still be good patients, but it’ll be on their terms, based mainly on how they feel. If you want your patients to get the very best you have to offer, you must move them toward wanting your care, so they choose it willfully, and then they’re happy to stay, pay, This is especially important for kids, as giving them a foundation of excellent health when they’re young contributes greatly to their future well being.

In a pediatric practice, the sixth essential strategy, getting inside the head of the decision maker, is the X factor that drives the entire process. How do you know who makes the decisions for a group? For example, for a company you’re recruiting, who is the decision maker? Is it the CEO? The COO, the personnel director, the HR manager in a family unit.

Is it the mom, the dad, a grandma or grandpa, or does one of the kids seem to drive the process? And once you know who calls the shots, how do you get inside their heads? You’ll need to gain rapport and ask good questions to elicit their values, so you can show them how what you recommend will help them get something they already want.

Have an Aikido approach. Align and redirect. Don’t be defensive or overly aggressive. Most usually, patients have been trained in a school of thought that is contrary to chiropractic reasoning. And especially in a pediatric practice, where we’re dealing with families and children, we have to be extra understanding, yet extra persuasive.

If we are legitimately trying to help the family, that will shine through, and they’ll mostly see that. So you can find a way to go forward together that works for everyone. If you find these ideas on the six essentials as compelling as we do, or if you just want to help as many people as possible and have as much as possible to show for it, scan the QR code you see on the screen, and it will take you to the six essentials website.

Thanks for watching. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman from The Masters Circle Global, where legends are made and legendary practices are built through chiropractic coaching.

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