Chiropractic Practice: Eliminating Friction in Your Fee Policies

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. The subject matter in this Thrive in Five is Eliminating Friction in Your Fee Policies. If you’ve been following our series, then you know that there are Six Essential Strategies that every successful chiropractor or business person of any kind must understand and implement in order to have the most successful business possible. One of these six essential strategies is pricing. And this is an area in chiropractic that is, it’s like the Wild West. It’s like a vast wasteland. 

Some doctors charge dramatically less for their services than others. Some charge dramatically more. Who’s right? Is it just based on the amount of time that you spend, or is it a factor of your expertise or how scarce the services are that you offer? Well, it turns out that there are four Cs, four important concepts that you must include in your pricing, and if you do this, then you’re much more likely to have frictionless pricing.

Now, the first C is consistency. How does it make you feel when you are taking a flight and you find that, that you paid $400 for your seat and the guy sitting next to you paid $200? It doesn’t make me feel too good. I feel like a sad, but the airlines don’t care. You should, because you want your patients to feel that the way that they are being charged is consistent from patient to patient and from condition to condition, from visit to visit, and from service to service. When you create consistency, it reduces friction because the patient doesn’t have to wonder, what am I gonna get charged today or am I getting the best deal possible? You want them to feel that level of consistency in everything that you do with your fees. 

Now, the second C is clarity. Clarity means you want to make sure that your fee policy is clear so that everybody understands what it is that they’re buying, what they’re paying for it, and there’s no questions.
If they have questions about your fee policies that creates friction. It interferes with the ability of smooth, uh, you, it creates smooth flow in your office, and you don’t want that. So create clarity by publishing your fee, your fee schedule, or by making sure to explain it thoroughly at the very beginning of care so that there are no surprises. 

Now, the third C is certainty. Now, certainty means that you don’t wanna present your fee policy in an insecure or waffly way, nor do you wanna give the patient an impression that you’re just making it up as you go along. You wanna create certainty by having an established fee structure and adhering to it so that every patient knows exactly what it is that you’re saying. 

And then finally, the fourth C is congruency. Now, congruency means in its, uh, the word means no conflict between inside and outside. But in fee policies, it’s especially important because in congruency or meaning that what you’re saying is not really what the person is getting, well, that can be very toxic to the relationship that you have with your patient. So you want to be sure that you create a congruent relationship with the patient, meaning that everybody knows what to expect, there’s no surprises, there’s no conflict between what’s going on inside and what’s going on outside. Now, why is it so important to have these four Cs in your pricing? You wanna make sure that the patient both understands exactly what’s going on for themselves, but also remember that every patient is a likely source of referrals. If you do a great job, then you’ve got every reason to believe that if you create the right relationship between you and the patient, they’re gonna want to share you with the people that they care about.

And this is what turns into multiple referrals. In fact, Disney said that a patient who is happy, in his case, a customer who is happy is likely to refer five to 11 different people. Can you imagine what it would be like if all your patients referred five of their friends? You couldn’t even handle the influx of people. But that’s what’s available to you when you refine your communication and you create this consistent, clear, um, certain and congruent relationship. Now, the six essentials is really important for you to understand if you wanna be really successful in practice. 

It turns out that we have a website that you can go to that will explain the six essentials to you. There’s no cost or obligation. All you need to do is run your scanner, your camera, over this QR code, and it will take you right to the website so that you can learn about the six, about the six essentials.

These six essential strategies will revolutionize your practice, and none of them are especially difficult. None of them are especially complicated. All of them are completely within your ability to understand, and you’re probably already doing most of them to some degree already. But when all six of these essential strategies are tuned and working, it’s just like six musicians playing beautiful music together. 

So I’m urging you to run your scanner over this QR code and get to the point where you understand all six of these essentials. You’ll be astounded and delighted with what it turns your practice into. As always, it’s my great pleasure to be with you here. Thank you very much for watching Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman. Signing off for now.

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