The 6 Essential Strategies- Discover Your Contradictions and Your Points of Friction #1

Don’t forget to learn about the 6 Essential Strategies and about our Discovery Form.

Hello everyone. Today we’re going to continue to discuss the Discovery Form and the contradictions holding practices like yours from succeeding, from growing, and from making a significant impact.

If you missed our first podcast, when we discussed a few points of friction that all practices have and suffer from, and where we also covered the Six Essential Strategies, that link is in the description.

And, if you want to complete the Discovery Form yourself to discover your contradictions and your points of friction, that link is also below.

Let me point out that if the rate of change outside your practice is greater than the rate of change inside your practice, at best, your practice will grossly underperform, and at worst, it won’t last very long.

So let’s go to a form we received from a doctor whose practice was flat and clearly shows signs of serious and common contradictions. I pointed out these contradictions to him and helped him resolve his challenges and now his practices on the grow again. So let’s go to a screen share and let me show you all of that.

So here are the Six Essentials, and this is the form that we ask clients to fill out. And it’s very simple. It’s all yes and no answers, and this is a form you should be filling out. It’s very simple, it’ll take you just a few minutes and you don’t have to go research anything. And it’s developed into the six major topics of the Six Essential Strategies.

So for example, this doctor, on the very first question on the topic of friction, which is anything that slows down, disrupts or prevents the growth of your business, or anything that causes a patient to question or resist your care. The question was, as the doctor, “Do you have any friction with attracting and processing new patients?”

And this doctor who filled this out said No, which is an indication that he pretty much should have all the new patients he likes and all the new patients he wants, which is very good and very refreshing.

So if we go further down this form, we ask another question in a different way, and this question is, are you consistently generating a significant number of new patient referrals?

And his answer is No. How interesting. So in one question, he says he gets all the patients he wants, and the other question he says he doesn’t how to generate referrals very well. That’s a contradiction, and contradictions slow down, usually sabotage a process.

When a doctor, for example, wants new, more new patients, but feels uncomfortable asking for referrals or hasn’t set up relationships or doesn’t really know how to market, there’s a conflict, and when we have a conflict of wanting something but not enjoying something, or not engaging in something, the end result is neutral at best, or going backwards at worst.

A second contradiction is this. We ask this question. “Do you get all the new patients to accept your care plan?”

What that means ladies and gentlemen, is when you recommend at your Report of Findings, a specific and detailed care plan whatever that is, do your patients accept it? Do they actually convert from what is a potential new patient to becoming a new patient?

And, he writes No, I don’t get all the new patients to accept my care plan. I am not succeeding at conversion. I don’t have a hundred percent conversion. This is an enormous problem.

Many doctors convert a hundred percent of their new patients. Some convert only 90%. But there’s an unbelievable amount of our colleagues that are only converting 20 or 30 or 40, or 50 or 60% of their new patients, and this is very frustrating, very costly, and very time consuming.

But if we look a little bit further down in this questionnaire, this Discovery Form, we ask the question, “Do you have a good method of converting your relief oriented patients to wellness patients?” and he writes, “Yes”. Well, apparently one of these is a conflict, one of them is right, one of them is wrong. You can have both, and this, again, is gonna sabotage his practice.

Contradictions always weigh down the practice. I want you to think of a contradiction in how you think and in your mindset, as a subluxation of your practice. So let’s take this a little bit further now.

Let’s talk about this in more detail, and let me just give you some clarity on this subject. We all have contradictions. We don’t do that on purpose. We are not even aware of them. But knowing how to ask the right questions, we’ll expose that. This is why we’re asking you to fill out the Discovery Form. Let me share with you a little bit about some of the feedback that we get.

All the doctors who have filled this out that we have spoken to and we’ve pointed out these contradictions immediately started to gain some traction and saw growth. I’ve been a chiropractor for almost 45 years. I’ve been traveling around the world, speaking to and for chiropractors about 30 times a year for almost 30 years, and chiropractors frequently ask me questions like, “Hey, Bob, in your opinion, what’s perhaps the biggest problem in our profession?” And, I have to tell you, I never hesitate, I always give the same answer. And that is, our profession has had a failure to adapt. Let me give you an example, and quite frankly, I can give you a hundred examples.

I think almost all doctors, almost all chiropractors would recognize that people are far sicker today than ever before. They have more physical, more chemical, more emotional for sure, more electromagnetic stress bombarding their brain, their body, their nervous system than ever before in history Plus, People are sicker on more layers, they don’t just have a structural problem. They don’t just have a neurological problem. They’re toxic, they need a detox program perhaps, they need to start exercising again and moving, there’s layers and layers of problems and dysregulation.

Yet, the chiropractic profession as a sign and a symbol of its failure to adapt is that most chiropractors, probably 98%, are still recommending the same care plan, the same schedule of visits they recommended 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years ago.

This is a problem. This is a failure to adapt.

So I want to tell you that I had a call with a client just the other day, a brand new client and associate of one of my owner-doctor clients, and this doctor generates about 25 or 30 new patients a month, which is beautiful. A lot of chiropractors would aspire to that, but it has a retention, a PVA of under 8.

So I asked him, how often do you get adjusted? And he goes, “At least once a week” and I hear that a lot. I’m sure you do too. And I asked him, how long is he getting adjusted at least once a week? And he said, “I don’t know exactly, but I’m thinking at least 10 years.” So I said, doc let’s look at this and let’s be conservative.

If it is only 10 years, and it is only once a week, that’s 50 visits a year times 10 years, you’ve already had 500 chiropractic visits. Would you recognize that most of your patients are probably not as young as you were when you started? "Yes." Would you recognize that most of your patients aren’t as focused or see as much value in being health as you probably do?

He goes, “Yes”. I said, would you agree with me that you are still not done with care because you’re probably gonna get adjusted this week cause I’m actually getting adjusted later today? I said, tell me about if you see an incongruency here, or a contradiction that you’re younger than them, you’re healthier than them, you’re more valued about health than them,

you’re more proactive than them, you’ve already had 500 visits and you’re not done, and yet your average patient who’s older than you, sicker than you, less conscious and aware as you are, less engaged, less valuing their health than you are, they get seven or eight visits and they’re better.. He goes, “I never looked at it like that”.

I said you have to look at it like that. And I’m not suggesting that we have to recommend 200 or a 100 or 50. I’m not recommending any number of visits. I’m recommending congruency.

And if we could start to see the world through that lens and see the world through the lens that people are sicker today than ever before, and start to learn the Six Essential Strategies of Every Practice now,

which are very different than the strategies of even just two or three years ago, let alone five or 10, or 15 or 20 years ago. It shifts your mindset. It becomes a paradigm shift for you, which then changes your actions, changes your focus, and I promise you will also change your results.

Check out our other episode, 6 Essentials of a Legendary Practice: The Magic Formula To Create A Great Practice.

Don’t forget to learn about our Discovery Form.