There’s a saying that goes, “every master was once a disaster”.
You have to go through the tough lessons to find out what works for you and what doesn’t, because we don’t know what we don’t know.
You’re going to spend money on marketing that doesn’t pay off.
You’re going to be unrealistic about how many hours you can effectively work, and how many patients you will serve in your first month or six.
And you’re going to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations with patients about their treatment plan, or their dissatisfaction with your services.
For this article I polled recent grads who are currently practicing as an associate doc and who have taken over a practice as their own. These are their lessons from the trenches that they wish they knew about before stepping into the role.
1) Make Your Practice A Reflection Of Your Authentic Self
Your practice (and any business) is just a reflection of yourself. It’s much easier to live and work from a place of authenticity so you don’t have to hide behind a mask or facade in your practice. Patients can see through this anyways doing you more harm than good.
It also doesn’t make any sense to jump into practice without clear goals of what you want to create. How much do you need to personally earn per month to live a life that is successful in your definition? How many patients will this take you to manifest?
How do you want to spend your time as a successful chiropractor? Make sure to adjust your hours to reflect this before you create resentment for working through family dinners.
2) Learn How To Attract and Lead A Great Team
Your team consists of yourself, your CHA, your banker, your lawyer, your accountant, etc. Use the doorman principle to make sure they are worth keeping in your life before trusting them with your business success.
When it comes to leading a team, people like to know what they need to do in order to fulfill their role successfully. If you hire a CHA without having a clear outline of their outcomes for them to agree upon, they are blindly agreeing to being your personal assistant. There is no metric for a job well done or not.
Ex. if little Johnny spills his juice cup all over the reception room floor, is it the CHA’s job to clean it up? Probably, but is that an outcome they signed off on?
Make great use of team meetings so you can create momentum, synchronicity, and create a team that works with you rather than for you. There is a great article in The American Chiropractor on running effective team meetings that you can read here.
3) Learn How To Sell Chiropractic Effectively
There is a tainted stigma around selling in our society that makes us queasy whenever we even think about selling something to someone. Although, to be a great chiropractor you need to learn how to sell the vision and benefits of a long-term chiropractic treatment plan (without sounding like a dirty salesman).
The best way to go about this is gaining certainty on how your services truly serve the patient and conveying this in your chiropractic systems – intake visit, ROF, table talk, etc. When this is done well from a place of sincerity and authenticity, that’s where you will generate more new patients and referrals than any radio or newspaper ad will ever provide.
Now obviously there are a thousand tough lessons you will have to learn yourself, which is why they call it a “practice”. However, you can lessen the learning curve by studying those who come before you and mastering certain principles that will set you up for a better outcome.
We know you are an individualist free thinker that is determined to create success on your own terms, doing it your way. Which is why we are offering you a complimentary student mentorship coaching call as a way to share with you our top 3 lessons you need to know before starting practice to create an authentically successful practice in your own ideal.
Find out more about that here.
Good luck and have fun in the process.
Written by Rick Tielemans – Full Circle’s Marketing Arm