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Hey, welcome to July, 2022. My name is Dr. Eric Kowalke this is ChiroSecure, Look To The Children’s show. I’m so thankful to be able to do this with you guys and just further chiropractic care for kids. And thank you to Dr. Stu Hoffman and ChiroSecure for hosting. These shows, I do the first Thursday of every single month.
And my goal is to bring you value and content that you can take back to your practice today or tomorrow, and actually implement into your. To help you see more kids. I have a practice in grand rapids, Michigan. We see hundreds of kids every week, and we’re taking the information we’re learning and designing and building out of that clinic and through our other companies get, bring it to you guys and how you can leverage that information to see more kids and get better results for the next generation.
So one of the most important things that we can do is talk about show up rate, and that’s something that. We just hope is really good. We focus a lot of training, a lot of effort as chiropractors on attracting new people that need chiropractic care, attracting new patients converting, like how do we educate them and get the right information to them that they commit to a treatment plan or recommendations to get better.
And then we hope that everything just goes great. And. If they’re not showing up, we’re wondering why they’re not showing up. And we’re very reactive. So our entire mindset in, in intent in life as a chiropractor is to be proactive instead of reactive, w we’re proactive with our health. We take care of our bodies.
We’re proactively. Lifetime chiropractic care, preventative chiropractic care for ourselves yet when we look at patient retention and show up rate, a lot of times we’re very reactive with somebody hasn’t been in that they’ve missed a bunch of visits and now we’re calling them and trying to figure out why have you not been in, what can we do to get you back in?
And some. Disciplinary thing. And our go-to solution for most chiropractors is like cancellation policy. So if you’re not making it in, we’re going to find you or discipline you for not showing up to your appointments. And I can tell you that the gender, that the landscape is different now than it was 10 years ago.
Not saying you shouldn’t have a cancellation policy, but that mindset in that it doesn’t work like it used to work. It was primarily because our, this generation is shifting into a massive influx of convenience. Like they expect convenience. The expectation is convenience and gone are the days of let’s print out your calendar for 12 months and you put this on your fridge and these are all your appointments, and you can write them in your hand, calendar book, like that just doesn’t exist anymore.
People don’t even know what’s going on. Next week, maybe even tomorrow with their schedule, they commit to chiropractic care. They want it, they value it. They can afford it many times. It’s now a question of, can we fit it into our everyday life, especially with kids and families. This show, look to the children.
We’re focusing on. How do we build better practices that can see more kids and more families. And I want to talk about this today, 99% sure. Pray. This is what we achieve in our clinic. And these are the three main areas that we focus on and train on and are intentional with in order to achieve that.
Number one on the top is agreements. If you could read that, it says establish clear agreements on goals. And the plan to achieve those goals. So this is so important upfront is establishing, what is their problem? What are they trying to fix? What is the path of the plan that you have to get there?
Clearly communicating that and then getting agreement on whatever that is. So a lot of times you can get agreement. What you think is. And he bring your, bring them up to the front desk CA and you hand them off, and then you go do whatever you’re doing at your profile. At the end of the shift, you find out they actually didn’t start, or they had questions and they had to go home and talk to their husband.
And you’re like, wait a minute. And they were fully committed five seconds before I dropped them off there. Really you were speaking to them. You weren’t getting agreement from them. So agreement on the plan and the frequency and the schedule of visits and what’s going to happen. And when you’re going to do your reassessments and however you do chiropractic is so important.
So clearly communicating that and getting agreement upfront is key. Number one, second. One is value. This says 90% of value is built on day one day, two table talk keeps the value high moving forward from there. This is something that I see with a lot of chiropractors. I’ve helped coach for 10 years plus, and I’ve been through 10 different student clubs crossed the United States and different campuses.
And I would say the, one of the biggest mistakes early chiropractors get is they’re not building enough value on day one and day two. And really what is chiropractic care? What are we trying to do? And if. A large family wellness clinic. What the end result of what you’re doing is lifetime family wellness care.
Are we communicating that upfront and building value on lifetime family wellness care? Or are we just building and value on whatever their current symptom is to get them to commit to that and take a one little baby step. And there’s times when maybe you have to do that, but I’m telling you when you, if you don’t build value on the first two visits for your end result of what you want.
Lifetime family wellness care likely is it. Then it’s going to be a ton of education and a ton of table talk and lifting huge lift to get them to that point later on in, in care. So really focusing on day one, day two and building value on what it is that you do in addition to communicating their specific symptoms is so important.
And then every visit from there on the other. Trap that we fall into is chiropractors are very relational. People love talking to us. They love connecting to us and we love talking and connecting to them and we can become really good friends and develop relationship with them. And we talk about how their 4th of July was and the weather and all of that stuff is okay to do.
However, every visit, there’s gotta be some amount of education into, to chiropractic because they’re not hearing anywhere. Everything out there is fear negativity. Fear negativity is a little bit more fear. They’re not hearing their body was designed to heal from the inside out. They’re not hearing innate intelligence.
They’re not hearing that the skull of the spinal column is a suit of armor to protect their nervous system. They’re not hearing any of that stuff. And that’s what you could be educating every single visit. If it’s awkward for you to educate that. We pre-frame that we’re going to be doing that. So this is helpful because if you feel like, wow, they don’t want to hear it.
I’m just saying it every time when they start care, this there, we’re going to be educating you. One of the things we’re committed to on our end is teaching you something about your role in health and healing, every single visit, and now they expect you to teach them. And you notice I said your role in health and healing because they’re taking some ownership over the fact that they need to know that their own body has the power to heal itself from the inside out and chiropractic care is starting the process.
It’s not the process. So we’re starting the process of removing nerve interference to allow your body to heal from the inside out your body’s really the one that’s doing all the amazing work we’re moving the nerve interference, allowing you to do it. I’m fixing you. And my adjustment is the one that’s healing you and I’m taking all the credit.
That’s not a successful way to communicate that. And that’s really important as well as Billy value. So agreements value. If you’re doing great on these, you have awesome agreements. You’re holding them accountable to those agreements. You’re building tons of value where they just love chiropractic because they want to come for the rest of their life and then refer all of their friends with.
The third one is convenience. So this is where chiropractors are just stuck with. I don’t know how to make his convenient and hold them accountable. And so convenience, a couple of things here in office experience, time, less than 20 minutes chiropractic care becomes part of their life on a routine basis.
So let’s start with office experience then. So this is in our office. We measure this from the time they arrive to the time. They get checked out of the adjusting them. So the 25 minutes, probably in the time they walk in the door to the time they walk out the door, less than 30, for sure. If it’s more than 30 minutes, that’s not convenient for them to make it part of their everyday life.
The average person for sure. Families, because now the family comes in and they got kids to feed sporting events to get to maybe they’re driving from 20, 30 minutes away. Which is really common. More than 30 minutes becomes a significant appointment. If you can keep it less than 30 minutes, now they’re running to Costco or target and they can swing in and get adjusted and it’s, they don’t have to make it a huge deal.
Like we’re going to go do this every single week for forever. If it adds stress to their life, they’re not going to want to continue to keep doing it, especially when they don’t have a driving factor of payments. Everybody can commit to it. You have be a two hour appointment when they can’t walk and they’re going to show up, but we’re talking about life time.
Long-term retention building 300 PVA plus kind of practices. It has to be convenient. So experience time is crucial. The other key factor here is rescheduling appointments. So I’m going to change your mindset on this a little. Typically chiropractors, they go reschedule appointments is there. They don’t want to come in.
They’re going to reschedule the some future day. They’re going to fall off the recommendations and they’re not going to get the results. And we’re going to lose revenue. The reality with today’s day and age is if you make it convenient enough for them to reschedule, and I’m going to show you how we do this, they’ll stick to their recommendations even more.
So what we’ve found is convenience equals. Before it was so inconvenient to reschedule appointments that they would either no call no show. So they’re not even coming in that day at all. And then they’re trying to reschedule for the next day or the next week. Cause they can’t get ahold of you and they have to call or they just don’t even want to call.
I was at a dentist appointment a couple of months ago and the lady’s oh no, what do you do? And I told her as a chiropractor, never know what you’re going to get. When you say that. She’s I’ll actually just miss my chiropractic appointment yesterday. I’m actually going to cancel all of them because it’s just not convenient for me to come in to go there anymore.
And if I have to change my appointment, I have to call them and I don’t like calling them. And I’m when I’m working, they’re open. So when I’m not working and I can call them. And I just need to find a different solution. That’s literally what she told me. I was like, oh my God. If you only knew I created a company to do this, so SCAD has an app feature that we allow patients to reschedule appointments in our clinic, but not only do we allow them to reschedule, we allow them to see times that are more busy and less busy.
And this is really a benefit for us. Primarily is how this idea came about because our office would be super busy at four. And then nobody at four 15 and then super busy at four 30. And so our efficiency wasn’t great. And our wait times and our office experience, I wasn’t really controllable. So by showing them in the app, Hey, four 15 is a lot less busy just with green, yellow, red, little colors, then four o’clock.
Most people will be like, oh, I’ll come at four 15. So it really balanced our schedule out and increase our efficiency, which allowed us to have a more stable controllable office experience. But it allows them to feel like, okay, now I can move my appointment for 15 minutes later and it’s a better time for them.
And for me and my experience in the office as a patient, it’s going to be better. And I don’t have to reschedule to three days from now. I can just pop on the app quick, look while I’m at target and move it to the central. The other thing that this does is it allows, it takes that slot out. So let’s say it was right at four o’clock and Mary had an appointment with her three kids at four o’clock she’s you know, her kids are stuck in school or they got some things she forgot about.
She pops on there. She sees, oh, there’s a five o’clock or five 15, that’s green. I’m going to move it to five 15, the four o’clock red just changed to green because now there’s four less people there. So Susie who’s like. Johnny’s got basketball at five. I was scheduled there. I need to come in right now.
Boom. I can come in at four o’clock. So it’s a dynamic people moving their schedules around real time during the day that works for that. And it ends up working for us because we have almost a hundred percent show up rate. Some days we have 101% hundred, and 2% more people are coming in that are even on the schedule that day, because now we just make chiropractic care so convenient.
They don’t have to call us and they could see it all through their phone and it syncs real-time with our office calendar. So it doesn’t screw up our efficiency. If anything, it makes it better. Cause we haven’t coded in there. How many people will allow to see based on appointment codes.
Each time slot based on our vulnerability and how many doctors, how many new patients we’re seeing and re-evaluations and all of that’s coded in the backend. So it always makes sure our schedule’s perfect. This is something that convenience is, this is where chiropractic is going. This is where healthcare is going.
How do I get it more convenient? They’re willing to pay more. It’s not a time and money thing anymore. They really do have the time and they do have the finances to do it and they value it and they want it. It’s just, can you fit it in their life? Can you make it convenient for them in and out of the office?
So I encourage you focus on that. Look at that. It’s not scared of. Look at something else. How do we make it convenient for people? Look at the systems in your clinic. Are you using two way texting, back and forth? You have online stuff that they can fill out their paperwork. Is there go through the whole new patient process like you yourself?
How inconvenient is it each step? That’s oh, that’s annoying. That’s inconvenient. That’s losing new people. That’s reducing your impact in your community and your. Because nowadays I can order something on Amazon and I get it the same day. Usually I can order my groceries. I can order my coffee. I can do all of this stuff quickly, easily through an app without talking to any.
Scared just provided that to the chiropractic profession by allowing that to happen and come into your practice. And it sinks super easy, less than a hundred bucks a month. And within two days you can have it up and running in your clinic. That’s where we’re going as a profession to stay ahead of the game.
So there’s a lot. I went over in here, recapping agreements, clear agreements. If they’re falling out of care and they’re missing their appointments, you need to bring them back into an agreement. Either you change their goals, you change their recommendations, but you have to get back into an agreement.
That’s hard. We needed to be attentional with that. It’s really easy just to be like, oh, Hey, great to see you again. And not really hold them accountable and come back to their agreements. But ultimately if you do that correctly you get better results and you get better compliance. So agreements always building value table talk, and then.
Making it convenient for them to come into the office and not disciplining them because their schedule didn’t work for today, figuring out how to make your schedule work with their ever-changing schedule with all of your practice members is the solution of the future. And that’s what I wanted to help you guys see that there are solutions out there for you today.
If you have any questions on that, Dr. eric@scad.life, D R E R I k@scad.life. And I’d be happy to go through that with you and Happy 4th of July, have a fantastic. Hopefully this was helpful for you guys and you got something out of it, agreements and always communicating value and making it convenient in the practice.
Have a fantastic summer. Don’t forget. This show is hosted by ChiroSecure who gives so much back to the chiropractic profession. Dr. Monika Buerger is hosting the show the third Thursday of every month with tons of value. It’s quick, easy list and make sure you’re hopping out and seeing that. And I’ll see you guys back.
The first Thursday of August.
Today’s pediatric show to the children was brought to you by ChiroSecure .