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Hello and welcome to today’s show growth without risk. My name is Dr. Janice Hughes, and I’m really excited today to talk about some things that I’m incredibly passionate about, and that’s about how to help you as a healthcare practitioner increase value within your practice. Now, before we jumped in and I start to share some ideas, I do want to say thank you to ChiroSecure. I love the opportunity to connect with chiropractors, particularly obviously the change in the world and know, you know, sort of in-person or physical seminars. It’s just really wonderful to connect. So like I said, I really want to chat today about something that I’m incredibly passionate about and that’s helping chiropractors or other health practitioners increase the value of your practice. Now I know that for us, it’s all about to give, to love, to serve, to help people, to work with patients, you know, to help them, to help people within our community.
For me, that’s a given. I know, and I love that aspect of our profession. What happens though? And I’m going to share from my own mistakes is that I didn’t do things early enough in my career to ultimately crystallize the value of my business. Now, what I mean by that is that you and the work you do and what your team does, you provide this incredible value. It’s an important asset for you. In fact, it’s likely one of your biggest assets. So what I want you to understand is that there are some simple actions and steps that you can take. I can take that any of us can take so that we in essence are increasing the value of our actual business. Now, heaven did this happen to you, but I was on the phone last week with the widow of a chiropractor that passed away unexpectedly.
Obviously, now they’re scrambling. What do they do? How do they value it? What does that look like? How did they get a great chiropractor in there now? I never want you to have to go through that. So I’d love you to start thinking now, even for some of you say, brand new in practice, what are the things you do early that actually adds value to the practice? So let’s start to talk a little bit about that. You’ll notice that, um, you hear a lot of people describe systems, you know, how to put systems into your practice. Well, not only is it important so that you can reproduce your results, but that’s also important so that anyone else could step in and reproduce those results. So that adds incredible value. Now we can call that or standard operating procedures and a lot of people start to panic, you know, well, wait a minute, does that mean I have to write every single thing down that I do?
And the short answer to that is yes. The more you put things in writing, the more powerful your operations manual is the more powerful the ability to reproduce your results. So it’s great for team training. It’s also great because you can see that that’s going to add value. So now how do you do that? Do you have to sit and write, you know, manuals and no, like personally, I love that if any of you are already in a practice where you’ve got your team involved, start getting their help, write some things down from their perspective or audio, it, you know, start to talk through at a team meeting or with one of your great team members about what you do and the order of the things that you do. Now, you’ve got a record of that. Start to do things like videos. If you’re going to do training on a procedure, why not do a video and start to have a file where you save all of those procedures.
Now you notice that you’ve got it in an automated format. So gone are the days where you just think that you have to sit down and, you know, write every single step of the way or have checklists all the time. I like the idea of a, of a checklist or having this manual, but you could do that electronically. So what I want you to understand is that there is no one perfect system. I’m not asking that you do a system that someone else has trained you on. Or, you know, again, that you know is the one that brings the ultimate success. You know, it’s about your systems. What can you put in writing in video or an audio just about every single facet of your practice? And what I want you to understand is that does build your operations manual, your reproducibility, or what, you’ll hear more people in the business world, talk about the SOP, the standard operating procedures.
So I want you to see that you can get started with that. Now. I know one of the things I’m really fortunate, I go into life university and a few of the other schools, and I get to talk to some of the students about business procedures and practices and protocols. And we’ll literally provide them with some templates of those kinds of things. Not because I have one that is the answer that it often is just a starting place, please know, by all means through ChiroSecure, or just reach out directly to me if you want some of those kinds of ideas, but the power comes when you put it into your system, when you make it yours, you know, gone are the, I think a lot of people used to say, well, you can’t have a personality driven practice. Well, yes you can because your personality is a key part of your brand.
But what I want you to understand is that it’s not, you just doing things fly by night, you have a rhythm or a way that you communicate even beginning to do that in a video so that you have that basically as a template, you could start to train an associate. You could start to train other young docs. So pretend you’ve got someone following you or shadowing you. And you notice that then you’re putting it into a format that is reproducible. So I think it’s really important that we, we take some of those business terms like operating manuals and protocols and standard operating procedures. And we just start to think about, you have a unique brand and way that you do things, and that’s what brings great value to your practice. So by putting all of that, into this kind of format, now, I want you to see that you could train others to do that.
So let’s talk a little bit, say for a startup doc, the more you build that, now you can keep adding to that as you bring different team members in, you notice that sometimes when you hire one team member, one staff, they’re almost like a Jack of all trades, but there’s going to be different parts of their job. You know, PR or marketing outreach is different than here’s the protocols for the software program. So I want you to see that even if it’s one person, you know, that’s helping you, or for example, if you’re doing it all on your own, you know, there’s still different hats that you wear. So what happens when you are dealing with an insurance company or following up on some of your billings, what happens when your, you know, thinking in terms of the outreach within the community, just start recording those different pieces and parts of everything that you do.
Now, some of you listening that are not in startup that have these great practices where you have also a lot of teams, numbers stop and think about, do you even no for sure anymore, the things that they’re doing, one of the things that I often began to realize as I had great people on my team, and I’d really empowered them, sometimes I hadn’t touched base regularly with them about any sort of adaptations or slight changes that they’d been making to protocols. Some are good. And then some actually are taking you a little off brand of what you thought your team was doing. So it’s a great way to also review. I like to use the distinction says inspect to respect, if you can, all the procedures and the things that you and your team are doing now that allows everyone to completely respect the protocols, to get back on track.
If they’re slightly off track with things and it happens really easily and sometimes in ways that you would never even think, you know, it might be that you’ve run out of a certain manual or, or brochure that you often like to give to people. And then there was a photocopy mate and suddenly that photocopy wasn’t completely straight, or it doesn’t look the way you want it to look, little things like that can really start to impact negatively impact your brand. So it’s just a great opportunity to review a lot of those kinds of things. Now, if you’re not an early startup, it’s easier to begin to think about what I like to call that 10 year exit strategy. What are all the things you put in place now and begin to work on over the next few years that crystallize the value, but also allow you to think about how over time do you build more freedom and flexibility into the clinic.
So because you have that unique communication style, you have the way that you work with your patients. If you’re a sole practitioner, they’re not used to having you be away, you know, some of you that had to close for craziness with the pandemic and then got yourself open again and are more back on track. But before you know, it, we’re not feeling that we’ve got the freedom and flexibility to take time off. It’s almost like, well, everybody expects us to be there all the time. You know, those kinds of challenges mean that we need to start to think in terms of what, or how do we either bring other people in, or have people on your team that can do some other things for you? You know, one of the things that adds great value to the practice, I always say is that you really educate and groom and work with some of your team members to be able to do a lot of the parts or the pieces that you’ve been doing, but aren’t necessarily that you have to do that.
So let’s think about an example. Many of you use things like, you know, the insight scans, you know, some of you, if you do more functional neurology work, you’ve got people who maybe do some of the eye training techniques and the technology. You know, if you’re doing a little bit more functional med, you, you may end up having, you know, supplementation or, you know, questionnaires that you give to patients at a certain point. Well, do you need to do that? Or can you begin to train some great people on your team to do those pieces, not to make the diagnosis, not to take, you know, again, that clinical side away, but is it say some of the regular treatment pieces or checks and balances? You know, if you build an SOP, a standard operating procedure where someone on your team checks in every 30 or 60 days with someone, for example, that maybe you have on a certain supplement, number one, it’s better for patient care, but it also adds more value in the long run to your business because you have an operating procedure that not everything has to go through you.
So you notice that it’s a lot more subtle than we think that we can be enhancing and increasing the value of our practice even while we’re in it all day, every day. So a little bit of this, I want to, again, my background is a coach. I like you thinking, well, what can you be working on now? So the first thing is kind of pull out and take a look at what you have. Do you have a procedure manual? Some of you will call it a, you know, an operations manual. And when is the last time you actually even looked at that? I laugh because a few docs as I just do some complimentary consults for people, you know, I’ll ask them about that. And they’re like, well, I think I had one, or I think it’s stored somewhere. And they actually even have to search for where it is.
So a first step is just, if you’ve got something already, pull it out. If you don’t have anything yet, ask some of us for a template, ask a chiropractor that you know, and you like the way they do business and you like who they are. And maybe ask if they’ll share their operations manual now, because you’re going to copy it, that you’re going to look at it and use some of the categories and the ideas. Then it’s really engaging your team. Like I said, if you’re new into practice and you maybe don’t have a team it’s yourself sitting down and maybe putting a little bit of these things in writing, but ideally from many of you that have got great team members, it’s really get some of this in writing. A perfect example is what tends to happen as I even help people talk about their practice or their value, I’ll ask them for, you know, an equipment list or, you know, their furniture lists.
Most people don’t even have a list or a record of the kinds of equipment that they have in the practice. The same thing that could be an actual document that you guys are already working on now. So that if that is, is 10 years down the road, as an example, you can turn around and just updated or keep that active and updated all along the way. Another thing that I like you to think about now is just this idea about thinking in terms of your practice as an actual business. Could it be that if you’re a little disconnected, we’ve just gone through tax season. If you’re a little disconnected from the aspects of your practice that are a little bit more about the business, is it that you could take an action step to have a stronger look at that? Part of the reason is that you increase the value of your healthcare practice by knowing the numbers and taking a look at the things that you’re spending time on.
So let’s go back and use that example of some functional medicine. I know some practitioners that have some supplementation in the practice and they do some kind of an assessment, and they have patients that get on these different supplements, a great professional line. Then often they don’t have ways that they check back in with people. So that could be something that you add to some of your procedures, because like I said, it’s good for the patient. It’s also good for you that the other thing, taking a look at your P and L’s your profit and loss statements is how much does it cost you? Not only in the product that you’re ordering that in your time to have that within your practice, because sometimes you start to take a look at these things and you realize, wait a minute, there’s something that’s taking a lot of my time and, or my staff and team’s time.
And isn’t actually increasing the profitability of the business. Now, those are just a couple of ideas, ways that you can right now, take a look at where you at, where would you love to be? And then how do we increase the value of these different parts and pieces of your business, of your practice? So, like I said, it’s, it’s just thinking in terms of, from my perspective, it’s a, given that you, as a chiropractor or any healthcare practice that you’re providing great service, that you do great work, I’d like to increase the value of that. Because remember when someone is now gonna say purchase that practice or where you’re looking at down the road, selling the practice, you hopefully have generated multiple years of great profitability and revenue from the practice. I just want you to be able to prove that and show that so that you could then turn around and sell your practice as an actual asset.
So lots of different little ideas here today, but please reach out, ask questions. You’ll notice that ChiroSecure brings myself and other great people in to do the show growth without risk so that we can help you. We want to help you now. And the idea that I’m talking about is help you for the future as well. Speaking of future, please know that next week, the host for the growth without risk show is Mike Miscoe. So please by all means, make sure you’re checking in each week, each Tuesday with a great material and information that’s being shared. I want to thank ChiroSecure again for creating this opportunity for me to talk about some of the things I’m passionate about. I love helping chiropractors recognize and increase the value of their practice. The impact that you have is incredible. I want that to also be a great business asset for you. So thanks and have a wonderful week.