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Hey, welcome to the Look to the Children’s show. My name is Dr. Erik Kowalke. This show is hosted by ChiroSecure, thanks Dr. Stu Hoffman and all that he does for the chiropractic profession over the last couple of years, unfortunately, a lot of us needed to contact ChiroSecure and our malpractice providers for all kinds of questions around the.
And they’ve been able to get back to us and respond quickly. That’s something in today’s day and age, when you work with companies, their support and their ability to talk to a real person to get a real person on the phone is becoming increasingly rare. And our office uses them a lot.
We appreciate our ability to get answers to questions and just be fully prepared as a clinic. We run higher healthcare practice in grand rapids, Michigan. I also run a company called schedule. A software company we created to help chiropractors be more efficient and just really manage their scheduling to a whole new level.
Utilizing technology. Our office in Grand Rapids is where we kind of birth that technology. We see 1500 plus a week, 500 plus kids every single week. We’re a huge pediatric and family based practice. Infants brand new infants are getting adjusted every single day in our office. We have five docs, 16 adjusting to.
We just run a very efficient, great system oriented practice. And so I love doing these shows for you. It’s 20 minutes that I can bring you some nuggets and some real information that we do in our office that you could take back practically and apply in your. Today after lunch or tomorrow or next week and really just see impacting growth.
And so what I want to really talk to you about today is leadership in a pediatric clinic or a family practice. We’re really even if you just see all the old people in your geriatric clinic, how do you lead your team? How do you lead the people coming to the office is usually a direct correlation to how fast your practice.
How great your team is. How much your practice members or patients trust you your compliance. Are they sticking to care? Are they sticking to your recommendations? Are they referring? Other people is a direct relation to trust, which is direct correlation to your leadership. And so I want to give you some information and some things that you can think about today as far as becoming a better leader in your clinic and in your practice.
And number one is. And clarity around your vision. This is so important. I don’t care if you’re brand new in practice or you’ve been in practice for 15 years, trying to get to a whole new level or open another other clinic. You need to have a very clear vision of where you’re going and what it looks like before you can communicate that effectively to your team.
And then they can take action on that. What I mean by that is if you need to whiteboard out, what are the positions look like? What is your accountability or organizational chart look like a year from. What does it look like six months from now? What does it look like three years from now? Who do you need in which positions and what do you need them to do?
So if I was sitting down with you and your clinic today, and we were looking at everything, I said, okay, what is your what people do you need and what roles six months from now? You probably wouldn’t know it off the top of your head. Even if you did, you would say, okay, I need another associate doctor and I needed an operations manager or somebody to run the show and I need a new front desk.
Check-in. Okay. What are their roles look like? What are they accountable to? What are the main KPIs that you need for each one of those people in that role? Oh, gosh, I dunno. I need my front desk. Check-in CA she needs to be accountable to patients show up rate. So everybody’s showing up today. She needs to be accountable to the energy of the front area in the waiting room.
If I hear another associate doc, he needs to be accountable to growth. Do I need him to market? Do I need him to just adjust people? Do I need him to do conversion? I need him to do closes in rooms or I need them to do all of that. And if he needs to do all of it, what does he accountable to? How are we going to measure it?
How we’re going to segment out how many people he’s adjusting versus how many people you’re adjusting, what is your expectation? And how many people he adjusts in your clinic and how many kids, if you’re seeing 300 a week and you hire him, do you want him to adjust a hundred or 300 to free you up in there?
And you need to have clarity on all of those metrics and all of those things. So you know exactly what you’re looking for and you can communicate that clearly to each person that you’re hiring. Hey, this is your role. This is what I need you to do. This is how we’re going to measure it. This is how often we’re going to meet to follow up on that.
If you can do that ahead of time, you’re going to save yourself an enormous amount of confusion. Lack of clarity, creates confusion. Confusion creates a less momentum, which creates this really negative momentum in your practice, which in turn creates frustration and takes all the joy out of being a leader and loving being in your practice.
And that’s preparation and creating vision as a leader. And that just takes time. That takes an enormous amount of Headspace for me, that’s the mornings. I’m not very good at vision after two o’clock in the afternoon. By the time I get the two o’clock two o’clock in the afternoon, I can’t think sharp and clear, and I’m not inspired.
Enough internally to have the head space, to have really good clarity on what the vision looks like. So I did that in the morning times. I try to carve out time in the morning to do that. You also gotta be sure you’re rested and you’re spiritually fed. That’s so important. And you’re taking care of yourself first because if you don’t take care of yourself first and you’re not spiritually filled, you’re not like intentionally.
Doing those things and exercising and having time for yourself when you need it and being relaxed, then you’re not going to be able to create that clarity, envision your what your life is like. If you feel like your life is chaotic and you’re running around and you’re barely surviving, trust me, everybody that works with you feels the same way.
They feel like your business is chaotic and you’re barely surviving. The proudest members feel like their care is chaotic and they’re barely surviving. It’s a reflection of everything else in your life. And I’m speaking from, we have six kids, three or four businesses, they’re all in travel sports and dance and hockey.
I got a lot going on too, so I’m not saying life doesn’t slow down, but you need to have joy. You need to have organization and systems for your family, and that all needs to be organized as well for you to get to the next level for your business. So that’s vision hope is the second.
You have to be the driver of inspiration and hope in the entire clinic. And if you can inspire your team members and the other leaders within your organization, and you can fill them up with hope, then they can intern fill other people up with hope and that’s, what’s significantly lacking in our society today.
People just have no hope. They don’t even have, they don’t have hope over their job. They don’t have hope over, is the U S going to go back on a gold standard. So should they. Or cryptocurrency, people that have hoped for anything, especially in their health, because they don’t know who to trust anymore.
Everything that they thought was true three, four years ago. Now they don’t know. They’re either know that it’s not true, or they don’t even know what to believe at all anymore, or who to believe. You look at how much has come out on people that they thought they trusted and they told them, they realized that wasn’t.
So they’re more skeptical of believing people now more than ever. So your advice to them needs to come with hope and it needs to come with your story and the stories of others, because you can’t refute stories can always refute evidence. You could say research says chiropractic care helps with the immune system, which I say that too, but anybody could argue that what research was.
And they could tear it apart and say it’s not accurate because of this or that. They can’t tear apart your story. They can’t tear apart. The fact that the first family that ever signed on to care in our office 10 and a half years ago is still under care. And the most common response I get from families that have been in lifetime family wellness care in our clinic is they don’t meet their family deductible anymore for the.
Because they’re all healthier. They can’t refute the fact that we have six kids, 13 to two, and a single one of them has ever had an antibiotic, a prescription drug or an over-the-counter to the drug. And they can’t refute the fact that our extended family just on my wife’s side is 45 plus cousins.
43 of the them have been adjusted since birth and not a single one of them have had an over-the-counter medication. That stuff is your story. That’s what you own. You need to come up with. What is your story? What are your grounded? That can’t be argued cause it’s just truth. And that provides hope to you to carry on and share the mission of chiropractic and subluxation.
And you need to share that to pour over that hope into every one of your team members and every person that you come in contact with. That’s what they’re looking for. And that’s what they desire. And that’s what fills them up and creates an extraordinary experience for them when they come into your clinic.
Because man, I love going in there because they get. And I believe it, and I trust them because it’s real. The third one is consistency. This might be the most the biggest area to improve for most leaders and chiropractors. If you’re a chiropractor watching, this is you need to be consistent. If you say you’re going to be there, you gotta be there.
If you say you want to do this, you gotta do it. Consistency comes with accountability. So let’s just talk about accountability for a second with your team. They need to be held accountable. They want to be held accountable and you need to create consistent rhythms to hold them accountable to whatever they’re responsible for.
So whatever their role is responsible for, we talked about check-in front desk CA she’s just transmitted for people showing up to their appointments. Are we measuring that? Are we discussing that? Are we talking about that? Is, are we consistently looking at it? If I had my front desk check and see, and I said, okay, you’re responsible for making sure everybody shows up to.
And I don’t help her come up with a way to measure that. I just look at it once every two weeks or once a month. And then I realized it’s not doing good. And I go, and I yell at her and say, Hey, you’re not doing your job because people aren’t showing up, you need to do a better job. That’s not a very good leader.
I wasn’t consistent in holding her accountable, helping her figure out how to measure it. The leader comes in and sees the areas that we can improve. I don’t hold people accountable to figure out who’s not doing their job. If you’re not doing your job, you’re not on our. Everybody’s doing their job.
It’s my role. As the leader to find the areas that we can improve and to have the vision and be able to see what do we need to change? What do we need to do differently to help you succeed in your role? And I can’t do that if I don’t know the numbers. Is it good or is it bad? If it’s bad? I want to know that it’s bad.
Just as much as if it’s good. I want to know that it’s good. And so creating that clarity for your team on this. Why I’m being consistent, and this is why I’m in charge of holding everybody accountable creates growth in your business and allows you to be a better leader. So in order for you to do that, you as a leader need accountability.
So either you need to hold yourself accountable through using technology like Google calendar monday.com or other task oriented resources to hold yourself accountable. Waking up at the time, you’re supposed to wake up doing the things you’re supposed to be doing, not doing the things that you know that you shouldn’t be doing.
What are the things that are distracting you, do you find yourself spending way too much time on social media when you probably shouldn’t be like, is that really moving the ball forward in your life? Look at your phone and write down in your notebook. How many hours you spend every week.
It tells you, Facebook, Instagram, how many hours did you spend on there? If you think that might be a problem for you? Write it down. Write it down on your notebook, it, most of the time, if you think it’s a problem where you don’t think it’s a problem, you don’t want to look cause it’s exorbitantly high.
It’s even if it’s four hours, four hours, what could you have done with four hours of just rest or four hours of intentional time working on revision or, it’s hard. It’s not easy, but it creates growth in your life and it creates carries over to growth in your team. The accountability that you can have for them.
So you got to hold yourself accountable. If you suck at holding yourself accountable and you have to give somebody else the power to hold you accountable, and that’s a spouse or a family member or a best friend and having a really honest discussion with them say, Hey, man, I struggle with this. I need your help to hold me accountable to that.
And there’s tools and resources out there for that too. Like sometimes. Screen stuff. You find yourself looking at stuff online that you shouldn’t be looking at. There’s technology out there that shares your information with your browser history to friends or something. So you got to seek those out in your life.
Cause those are chains that are holding you down and holding you back from getting to the next level and grow. And you just got to get rid of that stuff and hold yourself accountable to get to the next level. The fourth one is energy. So we talked about vision. We talked about. Talked about consistency and accountability.
I guess that’s four already. So number five is energy. You have to carry the energy in your clinic. Your clinic goes up with your energy going up and your clinic comes down with your energy going down. You got to put yourself in your team. Member’s shoes. What I want to work for you when you show up on Mondays, is it different than how you show up on Tuesday afternoons or Wednesday afternoons or Friday?
Or when there’s a lot of stressful stuff going on, do you show up differently? Is your energy different? Are you carrying this stuff from your life in your personal life, in your inability to be organized and holding yourself accountable, you carrying that into your practice and intern putting that energy on your team members.
Fortunately, a lot of chiropractors are and some of it’s you just get tired, you’re just in practice for a long time. And you’re tired, worn out. You’re doing it all on your own. People aren’t showing up, they quit yelling at ya. You’re taking a beating from all different places and usually it all comes at the same time.
The extra machines breaks in your dog died. You know what, life’s bigger than that. You just gotta, you just gotta stay unfortunately, or fortunately you were chosen to be in the position. You are, you were chosen to lead this off as you chose to grow your clinic and own your clinic and have the mission of serving people.
You got to rise to that occasion, there’s times when you can vent and, get through stuff with people. And there’s times when you just got to put it behind you and look at the bigger mission and vision, and you were, you’re put in this place to serve people and they’re coming in expecting the best.
Every patient that shows up is expecting the best from you today. And oftentimes I think if you had a family member that needed chiropractic care, who would you refer them? I would hope you would refer them to yourself. If there’s anybody that could adjust them, I would hope it’d be yourself.
It should be yourself because you should think you’re the best. If there was anybody that could find it and remove the nerve interference, it should be yourself, like on the best. If you don’t think you’re the best and you got to go do whatever, you gotta do that to think you’re the best because that’s going to come through as confidence.
Clarity when you adjust people, because guess what, every person that comes into your clinic, they think you’re the best. Otherwise they wouldn’t come see. So you’re seeing a hundred a week, 200 a week. Those 200 people think you are the best chiropractor in your entire town. There’s anybody that could help me remove subluxation it’s you.
And so you need to carry that confidence with you, and that’s going to help you grow because your intentionality in the adjusting room and your confidence in the. Allows you to be a better chiropractor and that allows you to stay focused and carry that energy through adjusting. So the last thing I want to mention is your energy in the adjusting room is different than your energy in your exam rooms and your consultations.
And so most chiropractor’s schedules are just like throwing something at a wall and you’ll adjust somebody and then you do a consultation and then you’ll have this long conversation about somebody that’s going through cancer. And then you go back and you’ll just a family or an. It’s very hard. You gotta be a really dynamic, special person.
And it’s an enormously energy draining emotionally draining to practice like that. Where every 10 minutes it’s such massive changes in energy. If you can change your schedule so that when you’re adjusting it’s high energy and high fives and hugs the whole time. And then you have consultation hours or report hours where you move all of those complicated.
The energy is lower, it’s more serious. You’re converting people, you’re going over care plans. You’re discussing, people that aren’t getting better. You’re doing all that heavy lifting stuff all in a condensed time, you can get your mind set and right to know, okay, I’m walking into these scenarios for the next hour.
And then I’m going back to hugs and high fives and just crushing, adjusting for the next two hours. Your efficiency will increase enormously and your effective. In those types of appointments increase enormously because your Headspace and your energy is different in those. You’re not trying to just mix it all together.
So I’d encourage you to look into that too, and just investigate that we created scare to help with that. Cause we do that in our office with scheduling and we divide those schedules up so that patients can schedule through their phones. And the only times they see available are the times that.
For us and how we want to run our schedule. And we protect our high energy adjusting hours and times. And we just utilize get technologists syncs to their EHR system, to seamlessly move appointments back and forth and keep it all perfectly organized. Which I mean, not too long ago, we saw 500 visits in a day.
The only way we could see 500 days if we have a really efficient schedule and we’re using technology like scared to help us really master our schedule. And so I’d encourage you to look into stuff like that too. So a quick recap leadership in a pediatric clinic or in a chiropractic office, number one, make sure you have a vision and you create clarity of that vision to your team.
Number two, make sure you’re spreading hope to every single person that comes in because that’s what they’re really looking for. Number three, you gotta be consistent. Start being consistent in your own life. Consistency will carry over into your team. And everybody that you’re around and number four is accountability.
Hold yourself accountable first and then start holding your team accountable and clearly communicate why and how that’s going to benefit them and your entire mission. And then number five, energy production, energy hugs, and high fives. When you’re adjusting, protect your energy. When you are going in that space and you enter the four walls of your.
Your energy has to be right. And it can’t it can’t waiver and go up and down. You’re carrying the whole load. So hopefully you got something out of that. I encourage you to just keep working on it. Nobody’s ever perfect. You go through stuff. If you screw up. That’s okay. Don’t bail on it.
Just start over tomorrow. Keep moving the ball forward. Cause there’s a lot of lives counting on you. So don’t miss Look to the Children’s Show. Third week of the month is Dr. Monika. Third Thursday of the month. She’s fantastic. So don’t miss her speaking about children and chiropractic care. I’ll be back the first Thursday in may hard to say may already, but yeah, we’ll see you back in may have a fantastic spring.
Hopefully it’s warm and sunny where you are and I’ll see you guys.
Today’s pediatric show Look to the children was brought to you by ChiroSecure. .