Now, here’s today’s host, Dr. Monika Buerger.
Hello everybody, and welcome to ChiroSecure’s Look to the Children show. I am your host, Dr. Monika Buerger, and I am beyond excited, excuse me, today, to welcome a very good friend of mine. First of all, I want to tell you a bit about this amazing person. Not only is she beautiful and an amazing chiropractor, she’s absolutely brilliant, one of the business minds that I’ve ever met. I can’t wait to pick her brain. She graduated from Life University in 2001. She is the founder of Dominate Chiropractic Marketing, the dominators, and we are going to dig into that. She’s got a heart like no other. We met in person over, excuse me, between Christmas and New Years while we are both guests for a Spinal Missions trip, an amazing organization by the way, one of the most profound experiences of my chiropractic career. I got to listen to her lecture there, and she brought the house down. There’s no other like the amazing million-dollar practice builder, by the way, in a small town in Asheville, North Carolina, Dr. Nicole D Lindsey. Hey, baby.
Hey. Well, thank you for that awesome intro. I appreciate you. You’re one of a kind yourself.
Yeah, you deserve it. I mean, really, your heart and your soul and your brain is just profound. It was an amazing experience hanging out with you for that time. Speaking of then, we were free birds, right? We were free birds.
Totally, we were. On many levels.
On many levels. But we were talking before we went live about what’s going on in today’s paradigm. I know a lot of docs out there are a bit stressed and a bit concerned and feel a bit trapped or caged. At the same time, you brought up this great parallel about the most profound documentary of its lifetime. Right?
Right, right.
You have to talk to the audience about your thoughts there.
Yeah. I’ll start it with this. Hey, all you cool cats and kittens, right? If you’re watching this right now, you know what we’re about to say is the Tiger King. Everybody that sees it, you can’t stop watching it because it’s just crazy, right? But at the same time, I think it’s very ironic that that is the most popular thing right now, because it kind of symbolizes what we are and what we feel like right now. A tiger trapped in a cage, you know? It’s really interesting how we are drawn to this. The whole world is drawn to this concept of the tigers being trapped in cages, just like we are.
I thought that was such a profound parallel that you put together, because I hadn’t thought of it in that context. You and I went back and forth a little bit on Messenger about what we wanted to bring to the docs right now because this is a very unique time for all of us. We threw out there, a lot of the docs that I mentor, I’ve been saying pivot, don’t panic. Let’s look at this as an opportunity. You’ve done some really awesome things in your office just in this last couple of weeks getting ready for when this thing lifts. I believe, and I think you’re right there too, that we are going to have a huge opportunity explode once this crisis lifts. Can you just tell some of the docs what you’ve done in your office this last week or two to get ready for that?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel that the momentum is building and that this is a great opportunity for chiropractors to shine, to come out shining saying, “Look, this is what we’ve been saying. Take care of your bodies, take care of your immune system so that you are not in that pool of people that is more susceptible to getting sick.” Let’s utilize this time to build upon that, be ready for that so we can pull these patients in and let them know we can help.
What we’ve been doing is we’ve sent out letters to medical doctors in the community, which I do anyway, but we’ve done it with a different purpose and intent. We’ve done it with a feeling of, look, we want to take that burden off of you. You are seeing patients and you’re trying to triage, do they have COVID or just is it bronchitis, that’s really more important to the MDs right now. If you have patients that are musculoskeletal, send them to us, we will be happy to assess them and help them and take that burden from your plate. That’s one thing, is sending and faxing letters and just building that relationship now. You can continue to build on that, and we’ll talk about that over the next few minutes, once this is over.
Then the other thing that we’re doing is we are preparing our office and our business for a huge reactivation campaign. I have been wanting to do this forever. I’ve been wanting to go through all of my entire database and make sure that we have all of their emails in our CRM, which I thought my CAs were doing. If you think that that was being done, I challenge you to check that, because we entered 200 emails in just yesterday that we’re not in. They’re active patients that were not put in my CRM. So we’re tackling that, getting our list ready to do a huge reactivation campaign via text, when it feels right.
Yeah. This is a great time that we should be using our extra time to look at those things and almost like you’re starting from scratch in a way, not from scratch, but like when we start our practices, and now this is a good reboot time to reactivate and get our message, and maybe even a clearer message out, and that we’ll talk about in a minute here. But you even said that you and your associate were in there tearing down your front desk.
Yes, yeah. We kept hitting this wall with the number of patients that we could serve in our office and it came down to we needed another CA, a tech CA. We needed hands on. My office is, we’re maxed as far as space goes and what we’re serving, and I could not hire somebody until I made space for them. I needed a workstation for them and it wasn’t efficient the way that my office was set up. So my associate and I, the other day, it was a lunch break and we actually took apart our front desk, it’s in modules. There was dust everywhere, there were cords, and we tore it up. We rearranged the whole front desk area and we created another workstation. So we’re ready, we’re ready. Letting the universe know we’re ready.
That’s a big thing. I think when we move space, when we create space, the universe will provide. As chiropractors, that is part of our thinking, right? That’s the way we live, right? We look at chemical, physical, emotional, head space, all those things to be as successful as possible. I think the message out there to all of you is create the space in your head right now and if you have to create the physical space in your offices, do it now, because get ready for the implosion, right?
Right, exactly. Yeah, pivot, pivot. Pivot and get it done.
Absolutely. Your expertise is hooking up, I shouldn’t say that, is connecting … Watch my lingo here.
That’s right.
Connecting with MDs around your community. You have a company, Dominate Chiropractic Marketing, and it’s really teaching and helping docs connect with MDs in their community. Question for you, what do you find is the one thing that they want to know about us?
There’s quite a few things, but if I had to pull out one of the most important things that would be they want to know that you are professional, because let’s face it, the medical profession, they have all these different wild ideas from what they’ve heard, what they’ve seen, what they don’t know, what they think they know about chiropractic and chiropractors. When you meet them behind closed doors and you start building a relationship, they will say to you, “It’s so nice to meet you. I had no idea.” They almost have this like they feel guilty saying it, letting you know that they thought the worst about us and about our profession. It’s simple. They just want to know that you are a professional. They want to know what your office looks like. They want to know how you process patients. I’m saying, the simple things.
When I go into their offices and do a presentation for them, I actually include slides, pictures of my office, and I walk them through, I take them through how I process a patient. This is my front desk, the patient will fill out paperwork. The patient will be brought back into an exam room, we will do a full exam. The exam includes this. We will check their range of motion, we will take x-rays on the patient if necessary. They want to know that you are a professional and that you’re going to properly assess and diagnose this patient. That’s probably the most important thing that they want to know about you.
Another thing is they want to know exactly what we do as chiropractors. Number one, they want to know that you’re not woowoo and wacky, that you’re a professional. Number two, they don’t understand chiropractic.
Right.
I’m not talking about … I mean, what you do, Monika, you’re light years ahead of a lot of us in the way that your brain works. I so appreciate that I learned so much from you and being around you and the program you’ve put together for us chiropractors. We think as chiropractors that in order to build a relationship with a medical doctor, that we need to have DAC bars in neurology and have all this extra special stuff in order for an MD to be interested in having a relationship with you, and that is simply not true. The fact that you are a chiropractor, period, is enough.
That medical doctor wants to know what you do, so we break it down to them. We explain to them how we look for subluxations, and that’s going to be unique to your specific technique. If you give your clients in your program [inaudible 00:12:27] to utilize, those are the things they want to know. If for example, say it’s a migraine or headache patient, they want to know what you’re going to look for in that patient. Are you going to look for trigger points? Suboccipital muscles? Are you going to look for decreased neck range of motion? Are you going to look at the cervical curve and see if they have forward head posture? These are the things that they want to know.
Thanks for bringing that, because we take that to a family-based or pediatric paradigm, that right there is huge ammo because what are kids doing all day long?
Looking forward.
Especially now, right? At home.
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yes.
Would you say, if we want to take this approach with a family pediatricians or a family practitioner, even with the pediatric paradigm, using posture as one of the things we look at?
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I did a presentation for neurologists. Two of them were young and they had younger children, and the presentation I did was specifically on the effectiveness of spinal manipulation in the treatment of headaches and migraines, and tension-type headaches. The way that I explained to them, because I always like to give medical doctors an objective tool, something they can utilize in their office to assess a patient to see if they’re a good candidate for chiropractic referral, and one of the things that I taught them was forward head posture. I went through with them how to do this and had them do it on each other. One of the neurologists, young guy, his mouth dropped and he’s like, “All I can think of are my kids playing video games.” I said, “Yes, exactly. This is what we’re seeing, is more and more young children presenting with headaches because of their posture.” So yeah, yeah, this is what they want to know.
Absolutely. Just a spin up on that, we know that … My brain’s a little weird and I get into the neurology stuff, but we even know that we look at things like asthma, dyslexia, ADHD, we have studies on that from the neuroscience realm on those postural changes, those postural imbalances are associated with those kinds of neurological issues. Asthma, for God’s sake.
This is a great dovetail into … Oh, now I’m going to let you, you’re the expert on working with MDs. In the situation like that, would you maybe provide just some journal research on some of those other offshoots, aside from headaches and so forth, but just say, “There’s some interesting articles,” or how would you maybe bring that into the picture too, like asthma or something?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I get that a lot. You have to be careful because your audience does not understand this language and they think chiropractic, musculoskeletal, chiropractic, musculoskeletal. Okay, so that’s the language that we base the relationship on initially. It doesn’t mean it stays there, but you want to meet them where they’re at. You don’t want to try and change their paradigm on the first date, okay?
But your question to me in text was how do you foster a relationship with an MD? One of the ways you can foster a relationship with an MD is once you date a little bit, right, you have this initial meeting, you’re dating, and then they start sending you patients. They’re happy, you’re happy. It’s going well. “Now I would like to talk to you about this next topic, the effectiveness of spinal manipulation in treatment of asthma for children. Would you be interested?” Now they’re a little bit more interested because they’re seeing results. They like what they’re seeing. They may even have a few patients that were asthmatics that they sent you for something else and they’re hearing that their asthma is improving.
This is how it’s done best. However, when you initially set up a meeting with an MD, whether it’s through a lunch and learn or a 10-minute meet and greet, it’s important to pick a topic. If your topic is asthma improving with chiropractic, then that’s what it is. If they allow you to come in talking about that right off the bat, then do it. Okay? But be careful throwing too many things at them. You and I know that chiropractic care can fix just about anything, right, but that’s not their language, so we have to be careful in that area.
Basically, primo bullet point, meet them where they’re at and try not to go in with the we cure, fix, everything, but give them some meat and potatoes to grab onto first.
Yeah. You may have those slides in your presentation there, and if you’re going through it and you’re getting a really good vibe, there’s a lot of gray in this kind of marketing, it’s not black and white, it’s not say this only, that MD may be tracking and asking you some really good questions. This happened with an OBGYN with me. Then if that happens, you take it there. Take it there, you know? But you may not be able to do that with every single one initially, initially.
How did you first get in their door? What’s-
Yes. There’s a couple of different ways. I have found the best way to do this is by setting up a … Now, of course we can’t do this right now because of our situation, but setting up a lunch and learn and going into the MD’s office, in their office, right, where they’re comfortable and bringing their office lunch. There’s all of their staff, I invite all their staff because I want all ears. You can get just as many referrals from their administrative staff than you can them. Pick a topic, stick to it, and go educate the MD. Because when you do this, you are positioning yourself as the authority. That’s what they want to know too, right? That you are the authority in your subject. I have found that that is the strongest way to build a relationship with a medical doctor. It’s not the only way.
Another way is setting up a 10-minute meeting with the MD. If the sound of or the thought of presenting to neurologists or medical doctors freaks you out, I get it, it still freaks me out every time, but I do it, then a 10-minute meeting might be better suited for you. You’re calling the MD, you are setting this up with the medical doctor, and you go in and you meet them before their shift, after their shift, for 10 minutes and use a smaller version of the lunch and learn, but hitting on some really important points in that 10-minute meeting.
When I got to hear you speak in Jamaica, I was just like, “Wow.” If you haven’t got to hear her speak, A, she needs to be out there speaking on more platforms, this is my opinion, but I mean, it was very enlightening. Some of the stats you said in creating that referral network and the longterm success rate of your practice, it was really eye opening. So kudos to you, because that’s not easy to do.
If I understand you correct from that little last pearl, it really takes us to be confident too in what we do and knowing what we do works, right?
Yes, exactly. That’s why doing programs like yours and really owning it is really important. Again, you don’t need all this extra certification, but if where you are you’re not comfortable with your technique, with who you are as a chiropractor, you need to fix that first, right? Confidence, that will help you with this so much. Absolutely, absolutely.
I do want to say something about what you said about from a financial standpoint, what this kind of marketing does. It’s something that I hadn’t thought about until you just said this now, but back in 2008, when the economy crisis happened, this was pivotal for me because it didn’t cost me a lot of money. Here we are, everybody’s practice is down, some 15%, some 60%, some down 100%, right? I’m hearing this all over the place. This type of marketing is going to really help pull you out of that hole because it doesn’t cost that much money, it’s just a lot of your time.
I think, I don’t know, sometimes when you put your own time and blood, sweat and tears into it, I think sometimes the pay off can be a little bit more profound, you know? I don’t know. I just thought I-
Definitely.
Yeah. When we were in Jamaica, I mean, some of those numbers you showed on the potential referral aspect, and I don’t know if you want to throw just a few of those out there, it is quite profound there. Where was I going with this? We were talking about the pivot, pivoting your practice right now. What would step number one be for people you think right now, during this lull?
Yes. If your office is open right now, even on a limited basis, go ahead and get that letter out. I’ll be happy to give it to you, just message me on here, on Facebook, Nicole D Lindsey, and I’ll give it to you in Word so you can edit it for you. But fax those letters now to every single MD in your area to let them know that you can help them. That’s one of the first things you can do.
Number two, you can start building your MD log of medical doctors, healthcare providers, that you want to build relationships with. Start building that list. Go on yellowpage.com, look on Google. Search all the healthcare providers in your area and get them on that list, their phone numbers, fax numbers, emails, so that you can start making these calls as soon as this stuff is lifted.
Yeah, and do you send out progress reports?
Yes. You were asking what do the MDs want to know about you, that’s the other thing that’s important. They really want to know how their patient is doing. They want to know, first of all, did the patient show up? They know they made the referral, did the patient show up or did they not, and what happened? They want to know what you found, your diagnosis. Then, yes, I send a progress report. I also send a discharge report, discharge from acute care for the initial thing that the MD referred the patient into, it doesn’t mean I’m releasing the patient forever. They learn this, you have to explain this to them in your verbiage in the note. But yes, they want to communicate with you. They want to know. That’s their language.
We’re talking about MDs, but we could really take this premise into the physical therapy world, the OT world, right? It’s crossover [crosstalk 00:25:00].
It’s all interchangeable. Yes, yes.
Before we depart, I mean, we could sit here for days like we did on the beach in Jamaica.
I would love that right about now.
We were talking in Jamaica about … I was on the big Tylenol kick and I think I sent you the little thing. By the way, viewers, next month I am going to do a special presentation on the effects of Tylenol or acetaminophen, because this is an incredibly important, and it’s even more important now with this whole COVID thing going on. But like I told you, I said, “You know what? 65% of pregnant women in this country and 50% in Europe report taking Tylenol for low back pain,” and there’s a lot of risks to the fetus on this, linked with ADD, asthma, allergies and we’ll get to that next month, but that is something we also can start from a pain base, right?
Yes, absolutely.
Low back pain in pregnancy, and build on that, right?
Absolutely, absolutely. I think like we were talking about earlier, before we got live, is now this is such a great opportunity for chiropractors to shine. I think more and more people, more and more medical doctors, healthcare professionals, are going to be looking for ways to help their patients get healthier. When you have an OBGYN that has a pregnant patient and they’re seeing studies come across their desks about acetaminophen and they can’t ignore that. So yes, I think that that is definitely going to be a hot topic for OBGYN marketing. OBGYNs are great MDs to market to and in my program, my online course, we have a presentation that I actually use to build relationships with OBGYNs.
Awesome, awesome. Well, I know you’re super busy. I thank you so much for being on here. I miss you. I wish we could hang out together, not in quarantine-
And happy belated birthday.
Oh, you’re so sweet. But again, the brilliance this woman has to share and her mind, her brain, I just love her brain from a chiropractic and a business standpoint. I mean, I’m telling you guys, if you don’t know her, get to know her. Please get to know her because she will turn your life around. I want to thank ChiroSecure for always being there for us and giving us this platform. I think I failed to say you are actually one of the hosts of ChiroSecure’s Empowering Women show.
I am.
So thank you for putting that on. Again, ChiroSecure, Thank you for having our backs, for giving us this platform, for always sticking up for the chiropractic profession, especially right now when so many people are struggling. You’ve been out there to be an anchor for all of us, so we thank you, both Nicole and I. I’m speaking for you, but I know you feel the same way.
Yes, yes. Absolutely.
Thank you to the ChiroSecure family for being our anchors. Be sure you join Eric Kowalke the first Thursday for Look to the Children show. Then again, I’ll be on the third Thursday of May, and you guys want to hear this presentation that I’m going to do about the effects of acetaminophen. It goes beyond glutathione and it goes beyond pain. It is going to be involved in neural development. With that said, I bid you adieu. You guys all hang in there, and pivot, don’t panic and together we will rise.
Today’s pediatric show, Look to the Children, was brought to you by ChiroSecure.
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