191 Patient Acquisition vs Retention Management
Sep 15, 2024Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.
This week’s topic: Patient Acquisition vs Retention Management
The KC CHIROpulse Podcast is designed for Chiropractic professionals ready to elevate their practice to new heights, and is hosted by Kats Consultants coaches Dr Michael Perusich and Dr Troy Fox. Both docs are seasoned experts in Chiropractic care and business development. This podcast provides invaluable insights and actionable strategies to help you create a flourishing and sustainable Chiropractic business.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Why focusing too much on patient acquisition may be hurting your practice
- Why sustainable prosperity comes from working on your business and not just in your business
- Why new patients statistics may be fooling you
- How you can leverage practice growth by scaling your retention
- …and so much more…
In each episode of KC CHIROpulse, we delve into crucial aspects of building a successful Chiropractic practice, covering topics such as establishing a strong foundation, adopting a patient-centric approach, mastering marketing techniques, achieving financial fitness, fostering effective team building and leadership, integrating technology and innovation, and navigating common challenges in the field.
Whether you're a seasoned chiropractor or just starting your practice, the KC CHIROpulse Podcast offers a wealth of knowledge and practical advice to help you navigate the intricate world of Chiropractic business. Join us on this journey as we explore proven strategies, share success stories, and connect with industry experts to empower you in your pursuit of building a thriving Chiropractic practice.
Don't miss out on the latest insights and expert guidance. Subscribe now and unlock the secrets to taking your Chiropractic practice to the next level. Your success is our priority at Kats Chiropractic Business Advisors.
DISCLAIMER: The information presented in this broadcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to offer legal, investment, accounting, or medical advice. Seek the consultation of a professional for advice in those areas. And remember…your results using this information may be different than described.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Doctors, are you spending more time on patient acquisition than running your business? Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC Chiro Pulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants and Chiro Health USA. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich, and this is Dr. Troy Fox, and we are your host today. Troy, this is another one of those topics. We talk a lot about, to keep the doors open. Yes. You've got to have patients coming in. You've got to have new patients. You've got to, but my gosh, at some point you got to run the business.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Yeah, it's like the barn doors and we're getting to the business end of the cow right now. Time to get with it, right?
Dr. Michael Perusich:
That's Troy's Miss Western, Miss
Dr. Troy Fox:
there you go. A little Midwestern ism. And
Dr. Michael Perusich:
everybody, I never know exactly what's going to come out when he starts. We never know where it's going to go. My
Dr. Troy Fox:
analogy is to
Dr. Michael Perusich:
go family show. It's a family show. That's
Dr. Troy Fox:
right. That's right. So I'm fascinated by the business side because you and I have focused on that. And probably to an extreme level during our careers, but a lot of people, we, you'll ask them and the only thing they know is how many new patients they saw last month, how many visits they saw. It's What's your what's your margin right now?
Dr. Michael Perusich:
I don't know. What's funny when we go to things like when we go to seminars and conventions and those things, people are always coming up and talking to us about their practices, which is great. We love talking about, but when we ask them things like, what's your profitability look like when your margins look like?
Dr. Troy Fox:
Yeah,
Dr. Michael Perusich:
we get I see 40 new patients a month. Okay. That's that, that's excellent. Unless you're losing 45. I don't know what to say. We'll get I see 500 patient visits a month. Okay. That's probably a great number. Unless your expenses require you to be seeing 700 at some point. And no, sorry. Here's the other one. I hear a lot. I don't pay any attention to the business side. I let my spouse handle that part. And I just. I'm a chiropractor. I go in and see the patients. Okay. That's great. But you also, unless you're a 501 C three and a non nonprofit, you're in this to be profitable.
Dr. Troy Fox:
That just gave me anxiety just hearing you say that because we've talked to people all the time that do that. And I look at it this way. If I'm Walmart, Am I tracking what my costs are for product? What my costs are for location, what my costs are from every dime of it? Because I want to know what my margin is. They operate on a margin, right? They don't operate. They don't operate on volume. They operate on a margin. But as chiropractors over the years, we have focused on patient acquisition and operating not on a margin. But just off of what I call pie in the sky, substandard, here's the numbers that I'm doing in my practice. If I am 80 percent more profitable than you, but I only see half the new patients every month, then, how are we going to compare new patient numbers? Cause I can tell you right now that I average, and some of this is going to blow you guys's mind. What do you think I average in new patients? 60, 80, a hundred, 40, how about 15?
Dr. Michael Perusich:
There you go. 15.
Dr. Troy Fox:
My, my retain. I live in a small farming community, but your
Dr. Michael Perusich:
retention is huge.
Dr. Troy Fox:
My retention is huge. I don't have to get on the hamster wheel every month. Okay. I also know what my profitability is. And so I'm happy with that number.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Okay. So I want to point something out here. Your attention, your retention stood the roof. My retention was 96%. Yeah. Doctors I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to put something on you right now. So be ready. If you're driving, you might want to slow down a little bit. What does your retention numbers look like? What is your retention percentage? What is your retained percentage in your practice? I'm gonna guess because again, I talk to you guys all the time. Most doctors don't know. It's a wild guess and that's one of the first things we start to look at when we analyze practice is all right where's your retention? Great. You got great new patient numbers, but where's your retention?
Dr. Troy Fox:
They don't even know how to figure it because you're not, because you're not running a business. You're running a pseudo practice,
Dr. Michael Perusich:
right? You're just running it willy nilly. You're not paying attention to the statistical side, the number side, the business side of the practice. And that's hugely important. Now I know a lot of you out there probably thinking I don't have time to do that. I get it. I get it. We are busy, especially if you have a busy practice. There's a lot to do. I get it. We wear a lot of hats, but you've got to, if that's the case, you've got to have somebody on your team, spouse, office manager, somebody on your team that understands those kinds of things. Or you need a great business coach helping you really monitor those kinds of things. And It's great to go to all these seminars to learn how to acquire new patients or learn new techniques and new therapies and those kind of those are all great things. But you've got to have that mix of business knowledge in there too. And I know you've got something to say. But here's the thing about business knowledge. Business is not business. Acumen business management is not static. It changes and it changes about as fast as most of us change our socks. Sometimes, it's constantly evolving. Here, all of a sudden, for example, we're starting to see all the insurance companies go to pre off audits. Okay, that's a business strategy change right there. Huge. And if you're not paying attention, are you going to be ready to manage this kind of things?
Dr. Troy Fox:
Yeah, I was going to say that also not only are the business practices not static our focus on a daily basis changes. Literally like every day I'm talking about something different with my staff, but I can tell you that what my staff looks at is flow of the practice. They care about the patients as much as I do. And what I see in a lot of cases is we're so focused on one aspect of the business, and I'm going to go back to new patients because that seems to be one that a lot of people focus on. I need more. And the problem is you turn your practice into chaos. When you do you want to turn my practice into chaos. See more than what I'm seeing right now. Not because I couldn't, I could stay here and do more exams. I could squeeze more exams in my staff would kill me. Yeah. And you know why? Because it's chaos. We don't need that kind of chaos to create a great practice that generates great revenue,
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Okay. Can you hold that thought? Cause I'm getting the message that we got to get it. Take a word from our sponsor, but I want to come back and I want to talk about a couple of things. I want to talk about staff engagement and how that plays into the picture. Yep. You just mentioned something that relates back to capacity and your tipping point. And I want to come back and talk about that too.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Yep.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
All right, everybody. We're gonna take a quick, short break and we'll be right back.
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Dr. Michael Perusich:
All right, everybody. We are back. You're listening to the KC Chiro Pulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants and Chiro Health USA. Troy, you brought up a couple of great points here just a second ago. And this is one of those podcasts that just, it just goes, just blows my mind. But you started talking about staff and how staff is engaged in making sure that. Practice flows like it's supposed to,
Dr. Troy Fox:
right? They're part
Dr. Michael Perusich:
of the business. They're part of the business. And you've got a, you've got a capacity and inside of that capacity, where it runs smooth and where it spins into chaos. And so you're always writing that sweet spot because when you hit a point where, and let's use new patients, when you hit a point where your new patients are too high, You hit a tipping point and at that tipping point, chaos ensues sound like what kind of, Hey hit that tipping point and that chaos begins to come into play, then the practice starts spinning out of control. Now, all of a sudden you're not collecting as much. You're not getting. Patients scheduled for care. You're not doing a good report of findings. Your financial report of findings is thrown out the window. You're short cutting exams. You're short cutting treatment. Now your practice is in danger.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Yeah. Jacked up. That's a medical terminology, by the way. Jacked up, jacked
Dr. Michael Perusich:
up.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Medical side or patient side of your practice will create a jacked up business side of your practice. If you're patient side is in chaos and you don't have good strategies in place, you don't have good procedures in place. Your scheduling is not good. You will throw your business side into chaos. And that's when things get dangerous because you can have a max, a mass exodus of patients. On the business side that hurt your bottom line. And now all of a sudden your margin has either evaporated completely or has gone into the negative. And that's where we see people that call us at times. Unfortunately, more we've seen more than we would like over the years, but they don't have a margin, but the margins in the negative it's eroded to the point of where they're losing money every month or they're darn close to it and they're barely floating and they're not even paying themselves. It's oh my gosh, that happens because the business. And the patient side are not congruent with each other. They have to be congruent for a business to function. We're a little bit interesting in that manner in that you have to flow on both sides.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah, for sure. And so you just brought something up right there. Doctors, if you're not paying yourself, then this is a medical term. You have a medical condition called jacked up itis, and this is serious and we need to come in and do a jacked up ectomy. I love that. We need ICD 10 codes for that. Jacked up itis and a jacked up ectomy. But seriously if you're feeling these pains, these itis pains, if you're feeling jacked up, then it's time to to, Take a step back and dig deep and figure out where it's at. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you how you figure it out. It's in your stats and analyzing your stats and trending your statistics. Oh my gosh. What does it show you? It shows you everything that's wrong with your practice and everything that needs to be fixed. Do you have jacked up itis over there? Oh the Fox cone is silent. He's still saying, Oh, there he is.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Yeah, we'll just have to go without this. Yeah. My microphone just died. So there we go.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Oh, that's all right. All right. So Troy's back in business over here. But yeah, if you feeling like your practice is out of control, it probably is number one. And number two, if you're starting to feel the pains of I'm not paying myself, I'm not paying the bills, we're losing patients. We're not getting enough new patients to refill what we're losing. Those kind of things. It's time to get some help. It's just like your patients when they're feeling pain and dysfunction and they can't do those things they need to do or love to do. What do they need to do? They need to come see you, right? Because you're the jacked up itis doctor and you're going to do a jacked up ectomy and you're going to get them out of the problem. Same thing. If your practice is jacked up and you got jacked up itis, it's time to fix it. And but if you just keep going and you're not paying attention and you're running off to all these seminars to learn how to bring in more new patients and learn more new techniques and bring more shiny object therapies into your practice, you're just making the problem worse.
Dr. Troy Fox:
It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result and you don't get it. And then you secretly hope when you're at state convention, you ask somebody how their practice is doing, how many new patients do you see? And you're hoping to God, they say eight. I saw 15 last month. We're in such a, it's such a, I don't know this rah, rah pecking order kind of thing. And I've been there. Trust me, I've done it. People come up to me and when I was killing it, people come up and ask me and they'd just be blown away by my numbers, how many visits I was seeing, how many new patients, what my PVA was, all that I don't care about that. You know what? I care about my profit margin. And so when I'm working with staff, here's another important caveat with staff. You know how we do bonuses with staff at times. Some of you do, some of you don't like, you may give bonuses to staff for different numbers. Maybe I give one for new patients. Maybe I give one for total office visits. Why am I giving those? The staff needs to understand this. Isn't a gimmicky concept. What it is to keep everyone engaged. I want everybody to have We're running a business
Dr. Michael Perusich:
and
Dr. Troy Fox:
I want to push in the right direction. It doesn't mean that I'm trying to gimmick my way to getting another new patient, but I am going to tell you that if you use proper phone procedure and you get patients scheduled and those patients follow through and come into my clinic and they understand before they come into the clinic, that we're, that we are, a cash practice or a wellness practice or whatever terminology you want to use. I want the patient to understand when they walk through the door and when they do, they understand, they get it and they stay, they pay and they refer in the eventuality because they love my practice. The staff has a part in that. So that's why we do it. Not because I'm trying to create a gimmick. I'm trying to run a business. And as a result, I'm doing profit sharing. I do it by the month.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Okay. I'm going to say something here. I'm going to give our consulting business Kats consultants a shameless plug here.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Sure.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
It's our show. So we can do that.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Absolutely.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
One of the ways that you get staff engaged and make them become your success partner. is by training them. And I don't mean teaching them. Training them, developing them. And so at Kats Consultants, this is one of the things that we help you with is through our, we're one of the few companies that actually has staff coaching. We're one of the few companies that's created seminars around virtual seminars around team development. And every time we do a virtual seminar, what do we get? We get all these accolades from all of our clients. Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing. My staff loved it. We're engaged. We're creating action steps right now and the practice is already growing. So yeah, these things are important docs. When it's only you driving the practice, when it's only you bringing in new patients and bringing in new therapies, the practice may get in trouble pretty darn quick. But when you're all driving it from the business side. From the real business side, the patient care, the new patients, all those things, they happen, they happening organically on their own. You don't have to fight for those.
Dr. Troy Fox:
So here's what happens. It's not always just you pushing every once in a while. And I'm going to use an acronym here or a pun, no pun intended. Yeah. They're going to give you a swift kick in the business. And your staff does sometimes because sometimes your staff is so engaged in the process at that point, they're a partner and they're going to help push you when you're having a slow day, you're having a day where you're not engaged as you should be. You're having a day where you're not as functional as you should be in your practice. And you're a little bit down about new patient numbers or how many visits we've seen, or, whatever your number may be, your staff jumps on you and Pretty much gives you a swift kick in the rear and says, get going pretty much. Let's move as a team. Let's move. And I love that as a team because my staff I'll tell you what I'm, every once in a while, I'm a little bit grouchy. I got hangry the other day. You guys all know what that is. I got hang and then I complained about a patient about, patient flow. And I remember one of my staff looked at me and said, you know what? If you'd spend less time complaining and more time in the adjustment room, we'd get done quicker. That is fast. And that's engagement. And they knew what I needed to hear. And they know here's what's great. They have poetic license to say that to me, and I don't get mad at them. Speak up
Dr. Michael Perusich:
permission. We're a team running
Dr. Troy Fox:
as a team.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah, absolutely. We need to hear a quick word from our sponsors again. And then I'm gonna come back and wrap this up. But we're talking about really working on the business side of your practice more than some of the other fluff sides. While those can be important, the business side is the most important. So we'll be right back.
Kats Consultants:
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Dr. Michael Perusich:
All right, doctors, we are back. You're listening to the KC ChiroPulse podcast. We have covered a lot of ground today. Troy, everything from why being over focused on new patients could actually hurt you, why you need to be working on your business and why you need to be creating and developing team engagement and building your staff into those success partners with you. So important.
Dr. Troy Fox:
You'll see that you'll get other engagement as well. You start bringing your staff in on the practice side, they're going to start seeing how business runs and their minds are going to be wired differently every day when they walk through the door, it won't be shortly thereafter that you're going to walk through the door. One of your staff members is going to go, why do we buy toilet paper from XYZ grocery store? We can get a much better deal. If I go to Costco and get it, I'm going to be down there tomorrow.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah, that's
Dr. Troy Fox:
even from a supply and supply standpoint, they're going to start looking at ways to increase profitability. And as a result, you're going to have a better practice because you're going to create business minds. And it's a wonderful thing. I've seen it over the years and I'm blown away sometimes, but sometimes people that I don't expect, and you like turn a key and open Pandora's box. And it's like, all of a sudden this person becomes this business genius overnight because you've given them the ability to speak their mind. And it's really fun. It's really fun to develop that business side with them.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
It is fun. And it's really fun to watch your staff go from being a task doer to being a truly engaged partner in your business. It's amazing. So work on your business, not just in your business and. That business side of your practice is incredibly important. All right, everybody, you've been listening to the KC ChiroPulse podcast. We appreciate all of you out there. You've helped us grow our podcast like crazy and it's because of you listeners. So be sure to like and share and subscribe to the podcast and keep listening every week. We're always here and go check us out at Kats, consultants. com and see what we're doing to help doctors build really profitable and viable practices. Troy, thanks for being here today. All right, everybody make it an amazing day and we'll see you next time. See y'all