143: The Business of Chiropractic

Chiropractors, are you prepared for chiropractic business? Welcome everybody to the KC CHIROpulse podcast brought to you by Kats Consultants, helping doctors keep their pulse on success. I'm Dr. Michael Perusich, your host. I'm joined by my guest host, Marisa Mateja, the wonderful CA trainer, knowledge of everything, runs the company, etc. (laughing)

All right, Marisa. Wow. Yeah, well, it's true.

So seriously. we want to talk about what it takes to run a business. In the chiropractic world today, because, you know, I think the, the, the, the game rules, the rules of the game have completely changed, not just recently, but, you know, probably over the last 20 years or so, so we can't, we can't run and manage our practices the way we used to, or the way we always have, number one, and number two, in school, we just, we really get this, while it's great, we get this great overview of how to run a practice, but you don't really get to run a practice.

And there's a big difference. I mean, you don't, you don't get an MBA in business. That's what I was going to say. I mean, you're not, you're not in entrepreneur school. You're not in a true business school getting that MBA, you know, you're there to learn how to be the doctor. But the reality is, when you get out of school, you now have a multitude of hats that you're wearing, right?

So you're now the doctor. But you're also an entrepreneur, and I'm sure we could think of several other hats, you know, a marketer or, you know, whatever. You're, you're a lot of different things. You're a marketer, you're a communicator, you're a leader, you're a speaker, you're confidants, you're, I mean, yeah, we wear so, so many hats.

It's crazy. And if you're not just really on your toes and on your, on your game with your business skills, a lot of these things just start squirting away from you. You don't even realize it. And if you're not paying attention, it really begins to affect the profitability and the true, true value of your practice.

Sure. And so if we look at what you get in school, you're right. It's a great overview. But the things that are missing are those little details. It's what does a doctor owner really expect of you if you're going to go into an associateship? You know, like what are the true things that they're going to want from you?

You know, those are things that may not be shared with you. Not on purpose or anything, but those are just things that a teacher in school probably isn't going to be able to share if they're not in practice themselves. Right. And honestly, in, in a couple of quarters or a trimester or something in school.

All there's time for is just an overview. It's just business class. You have the exposure, you have, you have just enough exposure, you have just enough exposure to be dangerous, really, in some respects dangerous to yourself more than anything, and you brought up a great point, you know, we think, okay, I'm just going to go out and be an associate and, you know, work in somebody else's practice for a while, but what does that mean?

What does that mean to the, the owner of the practice? Are you just there to fill up space or do they really want you to be profitable? And we see a lot of associateships break down because there's not that understanding of how to make a true associateship work, for example, because both the owner of the clinic and the associate have different goals.

And if you don't somehow mesh those together. Then your paths will go in opposite directions. And that's just one little component of the business side of practice. And there are so many. Does your niche fall in suit with an associateship or, or should you just be an owner? Do you have a different vision for what you're really wanting to do with your, uh, degree with your, uh, you know, path down the chiropractic steps there, you know, like what, what do you want to do with it?

You know, so it comes down to what does it mean to be an owner then, you know, so moving away from the associateship, what does it mean to be an owner of a practice? You know, there's so many things you can break down there of what you need to know. Well, I mean, you need to know what kind of business entity you need to be.

So you need to have the right professionals behind you, an attorney, an accountant, you know, are you just slapping something together and opening your doors? Are you a legal business? And there's different types of clinics these days. And you can be a solo practitioner. You can be a group. You can be integrated.