222 Is your practice the bomb or bombed out?
Jul 21, 2025Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.
This week’s topic: Is your practice the bomb or bombed out?
The KC CHIROpulse Podcast is designed for Chiropractic professionals ready to elevate their practice to new heights. This week, the show is hosted by Kats Consultants’ coaches Dr Michael Perusich and Dr Troy Fox, seasoned experts in Chiropractic business management. This podcast provides invaluable insights and actionable strategies to help you create a flourishing and sustainable Chiropractic business.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The three branches of success and how you may be missing the top one
- The missing link to practice success
- How will you find your way out of the rainforest
- Why you may be making the conscious effort to fail
- What you need to do to reach maximum success
- …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 personalized 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.
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DISCLAIMER: The information presented in this broadcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended to offer legal, investment, accounting, or medical advice, and represents the opinions of the speakers. 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:
Hey doctors, are you the bomb or are you just bombing out? Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC ChiroPulse podcast, brought to you by Kats Consultants and Chiro Health, USAI am your host Dr. Michael Perusich. I almost forgot my name. Yeah. And I'm joining my, my famous infamous golfing professional co-host, Dr. Troy Fox.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Wow. What an introduction right there.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
I
Dr. Troy Fox:
know, right?
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah. I've been working on that one. Yeah. Appreciate that. I've been working on that one. So you and I were talking before we jumped on here about the fact that you can either be the bomb in practice or you can bomb out, and I think we both agree it's really a choice. Oh yeah. It comes down to how willing are you to become the bomb and do what it takes.
Dr. Troy Fox:
I think you're a hundred percent right about that. And we're gonna talk about some patterns that we see with docs in practice with associate doctors in practice. And it's across the board. It honestly. This hasn't changed in 30 years. No. Maybe how we reach patients has changed. Maybe how we educate patients has changed. Marketing concepts have changed. This part has not changed. No, and I think there's, I think there's a root problem, but we'll save that for a little bit later.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
I think this is the static in practice. It is. I think this is the one thing, and there may be more, but. If we think about it, but I think this is the one thing that doesn't change, no matter whether you own the practice, you're a partner in the practice, you're a solo practice, you're an associate in the practice, a new grad, you've been out 30 years. I don't think it matters. I think this one thing to whether or not you're gonna be the bomb or the bomb out is completely static and doesn't change.
Dr. Troy Fox:
There are three branches to the tree. And those three branches are, and we'll start with the really great one. First. One of the branches is Highly Successful Dock. I'm not gonna talk about how we got there, but highly successful Dock Branch number two, you're just hanging onto the branch. You're barely hanging on maybe with two fingers in branch. Number three, you fell out of the tree. And. There, there are patterns that we see with every one of those behaviors. So what do you wanna start with? You wanna start at the top and work down, or you wanna start at the bottom and work up?
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Gosh, that's a great question. Let's. Let's save the fun stuff for last. Let's start at the bottom. Okay. Why? Why do we grab that lower branch and it snaps and we just fall flat on our face? We call that the bomb out in practice. And Troy, I think you'll agree that, I think the number one reason is because we're just not willing to do what it takes.
Dr. Troy Fox:
It was harder than we thought it was gonna be when we came outta school. Yeah we were in student clinic and we were seeing patients and maybe we got some patients handed down from another graduate that was leaving. And then we developed some of our own patients, our friends and family came in and we're like, this is great. And then I get into practice and I'm just gonna hang my shingle and I'm gonna wait for people to come through the door. And when it doesn't. Yeah, when it doesn't happen, all of a sudden we start to panic. You've never been a business person. You got into this to be a doctor. And we get that. We totally get that. Yeah. You and I approached it a little bit differently. We sought out and this is not an advertisement for coaching, trust me. It's not. But you and I both did seek out coaching before we ever started because we realized that we needed the business aspect as well as the healthcare aspect we were gonna run.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah. We both knew we could not do it alone. And even though you and I had some life experience before chiropractic we still knew. We knew we couldn't do it on our own because there's too many hats to wear. And that's part of it. Number one, if you've never owned, run, worked in, et cetera, a, a healthcare clinic, then why reinvent the wheel? Why make all the mistakes when somebody else can teach you, Hey, that's a mistake. Don't do that. Do it this way. You know what?
Dr. Troy Fox:
I just figured out why I did that too. Actually, I probably knew this all along, but you know what I did? I analyzed successful doctors. Yeah, I lucky to know several really successful docs. And you know what? I noticed they all had the same traits, and we'll talk about those here in a little while, but what I realized from that was I were to not hang on and fall off that branch. In other words, I didn't wanna. Be a failure in practice. Gosh, no. I didn't want my business to fail and then me have to try to figure out what to do. That seems like a real nightmare and it is for some people. So I immediately went, okay, what are the greats doing? What, and some of it was marketing gimmicks and stuff way back when. Some of it was how they approached their practices and their mental attitude. And we had to sift through that and figure out what worked for us. And that got you to the next step. That got you to at least hanging it onto the branch at that point, because early in practice you were not gonna be blowing the doors off on day one. I saw one patient on day one.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
I love it. So you just made me think of something. Not only did I study successful doctors, I studied the ones that failed too. Why did they fail? Why didn't they do great? Why did they get out of practice so early? Why did they spend all that time to go to school and then. Chose not to be successful. And I wanna dive into that just a little bit before we go to the middle branch, but we gotta take a quick little break so we hear a quick word from our sponsor. We'll be right back.
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Dr. Michael Perusich:
Hi everybody. Welcome back to the KC ChiroPulse podcast. We're talking about a. Making the choice to be the bomb or be the bomb out in practice. And Trey, we started with the lower branch. I love your analogy there'cause it's so descriptive. We're talking about the lower branch where you decide to be the bomb out and there's a whole bunch of reasons why we bomb out of practice. But as we stated before the break, I think the number one thing is you're just not willing to put the work in. And, chiropractic school was hard. It was hard to become a doctor. Yeah, but I'm gonna tell you right now, I think it's 10 times harder to become a successful doctor once you get outta school and into practice.
Dr. Troy Fox:
And I think it's part of the struggle is. Is that you get outta school. And I think some of it's, we're smart individuals. Every one of you that made it through chiropractic school is a smart individual. There's no doubt. There's no way you got through boards and you weren't smart, right? Sometimes we're too smart for our own good. I'll give an analogy. A friend of mine that's not the best golfer on the planet. And we went for a lesson one time and he was asking about, where should my hands be? Where should my elbows be? And he's moving'em around doing all this stuff. And the guy that looked at him was number two. Right behind Hank Haney, and if any of you guys know anything about golf, Hank Haney is a legend. He coached tiger. This guy is his number two. Right behind him. This guy says to my really smart friend, this guy had a physics degree. Super intelligent. He said, have you ever thought sometimes maybe you're just too smart for the game of golf? He overanalyzed everything but really didn't accept the coaching. He didn't accept what needed to happen. And I think in some cases what happens, we get paralyzed in practice trying to figure out what we should do by analyzing, and then we never take action while we're sitting there watching our practice die on the vibe.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah, it's. And I, I think side B to that is we just don't accept the idea of coaching enough to wanna open our minds to say, Hey, maybe somebody else has a better idea.'cause they've done this before, right? And so we overanalyze what we think will work and won't work.
Dr. Troy Fox:
Absolutely. Which sometimes will get you to that next branch where you're just hanging on. You may look at what somebody else did at that point and go I'm not gonna accept too much coaching, but I'm gonna look around and I'm smart enough to see what everybody else in my area is doing. I'm just gonna mimic it. And that, that a lot of times will get you to the branch where you're just hanging on and you're making enough to survive and practice, but you're really not. Going anywhere fast. I call
Dr. Michael Perusich:
that, I call that friendship coaching. You're calling around and talking to all your friends in practice, what are you doing? What's working? And you try to mimic that and one thing we don't realize I think sometimes is chiropractic, especially, we're such a personal relationship business that a lot of our success is born out of connecting our personality to like personality people. Yeah. The only way to do that. The only way to do that, I guess you could sit in your office and just hope the right people walk in the door. But I can tell you that doesn't work. Remind me to tell you about the time that lady called me a used car salesman. But the only way to do that in my opinion, is you have to get out of your office. This is the go, the extra mile stuff. You have to get out, you have to inject yourself in the community. You have to go do health talks. I know half of you just passed out, but you have to go out, you have to do health talks, you gotta do blood pressure screenings. You gotta I taught at the local college for a while. Not because I had a yearning to teach, and certainly not because it was paying me much money, but it put me front in front of thousands of people every day who got to know me and got to know my personality. And I know you did some of the same stuff. Troy. I joined the country club so I could meet the guys out playing golf. I. I, I didn't do it because it had great food. It was great food, but I did it so I could develop relationships. I got involved with the Boys and Girls Club and started going to their auctions and a couple years later I was president for, I don't know, five or six years. And but just getting out there and getting to know people, I volunteered at 5K runs. I did whatever I could outside of clinic time. To build a practice and I don't care if you own work in it, associate in it, it doesn't matter. It works the same. You have to get out. Yeah, we hear that,
Dr. Troy Fox:
Argument or that objection a lot. Not all. Sometimes we hear it from docs that own their own clinic. I shouldn't have to get outside my own clinic. Like they should come to me kind of thing. It just doesn't work that way. Sorry. They've gotta know you in the community. And once people know you, they trust you. And once you develop the trust, then they'll come in. Now, every once in a while, you're gonna get lucky and somebody's gonna walk through the door that just moved in from out of town, from a great doc. They meet you, you mesh immediately and they become almost your best friend in practice because they've already found out what chiropractic can do for them. But how about that patient that's never seen a chiropractor? We have'em. There's a ton of'em out there. They don't know you. They're timid about calling, but if you're out there in the community, and I like what you were talking about, it doesn't have to be all health talks and blood pressure screenings. No. Tho those are the struggle bus part of it. Those are the grind, the fun stuff is joining your local country club and playing golf with people pickle ball's big right now. Pickleball. Yeah. Get involved in pickleball. Get involved in Frisbee golf or disc golf. Yeah, I can't, oh, if I call it Frisbee golf, I'll probably be in trouble with the disc golfers. But I'm not a disc golfer, so I called it Frisbee golf disc golf. Get involved in your church. Those are things that you can do. And the truth of the matter is people come to you because they know you, not because you're a subject matter expert. That's not where it's at. So it's about being visible in public. That's where people get to that next level. And that's how you get to the branch where you're hanging on. And some people are more successful than that and others just'cause they have a dynamic personality. But if you put in the work, but you have to put in the work. I, that's something you and I talked about before is if you're unwilling to put in the work and you think just because I got a degree in chiropractic and I passed my boards. I should be successful in practice. Man, I wish that were the case. I wish not. I wish that you were driven by a large medical machine that pushed people your way the second that you got outta school, but that's not, it's not where you're at. So you can wish as much as you want that's gonna happen. It just isn't. Yeah. So you have to actually go out there and endear yourself to the public.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
You do. And you know that middle branch it's another choice. And while it might pay the bills, it's also, and I'm sorry to say this, and I don't mean to offend anybody. It's the mediocre level. And did you really go become a doctor because you wanted a mediocre practice? I'm gonna challenge you, even if you think you did, I'm gonna challenge you to say you didn't, you went to school to become a highly successful doctor, and you can, and far too often I hear docs that are at that mediocre branch or the bomb out branch. And they think and I absolutely hate this comment. Chiropractic doesn't work or none of those things work in my area. Patients around here, people around here are different. They don't utilize chiropractic bull. That's all I've got to say for that. That's a mindset of yours. That's a choice you make. So I practiced in a town where, I'll be honest, I won't go into all the details'cause I. I don't want to call my town out, but chiropractic was beat up. Beat up. You've heard of the Wilkes case. Part of that case started in the town I practiced in. So when I got there, not to belabor the point, but when I got there, the medical doctors and the chiropractors didn't really commune together. In fact, I got looked at funny when I joined the country club because apparently unbeknownst to me a few years prior to me joining chiropractors couldn't belong to the country club. That's how bad it was. In my desire, my choice to become successful, guess what I did? I started chipping away at that and raising the bar for chiropractic and putting chiropractic on mainstream in that town. And after a couple of years, guess what? The medical doctors, their families, their kids, they were all patients of mine. I lived in the same neighborhood. I played golf with them. You can overcome these barriers and I hear doctors, sorry, I'm on a soapbox here. I hear doctors all the time making these excuses. My town's different. There's too many medical doctors here. It's an older population and they just won't come in and pay for services. All of that is I can debunk all of that. So you have to make the choice that I don't want to be out on the bomb out branch or the mediocre branch. I wanna be on the top tier branch and have a highly successful practice.
Dr. Troy Fox:
I wanna add a couple of things to that.'cause number one, what you said at the very end is mindset. If you believe that you're not gonna be successful, there's plenty of research out there to show. Yep. You will fulfill that dream of not being successful. If you wanna be successful, you have to have a successful mindset. But that's, we're going to the next branch here in a minute and we'll talk about that success mindset. But the other thing I want to add into that too, is sometimes you need to be a goldfish and. What I mean by that is this. How smart are goldfish? I don't, I've never really analyzed a goldfish heavily, but I think Goldfish have a short attention span. They have short memories and it's kinda like this. What was your name again? You gotta forget what happened two minutes ago, and you've gotta forget what happened in your town. Now if your town, you say, gosh, my town is really anti chiropractic, or it's this, it's that every, let it stop you. You know what? I won't disagree that there are different regions that function differently. I can tell you that the practice that I have now is vastly different than the practice I had previously, especially in the, this is interesting in the months that are slower,'cause we all have slower months in practice. I don't care how successful you are, you're gonna have some months that are slower. Mine's in the middle of summer. Yeah. Mine's during harvest. I'm in a small farming town and guess what? Am I panicked about the fact that I'm a little bit slower? No, that's a great time for me to strategize. It's a great time for me not to think the sky is falling, but I also had to be a goldfish. I had to, I have to forget what happened yesterday and focus on today's patients. I don't belabor day after day, and I also don't look at what I did for the month. What I like to do is look at a continuum. How did I do this year in comparison to last year? Am I up a little bit? If I'm down, I need to change some things, but I'm a goldfish. I'm not gonna remember, and I'm not gonna sit and belabor it every day, but I'm smart enough to analyze it. Periodically just to give me a roadmap of where I'm going, because I'm a goldfish and I don't remember where I'm going. I need a roadmap. So the goldfish analogy's great because you just let it roll off. You have to because you, we talked about this earlier. Yeah. When you. Get on social media, let's say, okay, gosh, my practice is slow. I'm gonna get on social media. I'm gonna become a subject matter expert, and I saw a doc the other day give a simple 90, 90, 90 stretch, simplest thing on the planet, right? Put your feet up on a chair, bend your hips, bend your knees, put your arms over your head, stretch a little bit, and he just got shredded. Social media shredded. It's crazy. Oh my gosh. You're gonna hurt yourself. Don't do that. Call your medical doctor. Social media is so nasty anymore. You better be a goldfish if you're on social media because you will quit doing social media if you take that stuff personally.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah. You can't take it personally. And that's, we see a lot of doctors stay on the mediocre or bomb out rung because. They get shut down by a patient. Somebody in town says something negative about chiropractic. Who cares? You gotta let that stuff roll off your back like a like water on a duck little secret.
Dr. Troy Fox:
It doesn't matter which branch you're on. You get that. It happens to everybody. There isn't any one of us that are gonna just skate through. Those people that are ultra successful don't have a practice that doesn't have any dissenters. They're there and there are gonna be people you can't help and they blame you because you can't help'em. It's just, it's the nature of the
Dr. Michael Perusich:
beast. And in fact the docs that are on the top rung the most successful, rung the bomb branch if you will, the, those are the ones that have learned how to battle those things and turn'em from a negative and flip'em into a positive. So I wanna talk about that top branch. We need to take a quick break here Word from our sponsors we're talking about. You making the choice doctors to either be the bomb in practice or to let yourself bomb out. We'll be right back.
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Dr. Michael Perusich:
Okay, docs, we are back. We're talking about the branches of a tree because we have become arborists. I like that. No, seriously, we're talking about making the choice to be successful in practice'cause that's really what it is. And setting yourself up for success by not allowing yourself to get. To get torn down by the negativity and especially not allowing your mindset to shift away from being successful.'cause it truly is just a mindset.
Dr. Troy Fox:
It is. And so as we step into the success realm, the first thing we talked about is right from the beginning. And you can start this at any stage in your practice, if you haven't done this up to this point, today's the day.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah. Here,
Dr. Troy Fox:
here's the day that you start looking at what successful doctors you're doing. And rather than being threatened by that or upset by that,'cause you may have somebody in your town that's killing it, it doesn't mean that you're not going to Too sure. Lemme, it's fine. Look at those other docs that are doing well. You know what? You would be surprised. A lot of docs that are out there that are successful have coaches. Yep. It just is what it is. And even though we're coaches, again, like I said at the beginning of our conversation today, I'm not talking coaching. What I'm doing is telling you what successful people do, and we've said this many times. Dr. Perus is famous for talking about how many coaches that Michael Jordan had.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah.
Dr. Troy Fox:
And Tiger Woods. Yeah, tiger Woods had multiple coaches as well. The greatest golfer, and you can argue with me about whether Michael was the greatest basketball player ever. You're gonna lose because he was I know PE some people like LeBron love, love you, LeBron. You're a great basketball player, but you're not Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan. Not only did he have that mentality. But he had the coaching behind it. He had multiple coaches and he listened to those coaches. Yeah, and he did what they told him to do and he believed in it. That's what we've done from a success standpoint. Number one was coaching. The second thing that we've done is we've looked outside of chiropractic and Dr. Perus, you're really good at this part of it. Looking outside of chiropractic at what makes humans successful. Yep. Not just chiropractors, what makes humans successful, not just business people, but humans.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yep yep. And I'm gonna add one more thing to that list.'Cause those first two things were spot on. But the third thing is you just, you have to be willing to put in the work and, oh my you gotta be willing to roll up the sleeves and go the extra mile and put in the work, and put in the effort and put in the time. And if you do those things. Then. You're sure to be successful. Now, is it a promise of success? No. There's a lot of things you have to learn outside of being a doctor. You have to learn how to communicate, you have to learn how to engage people. You have to learn how to have authority. There's so many different levels to it, but this is why coaching is so important because this is the kind of stuff you can't do on your own. You may have a realization to a lot of these things, but you can't. Organize it and learn it in a manner on your own that allows you the time to still practice too. So this is one of the great reasons why coaching works. And I, Troy, I know you said this isn't a platform for a sales job, and I'm not trying to do that, but. If you don't have a coach, find one that works for you. Coaching like chiropractic. It's a relationship based process. Find somebody that fall floats your boat and can help you really become successful. It's so
Dr. Troy Fox:
easy and this is from a success standpoint, they get the 30,000 foot overview. They're not tangled up in the weeds like you are. You're tangled in the weeds every day and you think you, what you're doing is unique to everyone else. A coach is gonna look at you and go, I've got a hundred other people just like you. Yep. And here's how we, here's how we backtracked out of this jungle that you're in right now, we did it one step at a time. One day we may be talking about patient communication. Another day we may be talking about how do you reduce your overhead expenses. Another day we may be talking about, effective strategies for marketing that don't make you look cheap. This is not a race to the bottom, right? We talk about these different things, but we do it one step at a time. Nobody gets in the middle of the Amazon jungle and just jumps straight up in the air and leaps out of the jungle. You gotta backtrack out one step at a time, and quite frankly, the second you leave school, you're in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Some people go deeper. Yep. And get themselves in a real bind. Some people flirt with the edges of it and it's really easy to backtrack out of it. Or maybe they have a little business experience and unfortunately, I'm gonna use a word that you guys don't like sales experience.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Ooh. I don't
Dr. Troy Fox:
care what kind of doctor you are, you're in sales. Oh,
Dr. Michael Perusich:
we gotta use,
Dr. Troy Fox:
cause you, when you explain a procedure that you're gonna do with a patient and get their affirmation that they want to do that's called sales. Yep. And there are effective ways to do it and there are really ineffective ways, and I know, here's another word people don't like close. Ah, and you close on something. If you can be so over the top, over descriptive, over pushy, that's a not a word, over pushy. You could be very pushy. You can actually talk someone out of it. You literally talk so much and for so long that you talk a patient out of it. Yeah. I can tell you that most of my conversations with patients are pretty short and to the point because one, I have confidence that they're gonna follow my recommendations. So that goes back to another step of getting out of the jungle. And that is authority. Yep. Doctor authority. That's not that's not ingrained in you when you come outta school. It's taught or it's learned as you go along. So as we go through those steps, I have to have the authority to begin with and realize that a patient's gonna follow my recommendations. Number two, I offer my recommendations. And number three, they agree to those recommendations. So that's another step of getting out of the jungle, is people following through when you do offer something to them called sales and closing. Yeah. As much as you don't like it, we're all doing it. And I'll tell you what. When I go to my functional medicine doctor and she tells me, Hey, here's what I want you to do. She's selling me a product, and that product may cost$1,500. I know the last time I did it was, yeah, between labs and everything that I did. It was$1,500 and she sold me that product and she did it in less than a minute. Now, did she talk to me for longer than that? Yeah. We were talking about a few other things, but when it came to the sale of the product, it was short and to the point. This is what we need to do. You're ready to get started, Troy? Absolutely, I am. And it does. At that point, money wasn't really the object. Now, if I were stone cold broke. Didn't have a job, didn't have a car, and walked over to her office that day. I might have had to think about it twice. We do have some patients like that sometimes. We all do. Sometimes. Sure. The majority of your patients, and I'll tell you a little story about that. A majority of your patients have money to proceed with healthcare and you don't even know it. Yep. And here's what I mean by that. So I, as a chiropractor, I'm offering care to patients. They're doing it. We're cruising along, we're doing our thing. I come up with a new service in my office. That new service has gone over like hot cakes. People immediately jumped on it. There were people that I did not know if they had money to pay for their next chiropractic appointment that dropped four and$500 without batting an eye that day for that service. Yep. Guess what I underestimated my patients by thinking, and we all do this, that maybe they didn't have enough money to pay for more chiropractic. Yep. And you know what? They proved me completely. And this isn't once, this has been over the last six or seven months, I've been proved wrong so many times now, and the conversation again is 30 seconds long. It's no longer than it was on the other one. Hey, here's what we have to offer. Oh my gosh, I can't wait to get signed up for that. Boom.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
And there's a psych, there's a psych psychological diagnosis for thinking that your patients don't have money. It's called, what's that called? Poverty complex. Oh my. I'm so scared of that. Quit making financial decisions for your patients. Now, I have to admit, I learned that the hard way. I think my first year in practice, probably my first couple months, this patient told me that they couldn't afford care, and then I watched him drive off in a brand new. Cadillac. I'm like, okay. And I then I found out where they live and they lived on the golf course. I'm like, okay, I fell for that one. Don't fall for that. Yeah. Here's the strategy. If you, and I'm gonna use your analogy, Troy, if you wanna find your way through the Amazon Forest, the best way is to have an experienced guide. And that's what coaching does. And I'm gonna go out on a loom'cause we're talking about trees. That. A good portion of the doctors that are very successful in this profession have coaches and
Dr. Troy Fox:
I'm gonna add into not only just a coach. But one that is well-rounded in all aspects of business. This isn't about new patients in PVA, that's not what we're coaching you on, and it's
Dr. Michael Perusich:
not about
Dr. Troy Fox:
gimmicks and it's not about gimmicks. And we very infrequently set around and grind on you about new patients in PVA. We'll look at your stats your stats and your trends do tell us what's going on in your practice, but we're more about the well-rounded experience. And I say that because I see a lot of gimmicky stuff. It comes across my Facebook just like it does you guys. Yep. If you look at any kind of coaching at all, next thing you know, your Facebook feed is flooded with not only not only adds for chiropractors, but I get ones for PTs too. And guess what? You know what they're talking about? Reactivation calls. They're talking about new patients, they're talking about all that stuff. But the truth of the matter is there's a lot more to it because quite frankly, I can get all the new patients on the planet. I can run a special and some of you might be guilty of this, so I don't want to make it sound any worse than it already is, but some of you got 45 new patients last month. And they paid$2 and 50 cents a piece to come in. They got an exam, they got x-rays, they got an adjustment. They might have gotten a massage. Maybe it was only a chair massage, but they got a massage and then they got told they needed a package of 24 visits. Now, does that sound like the classic bait and switch to you? Does to me. Does to me too. I don't like it. I don't think that's how you should market. So if you are in the market to get as many new patients in the door, you get somebody that message you and says, Hey, how would you like 30 new patients? I get that every day. Every single day. Would you like 30 new patients this month? No, thank you. I wanna do it organically. And the way that you do it organically is different. And I think that's the, that's really the caveat. And this is probably. The secret sauce that really successful doctors have is we don't cheapen ourselves.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Nope. Never.
Dr. Troy Fox:
We market our patients in a way that we provide a service that they need or want, just like I've done over the last seven months. They need or want. We see that, because we're looking at the market trends, right? Yep. I'm not looking at what was done 30 years ago. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna run an ad for a dollar 99 new patient special. Patients aren't gonna stay.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Why? And this is probably a topic for another podcast, but why would you wanna do that? Why would you wanna. Give away all your service, give away$500 worth of services to 45 patients who collectively paid you around a hundred bucks. In your scenario
Dr. Troy Fox:
in my scenario. Yeah. And
Dr. Michael Perusich:
yet, and yet you're giving away$500 worth of services for 45 patients. How do you ever make that back up doing that? You're in hopes that two people are gonna follow through with care. Yeah. Plus those 45 patients cost you about 45 hours worth of your time. And let's see, I've got my calculator here. We always say you should be making around$500 a an hour in your practice. What I say. 45 hours. 45 hours. So you gave up$22,500 worth of your time by doing that. Just it makes no sense to, as a business model, to do that to yourself only to turn people into your practice that are 90% are gonna drop out and the other 10% that's left, they're gonna think that it's two 50 every time they come in.
Dr. Troy Fox:
No wonder you don't have time to get out in your community'cause you're too busy servicing people for$2 as a new patient and that's a choice to bomb out. It is. It's really, so what successful chiropractors do is they look at trends, they value those services where they should be, and they allow the market to dictate. Yep. And when the market dictates and you hit on something that patients see success with, they're gonna buy it. They're gonna pay for that service. And they're not afraid to pull out their checkbooks and do that. Not everything in life has to be free or$2 to get people in the door. But that's what some of you've seen. And that's unfortunately what we see from the middle and the bottom branch. Yep. Is you looked at what somebody else did and then it's a race to the bottom. Oh, they charged$10 for their first day. I'm gonna charge five. Oh, I'm gonna charge two. How about we just do it for free? How about you donate a canned good? Has that been done in the past and have I done something similar to that 25, 30 years ago? I did. I did. And you know what? I regret that was not a decision that was good for other chiropractors all over the United States, not just in my area. Yep. It was a poor decision all across the board because I cheapened chiropractic, we've run the chiropractic adjustment into the ground. This should be valued at way more than it is. And instead we're all in a race to the bottom. So even those of us that are uber successful, ultra successful in practice, still look at all those metrics and we know that our adjustments undervalued. There's no way some of us can. Now, you might be in a really affluent area where you're a little bit higher than I am. You may be in a poor area where you're a little lower than I am, but we're not getting paid for the chiropractic adjustment. What we should. Correct. Sad, but it's true. But as an entrepreneur looking at this, what I'm gonna do is overcome that. I can sit and complain about that all day. What I'm gonna do is add other value added services. Now my patient is coming in, they're getting more value, they're getting better care, they're getting healthier, but they're also spending more in my practice to do it.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
And we're also not gonna look at the value of a new patient. We're gonna look at the lifetime value of re of a retained patient. Yep. And that's really the crux of building a practice. And I think we opened a can of worms for a couple of tag on podcasts here. Oh, yeah. Joy for sure. Because this, these are topics that you and I can run with all day long because we see doctors out there making the choice to be mediocre or worse, and you don't need to do that. And so if you're struggling a little bit, you don't know what to do, you don't know where to turn to. Go check us out, Kats consultants.com, Kats with a K. See all the great things that we're doing to help doctors get up to that top branch of the Tree of success. So feel free to take a peek. We've got a bunch of downloads on, free downloads on the website as well. So check it all out. And most of all, thank you for tuning in every week to the KC Puls podcast. We love doing this because we're chiropractors too. Chiropractic has been phenomenal for us. We want you. Out there to have the same experience. So be sure to like and subscribe. And Troy, anything to add?
Dr. Troy Fox:
No, I honestly, I think that really in a nutshell is what we were talking about.'cause we always get together before these podcasts, and sometimes we have a topic that's already ready to go in the shoot. Then we make a little right turn after about five minutes of us talking to each other because there are things that happen or we see on a regular basis. This is something we see often, man. We want you to be successful. Yeah, we want you to be wildly successful and to do that. Sometimes you just can't do it on your own. I suppose there, there may be. Somebody out there in the rare air that's figured it out on their own, but it's pretty infrequent that you're able to cover every one of those bases. And so from my standpoint, coaching is no different. Then when I was taking boards and I used Irene Gold. You guys may have used something different, but I used Irene Gold for a board review. You know why insurance policy, I want to be successful.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
It was your guy through the Amazon Forest.
Dr. Troy Fox:
It cost me a little bit, but guess what? I got through boards the first time. Would I have done it on my own? I would've probably sit there and ground it out. I would've figured out how to get through it. Sure. But did I want to? No. So that's why we're here for you, and that's why we're talking about the successful practices.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yep. Absolutely. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in with us. We will see you next time. See ya.