215 The Aligned Chiropractic Practice
May 25, 2025Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.
This week’s topic: The Aligned Chiropractic Practice
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 Marisa Mateja, both seasoned experts in Chiropractic 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 alignment is critical to success
- How to get your staff out of task-doing mode
- Why your mindset plays such a vital role in helping to prevent burnout
- How being critical of the profession and your practice may be blocking you from 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.
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, 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:
Doctors. Is your chiropractic team aligned with you? Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC Chiro Pulse Podcast, brought to you by Kats Consultants and Chiro Health, USA. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Perusich, and I'm joined by my co-host. I almost said Dr. Marisa Mateja.
Marisa Mateja:
No doctor, know really. It
Dr. Michael Perusich:
feels like it most of the time.
Marisa Mateja:
Yes, I'm glad to be here. You're a
Dr. Michael Perusich:
cology. How's that,
Marisa Mateja:
cology? I like that. Yes that one's a good one.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Te Ology. Marisa, we see this all the time. We see. Doctors hiring good people to be on their teams, but keeping them in a role that's very task oriented. And when we're task oriented, we wind up in our own little silos and nobody's really aligned with anything. They're just there to do a task.
Marisa Mateja:
Yeah, it's important to make sure that, you've got somebody on your team, hopefully all of them on your team that are really there to be a partner in your business with you. They're more than just
Dr. Michael Perusich:
an assistant.
Marisa Mateja:
There's so much more, there's so much more than just an assistant in your practice. And I think when we leave them in that little bubble right, of. It. They become task doers and we've gotta break'em outta that bubble so that they're not just task doers in our practice. Yeah. We need them to be so much more, not only to the practice, not only to the doctor, but especially to our patients.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Exactly. And you think of all the different, if we just get away from tasks, you think of all the different places in the practice that they can affect value in helping to promote the practice, build the practice, scale the practice, build trusted relationships with patients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many things. And yet, so oftentimes we see doctors not really do enough of that development to make that actually happen because it doesn't happen on its own. It's a culture driven process.
Marisa Mateja:
It so is the culture that we create in our practice. It. Drives them, it thrives them, it makes them excited to be there, those kind of things. So if you don't have that culture defined set up you're not doing training, you're not doing any kind of motivation, you're not doing any of these little things that help them along the way. That's where we see practices having high turnover. The turnover just becomes unbearable when you don't allow them to really grow and be a part of the practice and help it grow and help that those collections go up and patient experiences go up and all of those little things,
Dr. Michael Perusich:
right? And it, it's so easy for everybody on the team to get so locked into. And I'll just make an example here. Take scheduling for example. Is that being performed as a task in your practice? Oh, hello, Mrs. Smith. 10 o'clock is available today. Good. Or is it a process that somebody is actually managing and managing with heart so that the practice, that the scheduling aspect of the practice becomes much more dynamic and much more efficient and much more, which leads to more profitability in most cases.'cause you get patient engagement. Is it being driven like that, or is it just the task?
Marisa Mateja:
Yeah, a task, what we'd see on a schedule would be absolutely just willy-nilly throwing people on wherever you feel like it's necessary to have a patient instead of really planning that day out cluster booking. Looking for opportunities for when are the right times for a new patient to be on your schedule. And of course, those of you who have been around me know that I like. A organized schedule because it then organizes your day and breaks the chaos out of your schedule. You don't have these. Highs and lows on the schedule. Everything's even keeled and it makes the practice so much easier, not only to manage, but it makes it easier on the doctor. It makes it easier on the employees to be able to come in and know what's gonna happen on the schedule. It makes it just easier to manage all the way around. The schedule's really important and if it's just a task, you don't see what I just, I described. Chaos,
Dr. Michael Perusich:
ab Absolutely. And I got a couple of things I want to add to that. We gotta take a quick break, but I wanna come back and talk about organization, what a key factor it is in the practice. So docs we're talking about getting your staff aligned with you and your practice, and that means a whole bunch of things. So that's what we're talking about. We'll be right back.
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Dr. Michael Perusich:
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the KC Chiro Pulse podcast. We're talking about aligning your staff, your team your assistants, whatever you call'em in your practice. We like team about aligning your team with you. And your vision and your goals and the practice and so forth. And Marisa, you brought up organization is such a key thing and you're fantastic at that process, but you would take it, you would take it a step further. You talked about getting your day organized, but you didn't just look at the schedule as a day. You looked at it as week, a month, a quarter, six months, a year. You would come to me on Monday mornings, for example, and tell me, Hey, there's. I got seven patient slots open on Thursday and Monday right now is looking a little light.
Marisa Mateja:
Yeah. That's being aligned. Exactly. That's managing it. That's being aligned with what's happening in the practice. That's knowing the fact that we have openings coming up and if you share that information with those people who are on the team, the doctors mainly right. The other providers that are. The ones that are going to be filling those thoughts. It helps them organize it in their head. It helps them be able to communicate that then to the patients that are in front of them. Hey, you're gonna be doing some yard work over the weekend and you're pretty flared up in the low back. I wanna see you back on Monday. Yeah. Because we know that's where our openings are. Or let's say it's Wednesday. We don't, I don't want you to go any later than Wednesday next week, but I need you back on the schedule. It gives those patients better direction. Number one, that's what we're there for is to help them understand what their care, is and what they need for their condition and those kind of things. So it helps them, but it also helps us because now we're organizing the schedule as we go. We're creating opportunities to fill slots that maybe wouldn't have gotten filled had the doctor not known those things. It's vital and I will say not only organization, but what am I talking about? Communication. And I think a CA's superpower
Dr. Michael Perusich:
is
Marisa Mateja:
good communication with their doctor and that's being aligned.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
So docs, I'm gonna ask you, what kind of training and development are you doing with your staff to make them super communicators? Because you're right. That is their superpower. Yeah. You would throw me little key pieces of information throughout the day of little things that patients would tell you walking in the door. Yeah. Oh my gosh. 30 minutes late.'cause Mahe was hurting this morning. Hey, Mrs. Smith might have plantar fasciitis that would open up a whole new treatment conversation with me, with the patient. So now I've got a patient who we just found an opportunity to create a brand new treatment plan. Absolutely. And it, it creates another win-win scenario in the practice. But the patient may not have ever told me that patient wasn't gonna tell me they were late, that's something they're gonna tell the front desk or you floating around the practice or whoever.
Marisa Mateja:
If we think about communication and we think about our patients telling us as employees of the practice information, we're gonna hear a lot more than the doctor ever will. And so some of us spend. A lot of time with them, whether it's at the front desk or whether it's in a therapy or something like that, we end up in conversations with those patients that the doctor will never end up in a conversation with. They open up to us because we're chatting, and you are learning about them and what was new? What's new with you? What'd you do this weekend? How'd you spend your time? Yeah. Oh my goodness. Now it's opened up all this information that they're pouring out to us that maybe you wouldn't have known before that.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Or you would open up a conversation with a patient, oh my gosh, I love your shoes. And the patient would turn around and say, oh yeah, I got these in New York. We were in New York last week. Oh my gosh. I walked a billion miles. Walked, walk. Walk. Yes. So I had to buy some new shoes while I was there.'cause my feet were hurting. You would tell me that I'm never gonna ask the patient about their shoes to open up that conversation. Yeah. It's
Marisa Mateja:
a, it's amazing all the little things that they will share with you about really their conditions that you didn't know about. So now all of a sudden it's oh my goodness, you've done all this walking. And not only do your knees and your feet hurt, but maybe your low back's hurting. When I walk a lot, that's what happens. Your low back can tighten up very easily. So you end up in these conversations and again. Communication can be our superpower as employees of the practice if we're just listening to our patients and really paying attention to them.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
And doc I, I wanna point out two things here. All of us are trying to look for ways to increase our capacity and increase our efficiency. Look what we just talked about that took things off of the doctor's plate. You kept the clinic organized and the schedule organized. I didn't have to worry about that. I could just focus on patient care. You'd feed me the information that I needed, and it allowed me to not have to worry about the rest of it. Same thing.
Marisa Mateja:
I I think you have to, I think you have to make, be. Paying attention to those things in the practice and making sure that you're doing the training along the way. So I see a lot of docs that wanna skip that part, and staff will never know what you need from them if you don't stop, slow down and have those points and have those discussions, training and discussions along the way, Hey, this helps me if you do this, or those kind of things. And then all of a sudden you open up. A world of, oh yeah, absolutely. I can watch for those things. And you'll have staff so engaged and excited to come tell you things because they know that, hey, this may increase our capacity to see more services with just this one patient. We may be able to help them in so many different ways. And hey, the good side of that is collections and those kind of things may go up as well.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Exactly. Again it creates that win-win scenario. And so I hear a lot of doc, a lot of you docs out there say, I don't do staff meetings much anymore. Or we only do'em once a month, or I never know what to talk about. Here, I'm gonna tell you something right here. This is the kind of stuff you talk about and docs, you don't need to talk, you need to ask questions in a staff meeting, how can you guys. This is maybe what you say. How can you guys, as the team, as the chiropractic assistants, how can you help make patient relationships build stronger? How can you help manage the scheduling process? How can you help scale the practice? But here's the key. You have to take one step backwards from that. Your staff has to know what your vision is. Absolutely. They don't know what your vision is. If they don't know why you have a goal of seeing a hundred patient visits a week, then they're not gonna be aligned with you. That's part of the alignment process is they have to be involved in what the vision of the practice is. I. Not just the goals and not just the simple goals. As a team, we talked about every nook and cranny there was in the business, there was hardly anything that was off the table to be discussed. And that's, yeah, building that culture,
Marisa Mateja:
We have to remember that. Being the chiropractic assistant is so much more than just a job. Yeah. Like that's that task doer mentality. If it's just a job. It's so much more than that. We're helping change lives, really. We're helping, people feel better and be able to function and all these things, and so it's huge. To have that knowledge base from you as the doctors to know what are we, what is our goal? What are we aiming for here? Yeah. Why are we here? Why are we here?
Dr. Michael Perusich:
What's our purpose? They,
Marisa Mateja:
they can do more than what you are allowing them to do. Exactly. I can guarantee it. Yeah,
Dr. Michael Perusich:
exactly. Joel Osteen wrote a book called Purpose Driven Life, and it's I only bring that up because if we don't speak about purpose. With our team, they don't know why they're there. Yeah my job is to answer the phones, or my job is to escort people to the adjusting tables. My job is to bill the insurance. No, that that's not your job. That's not your role. That might be part of your job description, but your role in the practice as. As a team member is to help build the practice, help promote the practice, help scale the practice, help build those lifelong patient relationships by creating trust in that environment. And that doesn't happen just by the doctor doing it. In fact that's probably the hardest way to do it. It happens as a team.
Marisa Mateja:
It does. Yeah. And. Those things happen when you have set times to discuss them and go through things. We've got to make sure you guys are really slowing down enough to get yourself off the mouse wheel every now and then for those things.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah, and I hear doctors say all the time, and doctors, I'm gonna call you out on this every time I hear this, I'm gonna call you out. But we don't have time to do staff meetings. We don't have time to do a five minute huddle in the morning. What? Yes, you do. Yeah, you do. We saw four, four to 500 patient visits a week, and we had plenty of time for two huddles a day. We had time for you and I to have our weekly meeting. We had time for our staff meeting every week, and I don't mean a staff meeting that was 10 or 15 minutes long. Our staff meetings would be an usually an hour and a half because we had so much to discuss. Yeah. Sometimes we'd have to schedule a second follow up meeting because there was so much to work on. Our practice. The more we worked on it like that, the better it got, the better it got. And after a while it was almost like it was just a machine operating on its own.
Marisa Mateja:
Everybody was aligned.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Everybody was aligned. Said, Hey, we gotta, let's take another quick break. But we're talking about aligning your team so that you're all working towards the same vision and the same goals. We'll be right back.
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Dr. Michael Perusich:
All right. Welcome back to the podcast. We we're talking about some, this is really good. This is deep. We're talking about how to align your team with you doctors in instead of them just being task doers. I love that term Rosa. Instead of just making them task doers, let's make them partners in the practice. And it doesn't necessarily mean literally, but. Why not make them partners in the practice? Because, Rome not only wasn't built in a day, it also wasn't built by one person. And so when we come together as a team, and that's the whole point of hiring people you want, you wanna hire really good people who can help you grow the practice, not just affect some duties during the day.
Marisa Mateja:
Absolutely, you wanna break down those walls, you wanna be able to find those commonalities between you and who does what best. And how does that help with your alignment, knowing, do you have the people in the right positions? Do you have, the communication strategies in place? Do you have the scheduling strategies in place? Do you have those? All of those things that bring everybody together, kind of thing. All the training, everything. It's such an alignment of all of those things. It can't just be, I'm gonna pick and choose. You really need all of that to be able to function well in your practice.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Yeah. And that alignment process happens because you create a culture that says you're not here just to do a job. We're here to serve. We're here to support. We're here to treat as many spines in our community as we possibly can and help people with needs that they have. That's what we do as chiropractors. We're solutions solvers. Absolutely. We have solutions to people's needs. So stay aligned, stay empowered. Great things to work on in your practice. Marisa, anything else to add?
Marisa Mateja:
No, just make sure that you're working together as a team and make sure that you put communication as one of your top priorities between everyone, including your patients.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Well said. Alright, everybody, be sure to go check us [email protected], subscribe to the podcast, we're growing because of you guys, and be sure to share this with your colleagues out there. This might be a great show to have your staff listen to as well. So absolutely, we look forward to seeing you next time on here. From all of us here at Kats Consultants and the KC Chiro Pulse podcast, we'll see you next time.
Marisa Mateja:
See you.