224 The 4 KPI’s indicating whether you will thrive or just survive!
Aug 03, 2025Welcome to the KC CHIROpulse Podcast.
This week’s topic: The 4 KPI’s indicating whether you will thrive or just survive!
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’ CEO Dr Michael Perusich, a seasoned expert 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:
- Why these 4 KPI’s are so important
- How not paying attention to these stats could cause financial disaster
- Why analyzing these stats along with a myriad of others give you the true picture of how well your practice is performing
- …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 busy doesn't mean profitable. Hi everybody. Welcome to the KC Chiro Pulse podcast, brought to you by Kats Consultants and sponsored by Chiro Health USA. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Perusich. I'm in the studio by myself today. I jumped in here because I wanna get on my soapbox just. A little bit. I wanna dig into some KPIs, some statistics in your practice that really predict whether or not you're going to thrive or just survive or maybe not survive at all. And in our profession, we have a tendency to look at just five basic key performance indicators, services, collections new patients, patient visits, and usually the other one is write-offs. It might be dropouts but we have a tendency to just look at the bare minimum and we have to quit doing that because. The statistical indicators in your practice go much deeper than that. We also have to stop looking at 30 day cycles because that just doesn't make sense. Your practice is perpetual, so we need to look at longer pieces of information. But I wanna talk about four KPIs that I think are especially important in your practice. One of them, and. Some of the software systems are starting to track this, which is great, but a lot of you aren't thinking about this number and it's unique patient visits. And so what exactly is that? That's the number of patients, individual patients that you see in your practice in a given period of time. So what does that mean? If I'm your patient and you have me on a schedule of once a week for four weeks I'm gonna be four patient visits, but I'm only one unique patient. And so what does that tell us? It tells you how effective your patient acquisition programs are. It shows you how effective your retention strategies are. But here's the bigger part. It really tells you. How insulated your practice is from dropouts. So the higher the number of unique patients you have, the less you're going to be affected by dropouts. So I'll give you a great example. If you only have 10 unique patients and you have two people dropout. It's not a lot of people dropping out, but gosh, it's 10 or 20% of your practice, right? But if we have a hundred unique patients and we have two dropout, it's only 2% of our practice and it doesn't really affect our bottom line. So we've really gotta drive that. Unique patient visit number. So how do we do that? We've gotta get more spines under care very simply. And so we've gotta have good, strong, new patient generation. And if you've been in practice five years or less, that should be a big role of yours, is to really be driving that new patient generation. But. We can't stop our acquisition of new spines in our practice just because we've been in practice for a while and we've got a good revenue stream coming in. We've gotta think about, we always have to replace our patient visits and our patients, if they drop out our attrition out, and we've gotta make sure that we're growing that, that. Unique patient number. So how do we do that? You get out in the community, you do reactivations, you get good at getting referrals, you get involved in community events, so people get to know you. You do health talks, those kind of things. And if your unique patient number is shrinking, that means the foundation of your practice is eroding away. So no matter how busy your schedule looks. You're on the road to not only not being profitable, but you're on the road potentially to disaster. So that said, we need to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors. We're talking about the four KPIs that I think are great predictors of your future success. We'll be right back.
ChiroHealth USA:
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Dr. Michael Perusich:
Alright, welcome back to the KC Chiro Pulse Podcast. We're talking about the four KPIs that I believe really point to how successful your practice is gonna be, not only today, but in the future. And I said it before the break. We have a tendency to do two things. We have a tendency to look at our schedule and think we're busy today, so we must be doing great. And we have a. Potential to just look at our checkbook and think there's money in there, so we must be all right. And that is a topic for another day, but we have to be careful about how we look at our practice. And so we've gotta really dig into these KPIs. And I'm just talking about four of'em today. There's. Many. There's 10 times that at least that you should be tracking. And so I wanna talk next about the profit per patient visit. This is an important number. We look at collections and we look at collections versus expenses, and we hope collections is higher than expenses, and some months it is, and some months it's not. But we really have to dig in and think about what is. The profitability of each patient walking in the door and doctors, this is why I'm standing up today'cause I'm on my soapbox because this is something that so many of you are overlooking in your practice, and I'll have the opportunity to look at your stats and lo and behold. Every patient that comes in the door, you may be losing$2. I saw one the other day. The doctor was losing$7 per visit every time somebody walked in the door. So they might as well be standing outside the front door and just handing everybody$7 before they walk in and saving the wear and tear on their body. Here you go. Here's$7. Here's$7, here's$7. Because every time I see that, that doctor sees a patient, they're losing money. You're not in business to lose money. I don't think anybody out there listening is a 5 0 1 C3 not-for-profit business. So we gotta make sure that we have profitability built into our fee structure. So this really matters because profitability is what points to your future success. And here's something that I want you to know, and this is a warning sign. A high volume practice with low profit means you're just working harder, not smarter. And at some point you're not only gonna burn yourself out, but financially you're gonna burn your practice out. So we've got to make sure that we optimize our tactics in this regard and that we're paying attention. And I ask doctors this, questions this question all the time. As time goes by, is reimbursement going up or down? It's going down right it as we go by over time. Where are chiropractic fees going? I hope they're ticking up, but far too often I see doctors just on this race to the bottom, and we talked about this in a recent podcast talk. I see them just. Racing to the bottom, trying to compete on price, and the guy down the street's doing something for$25. So we do something for 24 and then the guy down the street does something for 19 and so then we drop our new patient day to 11 and it's just a ridiculous business model because it doesn't build in anything but low margin returns. You are worth something. What we do with our hands is nothing like anybody else can do. We can restore people's function and lives with our hands with a chiropractic adjustment, and that's just the tip of what we do. So busy without profit for every patient coming in the door is just burnout in disguise. So we've gotta make sure that we're watching those KPIs for each visit coming in. Make sure that it's helping us build wealth, not drain our energy. We have to create profitability so that we can have long-term success. The next KPII wanna talk about is retention rate. And some of you out there have serious dropout problems, and so what do you do? What do you do to combat that the natural tendency is we'll just get more new patients. We had 40 dropouts, so we'll make sure that we get at least 50 new patients, and that way, we've got a net plus 10. Now, it doesn't really work that way. We have to think about the percentage of our patients who commit to and are engaged in a full care plan and even beyond a full acute care plan. We need to engage patients so they become lifetime patients. And there's a couple ways we do that. And I'm not gonna dive fully into this today'cause we don't have time, but part of that's your philosophy. Are you helping patients understand the value and the benefit of long-term chiropractic care? Because we go way beyond just the acute portion of care. We're great at pain and getting patients out of pain. But what we're really good at is keeping patients from experiencing pain. So it's like the dentist figured out that, hey, preventative care is way better than waiting for somebody to have a cavity that hurts for'em to come in. We're gonna make more, we're gonna position ourselves cells better in the community. People are gonna think better of us if we focus on preventative care. So we need to do the same thing. But back to this idea of retention rate. A low retention rate means you have a very unstable program and you're creating people who go out in the community and say bad things about you, because what happens when you quit something? You don't speak highly of it, you don't say I'm trying to think of something. I quit the gym because it was so fantastic and I was having such a great experience. You just don't hear that I quit the chiropractic clinic because I was feeling better or, I didn't really like their service, or it was a little too expensive. I didn't really see the value in it, blah, blah, blah. So they're gonna say bad things about you. Now, is that gonna generate more community referrals? No. It's not. So we've gotta make sure that we're retaining patients in a way that we create stability in our practice and we create a, an army of people out there proclaiming how great we are and how great Chi Chiropractic is. And so a high retention practice is one that's steady and more importantly, it has a predictable. Income stream. So as a team, we have to be focused on communicating value and the importance of long-term chiropractic care. So before we jump into the fourth KPI, what we're doing today is we're digging into the four KPIs that I think are great predictors of how profitable your practice will be and whether or not you're gonna thrive or just survive or maybe not even survive. We need to hear a quick word from our sponsors again, so we'll be right back.
Kats Consultants:
Kats Chiropractic consultants, your partner in chiropractic success. We are dedicated with one-on-one guidance to bring you all your practice management needs. Let's supercharge your practice. Give us a call today.
Dr. Michael Perusich:
Hi everybody. Welcome back to the KC ChiroPulse Podcast. We are hanging out and talking about the four KPIs that I think are just incredibly important, and the three we've done so far, we've talked about. Unique patient visits. Important. We've talked about profit per patient visit, hugely important. And we've talked about retention rate and the flip side of that is we've gotta get our dropouts under control. So the fourth one is your patient visit growth. Now this is gonna be foreign to you'cause we at Catz Consultants, we've been tracking this for a long time, but it's really a unique KPI. So you're probably thinking, okay, what does this mean? It's the total visits. It's the trend of your total visits over time, or it's the trend of how many patients you keep over time, and how much is your practice growing by increasing the individual number of patients. A little bit hard to understand maybe at first. But what this does is it really tracks the momentum and the long-term scalability of your practice. This is why it's so important.'cause it, it's such a unique number that it really gives you a. Cause to understand how well are we really doing. And so it helps you monitor for plateaus in your practice. And how can we get over those? It helps you build strategies to become more profitable and a higher retention based practice. It helps you learn how to or see where you need to optimize your scheduling practices and how good you are at engaging patients in chiropractic care. If our patient visit growth is flat or down, then the heartbeat of our practice may be in trouble. So that becomes a very important KPI. So we've talked about some really important tips here, really important numbers, stats, and if you're not tracking these, contact us. We can help you with this. At Kats Consultants, we track over 40 KPIs, and better yet. We do trending analysis on them so that we're not just looking at 30 day chunks of time. We're looking at how your practice is doing over the long term, and this is incredibly important and. We help you understand what those statistics really mean and help you create strategies and tactics in your practice to make those numbers look even better. So here's the challenge. I want you to really think about what are we tracking in the practice and how are we analyzing it and how do we understand it? And then if you feel like you might need some help or just wanna talk about it, this is what we do, y'all, we. Help chiropractors because we're chiropractors. We had success in practice and still do, and we want you to have success. So go to our website, Kats consultants.com, go to the very top, there's a little button up there that says, let's chat. Jump on one of our schedules and let's just take 30 minutes and talk about your practice. What's happening, what do your numbers look like? And see if we might be a good fit for you.'cause we're doing some great things. Great things for doctors around the country and have been for many years. So while you're on the website, check out our downloads and some of our freebie things and everything that we do. So from all of us here at Kats Consultants, I want to thank Chiro Health USA for being one of our sponsors. From all of us here, we appreciate you listening in. Be sure to subscribe and share this with your compadres out there, and we'll see you next time.