Chiropractic, like most of the health care professions, is populated by a group of people who are passionate about providing their services and skills of health care upon their practice members. They are there to serve people in their business and do the very best they physically can. Unfortunately, they often pay little attention to the structure or the operation of their business outside of the clinical delivery. This leads to practices being unsustainable in the long run.
Most chiropractors unfortunately don’t have sustainable practices. The cost of this in energy, time, service, results, money, the lost opportunity costs and impact on society in general is huge.
This is often driven by the chiropractors’ brain preference to nurture and support their practice members. In terms of the in8model (see the website www.thein8model.com for more information), the common tendency of the chiropractor is to build towards the future with hope and optimism. The implicit trust in people and the dominant thought that “it will all work out” sees chiropractors and healthcare professionals doing well in their healing environment but it falling short in their business environments.
Let’s visit what an unsustainable practice would look like and then we will look at the traits of a sustainable practice:
The unsustainable practice is one where:
- There is a constant need to get new people in through the doors. This practice burns through practice members and practice members due to many factors. This results in the marketing budget having to be quite sizable in order for them to keep priming the pumps of the new practice member machine.
- The practice desperately lurches from one crisis to another.
- The practice is reactive to outside influences and the team ‘make it up’ as they go.
- The principle can’t afford to go away as the last time he/she did (which was 3 years ago) they came back to a severely depleted practice with disharmony amongst the team.
- The practice is ‘personality’ driven with the ‘boss’ being the guru and every one else on a lower rung of the hierarchy.
- The education is ad-hoc with lots of talk around the adjusting tables but no formal program of content delivery and no strategic context set.
- Team members move through the practice regularly and are often turned off to chiropractic in the future. New team members don’t have the necessary training to competently handle the needs of the practice and they are always playing catch-up and feeling unsupported and unrecognised.
- There is a distinct lack of financial planning. The practitioner is always juggling money and no matter how much comes in it seems like that and a little more goes out leaving little at the end of the day for savings and investment.
- The practice ebbs and flows according to the energy of the practitioner and ultimately disintegrates when the primary driver burns out.
