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  Section Table of Contents

Feature Article:
Translating Your Dream into Reality
by: Ivan Delman, D.C.

Practice Management
Applying Pareto's Principle to Your Practice
by: Ivan Delman, D.C.

Marketing your Practice
Niche Marketing for Chiropractors
by: Ivan Delman, D.C.

Personnel Management
Tips to Increase Employee Longevity
by: Ivan Delman, D.C.

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Section Editor Contact Info:
Editor:
Ivan Delman, D.C.
Company:
Business of Chiropractic Pub.

Address:
576 Soldier Creek Road 
Grants Pass, OR, 97526

Phone:
 

Email:
Ivan@BusinessofChiropractic.com

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Introducing
Our Editor:
 

Ivan Delman, D.C.
Company: Business of Chiropractic Pub.

What they say about Business of Chiropractic Pub.

 

 
 

Dr. Delman's first degree was in business management. For twenty years his career focused on the management of manufacturing plants, car racing-related businesses, and then specializing in personal injury claims for the insurance industry.

He then became a chiropractor and for eighteen years successfully practiced that profession until retiring to travel around the USA.
As he and his wife traveled around the country, they visited many chiropractors and other healthcare practitioners.

He discovered that, although many practitioners were excellent professional technicians, many struggled to keep their practices alive because they didn't know basic business concepts. After discussing their various business problems with Dr. Delman, he would outline some simple solutions.

Using his business recommendations, the practitioners found it easier to manage their offices, with sometimes dramatic increases in cash flow and major decreases in problem areas. Dr. Delman realized that there was a business crisis developing in many single-owner health practices, due to decreased income from managed care, increased competition, and a lack of general business knowledge among practitioners.

Dr. Delman continues to provide realistic business advice to fellow chiropractors through articles, his e-mail newsletter, Chiro-Biz and special presentations.

Translating Your Dream into Reality
  printer friendly version
By: Ivan Delman, D.C. 

Whether you're driving a truck, selling groceries or managing a chiropractic practice, to make any of those activities work properly, the theory has to be matched with the function i.e. your dreams must be translated into function.

For example, you have dreamed and wished to be a race car drivers for years. Fin ally, you get to go to race driver's school and spent several days in classroom learning about braking, driving lines and safety procedures. However, until you get into your car and start driving laps around the track, it's all theory.

Stay with me! If this sounds like an oversimplification, perhaps it is. However, let’s see if this applies to the way you currently manage your practice.

Please think back to all of the practice management seminars you've attended. You'll probably remember that most of those seminars offered you excellent ideas. You probably planned to install those ideas into your practice.

When you returned to your office, on Monday, most likely, you had many distractions, trying to pull you away from your good intention to implement those new ideas.

If you eventually used those seminar ideas, congratulations, you've joined a very rare group. How rare? About as rare as the number of insurance companies that never cut your reimbursement for your services.

During the early stages of your practice, you had dreams, goals and desires. As time went on, most of you became caught up the daily swirl of trying to do all you can to build your practice.

There are many docs who, unfortunately, have never returned to their dreams. They never were able to take their dreams into operating reality.

For those in that group, here are some steps to get you and your staff onto the same page and working at those fading dreams.

FIRST, LOOK AT YOURSELF...What is your management style? Wet noodle? Absolute dictator? Those extremes usually don't work. Keep reminding yourself that you are the leader. You steer the direction of your practice. As such, your job is to:

• Know how you want to drive your clinic (Your mission).
• Make certain all your passengers (Staff) know where you're going (Your goals).
• Focus on making it happen (Your strategies).

Applying Pareto's Principle to Your Practice
printer friendly version
by: Ivan Delman, D.C.

“It is not enough to be busy; so are ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”—Henry David Thoreau

For hundreds of valuable ideas on how to effectively manage the daily activities of your practice go to www.BusinessofChiropractic.com
 

Niche Marketing for Chiropractors
  printer friendly version
by: Ivan Delman, D.C.

Focusing Your Attention
When comedienne Joan Rivers would get angry with someone, she'd stick her hand in his face and holler, "Talk to the hand. My ears aren't listening!"

Believe it or not, there's a tie-in to that statement and the way you market your services. I'm referring to the difference between marketing to everyone's ears or picking a more focused area like a hand. The focused emphasis on directing your chiropractic services to a specific area is called niche marketing.

There are many books and articles available on niche marketing. Niche marketing has been called "Target marketing," "Segmental Marketing" and similar terms. They all follow similar themes and rules but all agree on the starting point...

Plan your marketing strategy before you start expending too much of your time or money.

Please note that the key word here is "PLAN." The small amount of time you will spend to plan your approach will save you huge losses further down the road. You may have a photographic memory but your lens cap is still on if you get involved in niche marketing without that four-letter word, PLAN.

Before you start planning, you should have an idea of what part of your community you'll want to provide your services.

DISCOVERING YOUR NICHE
Finding a niche sometimes just happens. For example, when I was in practice, I also was active in racing cars on road courses. Since I knew what physical stresses a race car driver and even members of his pit crew undergo when participating in that sport, it was natural to offer my services to that market.

I wanted to make it easy for the people in my niche to get familiar with my chiropractic services. One of the things I did was to bring a portable adjusting table to the races. I also had a sign in my pits which stated, "Free chiropractic consultation to race car drivers" The drivers visited between races bringing along members of their crew (Usually family). The driver's crew watched while I administered palliative treatments to the driver.

Usually, the minimal work I performed on them afforded some relief so they would ask about follow-up treatment. If my office was handy for them, we'd make an appointment, If not, I referred them to someone I knew in their area. In either case, I was able to introduce chiropractic to a specific niche. I also had my practice name on the side of my car plus our clinic name was on cars we sponsored both at our road course races and at my local circle track.

Other Possible Niche Markets
Local Government Employees
I also addressed two other markets, outside city workers such as sanitation and maintenance plus the police department. They each required a slightly different approach, however, between those three segments and the spin-off from non-targeted patients, our office stayed busy.

Sports Groups
If you're involved in other sports or have a desire to work with children, or have experience in an interesting segment of your community, they could use the good services of a dedicated chiropractor.

The key is not to try and be a renaissance chiropractor that is, cutting across market segments and attempting to treat all of Earth. That course of action reminds me of the bumper sticker I once read which said, "Forget world peace! Visualize using your turn signal!" In other words, addressing today, not someday, and focusing your efforts works very well in our real world.

It's very difficult to accomplish your mission by embracing the entire universe. The streets are littered with the wrecked practices of chiropractors that have failed in their attempts to deliver their services to an excessively wide-ranging area. In the end, their services were so diluted, their efforts contributed very little to influencing the health of their communities.

Making a Point
Try an experiment. Take a pencil and firmly press the eraser end into the palm of your hand. Then, turn that pencil around and firmly press the lead tip into the palm of your hand. As you can see, the smaller the area, the more intense the focus of pressure. If you pressed hard enough, that point would penetrate your skin.

Think of your hand as the market and the pencil as your marketing efforts. Your efforts are scattered (The eraser end) or they're focused (The lead end). It's that simple! So you have to get the lead out and focus your efforts. Get the point? (Sorry...Couldn't resist)

DOING A MARKET EVALUATION
Once you identify the niche you want to serve, it's wise to check out the stability and potential of that market before you start going full-speed-ahead and committing your resources to a declining or poor market. Therefore, before you hastily decide to jump off the niche cliff without checking your parachute, you should do a marketing evaluation. The Small Business Administration has marketing plans available that are excellent. You can also use a chiropractic adaptation of the SBA marketing plan by downloading the free Chiropractic Marketing Guide located in the Chiro-Biz archives.

LOOK AT BOTH SIDES OF YOUR INFORMATION
As you work your way through the marketing evaluation, one of the items you'll want to check out is how many other chiropractors are serving the same niche. As an example, if you are planning on locating a new practice to serve the agricultural workers in the Philippines, that's great! That's because your evaluation revealed there are no chiropractic providers anywhere in that area. You also should ask yourself, "Why?"

Where Not to Open
If your plan includes opening your office on the lava slopes of Mount Pinatubo, an active volcano, perhaps that's why no one has been serving that segment of the agricultural population. Obviously, in this case, long-term plans for establishing a thriving chiropractic practice would be unrealistic. The point is to look at both sides of your information and keep asking yourself, "What does this mean?"

Since few of us have unlimited resources, when your evaluation reveals that you have discovered an excellent niche for your services, make certain that the size of that niche is large enough to support your anticipated practice growth. On the other side of that information coin, make sure that your intended niche is not so large as to use up all your financial and physical resources during the process of establishing yourself in that market segment.

Therefore, to conserve your resources and make them as effective as possible, we should firmly focus them, like that pencil tip, on a small spot. That will allow us to more easily penetrate our selected market.

IN SUMMARY
When you decide to develop a niche practice, use the following steps to make that journey easier:

1. First off, identify your target segment.
   (Gee! What a unique idea) Believe it or not, I've met some docs who were not specific enough and they had to work twice as hard to get the ball rolling. Instead of targeting "The factory workers of the East Coast", why not start with targeting "The factory workers in your town?" Even better, consider targeting "The factory workers who are now doing what you once did." The grammar is poor but the idea works. It's much easier to penetrate a market when you have a working knowledge of that market.

   When you start writing down the profile of your proposed niche, make certain you take a careful look at the physical size of the intended area (The typical chiropractic marketing area is 3 - 6 miles and sometimes more depending on your specialty). Remember it has to be large enough to support your planned practice size and not consume all of your financial and physical resources as you attempt to provide service to that area. The drain on your resources while trying to properly cover a large area would include such items as advertising, long drive times, signage, extra staff, longer hours and wear / tear on your own energies.

2. List the steps to adequately provide chiropractic services within your niche.
   If these steps are not in line with your practice mission then you may want to re-evaluate your plans. For example, if you decide to target chiropractic services toward all the baseball teams in your area then you will be busy both in and out of your office. You'll want to be visiting team workouts and games for observation, treatment follow-up, holding injury prevention clinics and physicals.

   A baseball-oriented practice might be in conflict, for example, with a practice devoted to pediatric care. If this looks like it is the case, you might want to re-evaluate your proposed market niche to find a more compatible niche.

3. Be able to walk the talk
   If you're going after a niche, it very much helps if you understand how it works and can talk the language of the patients in that market segment.

   Taking the baseball example, if you're going to offer your services to the team, it would be neat if you knew something about the game. You then could talk baseball language and be aware of the physical stresses involved in playing baseball.

   If you are lacking in some aspect needed to properly develop that niche, see if additional training, obtaining experience or hiring staff experienced in that niche would place you in a better position to proceed.

4. Last, but absolutely not least
   Please take the time to go over your marketing plan. When you finish, it will clearly spell out whether or not you are in a good position to proceed with your plans for developing a chiropractic niche practice. If it indicates otherwise, taking time to do the marketing evaluation will save you a lot of time money and wasted effort.

   Whatever you decide...please make a decision. Niche marketing is an important aspect of any company's success whether they are local or international.

   So don't be like the procrastinator who said, "If at first I don't succeed, there's always next year." Not likely! Next year, someone else will be providing similar services to a niche you should have owned. You really need to start today.

   For hundreds of valuable ideas on how to profitably manage your practice go to
   www.BusinessofChiropractic.com

Tips to Increase Employee Longevity
  printer friendly version
by: Ivan Delman, D.C.

AN EXPENSIVE CYCLE
Wouldn't it be a pleasure not to periodically have to hire staff replacements? Not only is that process time-consuming but it also is expensive. Plus...Until you get the new hire up to speed, you and your remaining staff will have to help the new hire get up to speed. This will hinder the operations of your practice.

Also, I remember reading a study that (paraphrased) stated, “When you lose an experienced staff member, the monetary loss will eventually equal a year's salary of your lost staffer before the replacement is fully trained and productive.”

So, what can you do to keep those valued, experienced employees?

Below are proven tips that’ll help you to keep valued employees happy and staying with you for the long haul:

• TIP…MOTIVATION BY PARTICIPATION
  During your staff meetings, keep your ears open for new ideas from staff members.

  For example, say that one of your staff mentions, "I haven’t seen patient Tom Jones for a while."
  Take advantage of your staffer’s interest. Allow them time, during their normal day, to go through your database and assemble a list of lapsed patients.

  Then, with the same staff member, work up a script. Give them the time and a place to call those lapsed patients. If your staff member does a good job getting lapsed patients to “Return to the fold” reward him or her for their productive efforts. Make certain that the rest of your staff is aware of what they’ve just accomplished.

  Many successful companies encourage employees to handle problems encountered on the job by working out the solutions among themselves.

  Think about that…We’ve all done that at one time or another.

  An Example
  Right in the middle of a busy time time, the front desk person comes to you with an operational problem. You can't handle it immediately. You suggest to the person with the problem to see another staff member who has experience running the front desk. “Perhaps they have some experience with that problem,” you advise.

  Now…Take the above example and expand on it:

  During your staff meetings, note the problems mentioned by people at the meeting. If your staff is large enough, form groups consisting of different departments to brainstorm the problem(s) and to come up with a list of solutions. Otherwise, take an hour or so out of a typically slow day and have your entire staff meet to discuss problems and possible solutions.

  Make it easy on them by shutting down the telephone and locking the front door.

  At the next staff meeting, ask them to report on their findings. You’ll be delighted to see some good solutions. On top of that, you’ll see employees whose motivation has been increased by participating in the decision-making process.

  The management at Cisco Internet Systems calls this “The Empowered Employee.” This is a great term since it describes the feeling an employee will develop when they are involved in the operational aspect of your practice.

  Another Example
  In my office, my back-room person was looking somewhat bored with her job. I extended her responsibilities to handling all inventory items in the office. This included purchasing (I set the hi/lo inventory levels), inventory rotation, working with patients who needed guidance re appliances and handing out pre-printed answers to repetitive nutritional questions.

  Her new duties not only renewed her job enthusiasm but also positively affected her regular back-room duties.

• TIP…CROSS-TRAINING
  When training a new employee in their job duties, it’s expected that there will be a period of non-productive time while the new person is learning their job duties.

  One way to reduce that non-productive time is cross training. That is, you train one of your long-standing employees to take over some important portion of the new person’s duties.

  While training the new person, have the long-standing employee train the new person some important portion of their job.

  This is a win-win deal because now you have made two members of your staff more valuable. The process may slow down your productivity, however, that’s just temporary.

  However, this process will pay off later when you start scheduling vacations or in case of staff illness because you now have an existing trained replacement.

• TIP…TRADING JOBS
  When you are performing your Mobile Management routines determine if someone might be able to do better elsewhere.

  One day, I was talking to the employee responsible for my billing; I was trying to determine why her stats were down. During our conversation, I got the impression that she wasn’t all that happy with the job. To her credit, she always had a great attitude and interacted well with patients.

  On the other hand, the person running the front desk, at that time, had only a “Fair” personality. When she was under pressure, she had a tendency to get a little snippy.

  After discussions with both people, they agreed to cross-train each other then trade jobs. It worked out very well. Both people not only felt more comfortable in their new jobs, but each performed better in their new assignments.

• TIP…THE PYGMALIAN EFFECT
  In essence, the Pygmalian Effect occurs when you have a persistently held belief in a staff member that eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  This belief can either work for or against your purposes.

  As an example, if you believe that one of your staff members is smart, attuned to their job and has potential, then you’ll treat that person much different than one that you believe has low or no potential.

  The differences are subtle and a proper explanation requires more space than this article allows. Therefore, soon there’ll be a much longer and detailed article dedicated to this phenomenon and how to apply it to staff members posted on our website.

  To sum up the Pygmalian Effect in a few words…If you truly believe in one or more of your staff members, you will subtly (Or not) transmit this feeling and they will live up to your expectations.

  Conversely, if you don’t, you will also subtly transmit this feeling and that employee will fail eventually fulfilling the prophecy you had projected for them.

• TIP...WHAT ELSE?
  There are many more things that can be done to keep your employees happy without giving away the store.

  For instance, taking just a few private minutes to tell an employee how much you appreciate their work. If they’ve recently done something positive that ended up benefiting another area of your practice, tell that person about it in glowing terms.

  If an employee did something above and beyond, then give them a ½ day off with pay. Tickets for them to take their family to a special event are also a wonderful way to say, “Thank you for a job well done`!”

Taking the time and making a strong effort to keep your employees motivated and job-satisfied is an excellent investment in your practice. After you’ve finished reading this, why not take a minute to pat a staffer on the back and tell 'em how much they are appreciated? It’ll brighten their day and yours.

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