Taking Time for Practice Building Will Enhance Your Practice
By Mark Sanna, DC, President and CEO, Breakthrough Coaching
The single most effective habit you can develop to successfully manage
your practice, after hiring a professional coach, is to establish regularly
scheduled practice building hours. As a professional coach, I speak to chiropractors
across the country. While almost every doctor I speak to has established
regular hours for patient care, only very few have established similar hours
for practice building.
If you search long enough, in every chiropractic office you will find a
box filled to the brim with seminar notes. These notes are filled with ideas,
each one a gem that has never been implemented. The single most efficient
way to close the gap between idea and implementation is to set aside a minimum
of one to two hours each week devoted entirely to practice building. This
time should take place in your office and should be uninterrupted.
I often must point out to doctors that they have two businesses. The first
business is the patient-care business and the second business is the practice-building
business. Each one of these businesses is vitally important to the overall
success of the practice. However, most doctors attempt to build their practice
and polish their procedures in between and around patient care. Develop
the habit of devoting regularly- scheduled time to building your practice.
This habit will allow you to focus your energy and attention on practice
growth and will keep you from diverting your attention away from your patients
during the time you should be focusing on them.
One of the most fundamental tools that can be used towards practice building
is the Internet. Practice building, should include an invest of time, energy
and effort in becoming Internet proficient. Consider that 53 percent or
143 million Americans access the Internet and that two million Americans
each month access the Internet for the first time. If attracting new patients
to your practice is, at its essence, a matter of making contacts, consider
that 53 percent or 143 million Americans access the Internet and that two
million Americans each month access the Internet for the first time.
I am amazed at how many chiropractic practices are not connected to the
Internet and at the number of those that are connected who do so through
a dial-up modem. The Internet’s finest application is e-mail, because
it offers “frequency for free.” Frequency of contact also leads
to a sense of community among your existing patients and ultimately, to
the key ingredient in any robust, long-term relationship: trust. You can
encourage your patients to volunteer their attention by keeping in touch
with your practice community through a weekly or semi-weekly inspirational,
motivational and informational electronic newsletter. The best part about
an electronic newsletter is that with the click of a mouse your patients
pass it on to everyone in their address book.
Chiropractors across the country are establishing themselves as editors
of electronic “health magazines” for their communities. These
content-driven Web sites provide existing and potential patients with updates
on health information, items of local interest, and articles written by
community-based health care providers who become excellent sources of referrals
to your practice. Today, the most successful chiropractors regularly connect
with their practice members and community through online technology.