Do Not replace your front desk with AI. And Do Not replace all of your marketing with AI. I am headed to an office now to help them organize their yearly event at their local county fair. Community events where you show up, meet new people, give them a consultation, and reactivate old timers cannot be replaced by AI. (Nothing like watching a good tractor pull with a former patient!) And… don't let AI make you less human.

Everything you do serves your patients. Their results, their happiness with you and your team, and their service are what will make your practice the best.

Practice growth depends on putting the right structural elements in place at the right time. Internal procedures, hiring, training, marketing, and many other elements come into play. In addition, aligning each function with the others is part of the challenge for the practice owner and the practice team. But your patient has their challenge as well. Their success depends on how well you lay out, and then help them follow, a structured pathway to their health goals.

Below are simple steps for a fun team-building and practice improving drill. It WILL improve retention as a byproduct of helping your patient better achieve their health goals. Do this exercise at least once per quarter and be the best… and help your patients be heroes on their journey to their health goals. And, of course, stay Goal Driven.

Over the years, I have worked with many talented, intelligent, and dedicated doctors—both men and women who were compassionate and effective with their patients. However, not all of them were successful in business. The reason was that they lacked organization—and organizational discipline. That is to say, they lacked the business structure that would support a strong practice function.

Here's the catch corporate owners already know and most independents don't: none of this works without dedicated management. The practices that thrive as groups aren't the ones that got lucky. They're the ones that built management structure on purpose. That Shift — from a personality-based, one-doctor practice to a business built on goals and led by a team — is exactly what I cover in my book from 2001, The Goal Driven Business.

Increasing Engagement Look at yourself and your team as athletes playing in a health care conference. Are you winning? That's the question Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz asked when they studied elite athletes for their book The Power of Full Engagement. Their conclusion: performance depends on managing energy, not just time. Like athletes, people perform best by alternating focused effort with deliberate recovery. Recovery time for your office could include:

No one decides one morning to lower their standards. You never wake up one day and say: “Patients are going to get just a bit less of me today.” Or, “the business performance will drop over the next month.” It happens one degree at a time — an exam abbreviated and rote because the schedule was tight or a report of findings that never quite landed.

Too often, doctors are distracted by the condition of their business...And, as a management coach, I often discover that their performance covers up their pressing concerns about their business, staff, and or overhead issues. It is not that they don't care about their patients, but their business needs as much "adjusting" as their patients. On the other hand, I have seen doctors take time to focus on their notes, on the x-ray and then on the patient in front of them...Happy p

Full capacity is when you are serving as many people as possible, given the available space, equipment, and staff. In other words, what is the maximum number of people you can see in a day – comfortably – given full support? This number will vary, of course, depending on how you practice. Full capacity is a vital goal for financial survival. You are already paying full price for your space, equipment, and team. With lower production, your overhead rises and your profits dec

56 delegates from 13 colonies got together in 1776 in a sweltering building in Philadelphia. Reports indicate there was a lot of bickering and that the delegates were pretty much a bunch of radical nonconformists. I can't help but see the connection between what these brave men fought for and what the brave men and women continue to fight for today in chiropractic and independent, integrative health care professions.

What the heck? What is wrong with people nowadays?? No… “Howdy partner, what brings you into town?” “You from these parts?” Is everyone scared or angry? So, this takes to me to the point of this newsletter... your Front Desk.

A practice is a network of relationships – created and sustained through communication and service.

Whether you have an ADHD brain or not, you are still an entrepreneur, and some of these traits just come with the job.

Get Off the Internet and Into the Neighborhood This Summer. Send this email back to us with a Please send screening form, and we'll send you a form that worked well for us. I may host a short webinar on this later this month, just because it is such a simple and potentially rewarding marketing procedure. It has a very good ROI. A well-run screening can generate 5 or more new patients in an afternoon. Let me know if you'd be interested for your staff.

Trust in medical doctors has collapsed — from 71.5% in 2020 to just 40.1% in 2024. (See my earlier newsletter.) Patients are looking for something else! That would be YOU! The M.D.'s whom I listened to and briefly talked with this last weekend described how practical remedies to COVID were suppressed, and how they saw patients unnecessarily suffer and die. They touched upon how, as highly regarded doctors, they were vilified, fired, and slandered for their work using safe b

There are plenty of examples of these two success drivers in business and in sports teams. But these elements find their parallel in physics. When everyone (or everything) is moving in the same direction for the same reason -- a "flow" state is achieved. You may have felt it before. But it doesn't usually last. Staff change, you change, computer software needs to be updated, backlog found in insurance, and so on. Issues crop up. But with consistent leadership, you find new

But when you are "dangerous" — when you stand firmly for the truth that the body is designed to heal, not to be a lifetime customer of the pharmaceutical treadmill, you become a beacon. Patients today are not looking for more of the same. They are looking for a doctor who stands for something real, regardless of the P.R. cost. Being dangerous is your greatest marketing asset. It builds a level of trust that no institution can break. The patients who are waking up to this rea

There is real science behind this, but it is sort of obvious. People perform better when they have something, or someone, giving them feedback!

Positioning is a marketing concept that means borrowing meaning from things people already trust, admire, or desire—and letting that meaning transfer to your service.