By Freddie Ulan, DC, CCN
Excerpted from Special Report, THE MISSING INGREDIENT: ADVANCED CHIROPRACTIC NUTRITIONAL CASE MANAGEMENT IN TODAY’S HEALING PRACTICE
Are You a Slave to Your Practice?
Many of us have built practices that have become our masters. We did it willingly, eagerly even. We created jobs for ourselves and our staff, and the next thing we know, we can hardly ever take a day off—much less a well-earned, three-week vacation with the family—because we “have to make payroll and pay the bills.” And besides, “Who will take care of my patients while I am gone?” If this is your situation, you are not alone. But you can change it.
All you need is the road map out of that situation, as provided in our Route to Clinical Mastery Program. You do not have to be a slave to your practice. With the correct technology of nutritional patient management and a truly workable system of practice management in place in your practice, you’ll be free from the bonds of slavery to your practice—free to get far more sick people well, while having a life of your own.
If you’re already helping countless people, if it’s totally stress-free, and you’re totally enjoying it while making all the money you could ever want, while still having a life, then you’ve arrived.
But the majority of colleagues I have encountered recently aren’t quite there yet, and can derive considerable benefit from what is outlined here.
Let’s Analyze Your Practice
Here are some questions for you:
Are you helping volumes of people?
Are you helping enough folks to make it worthwhile for you to get up in the morning and go to your office?
Another way of asking this is: are you operating anywhere near your actual capacity and potential as a true physical healer?
Some professionals are very busy getting hardly anything accomplished. But deep down they know that even though they’re as busy as they could possibly be, they’re not operating anywhere near their true capacity. They realize, I could be helping five times as many people — or even more—if I only knew how.
When I look at what it takes to have a great practice—for example, a seven-figure practice—it’s not actually that difficult.
Yes, if you aspire to a seven-figure nutritional component, this might mean you would need an associate or two to help you deliver the spinal adjustments in your thriving practice (or an associate to deliver the nutritional component). I can show you how to do that successfully too, regardless of how you want to arrange it—as scores and scores of clients can attest.
But getting back to the numbers: if your office averaged somewhere around 160 nutritional appointments a week, you’re doing over a million dollars a year from this component alone. Now what does that actually come down to? About 32 visits a day, which would give you 160 office visits over a five-day work week. If you worked eight hours each day, that would be four people an hour.
Then again, if you saw six people an hour, you could see 36 people over six hours in a day, and take two hours off. Believe it or not, once you are properly trained, this kind of pace is not stressful at all. In fact, it is quite enjoyable! It is also eminently doable—if you have mastered the right systems and tools, as taught in our Route to Clinical Mastery training program.
Avoiding the “Burnout” Syndrome
Without such a system, you can run into too much stress. I can’t tell you how many chiropractors I’ve run into who at one point were seeing 100 patients a day, giving spinal adjustments to 12 or more patients an hour (you know, the three- to five-minute visit)—and then two years later, they’re on a beach in the middle of the week. I actually bumped into one of these fellows on Venice Beach not too long ago and asked, “Hey, you on vacation?”
“Oh, no,” he replied. “I’m retired. I burned out.”
“Burned out? You were helping so many people!”
“And that’s what got me so tired.”
That’s one heck of a false datum: actually helping a lot of people cannot cause burnout and will not make you tired! Real help, restoring health, is energizing!!
I’ve looked extensively into the subject of burnout, and can tell you that it stems from expending too much effort for not enough return. In the example of the “beach guy” above, the return was not a question of money—he was getting plenty of that. But his real purpose was to get sick people well. He was giving maybe 500 adjustments a week. While that gave most patients at least temporary relief and short-lived periods of well-being, he wasn’t helping nearly enough patients in terms of total health restoration. And that is what burned him out. This can best be described as a “failed purpose.”
One of the reasons why my practice was so stress-free is that we were seeing a large number of people and getting enough of them well to fulfill my purpose! We were literally able to relax through the day, seeing patient after patient in a stress-free activity that could hardly be called “work”—it was too much fun for that!
Does this type of practice also provide the income you need? You bet! Income takes care of itself if you’re:
• achieving your purpose as a healer;
• helping enough people restore their health through natural means;
• fulfilling the reason you and I went into practice in the first place; and
• charging a reasonable fee that patients can afford.
You will be having so much fun, truly helping sick people regain their health, you won’t have much attention on the piles of money coming in. That’s what bean counters are for!
What Is Our Role in Restoring the Nation’s Health?
Chiropractic is the primary profession providing natural solutions to health. We are the only viable alternative to the toxic, medico-pharmaceutical model, which is the wrong model for chronic health conditions. Hence, we have inherited a weighty responsibility: the overall health status of our patients is totally dependent on what we do with our knowledge and skills.
Those of us who understand how to assess and resolve the nutritional component of our patients’ cases—the part that otherwise would keep those subluxations continually recurring—have answers that put each of us miles ahead of all other practitioners, regardless of specialty. If the answers we hold in our hands were broadly implemented, there would be a great increase in general health. Vastly improved health, in turn, would translate into more happiness, deeper contentment, better lives lived, far less dependency on government, and an improved destiny for our beloved nation.
