We also discuss the brand-new online marketing overhaul mini class that you can get absolutely free at www.uppercervicalmarketing.com/omom
We also discussed in our client highlight segment the results of Dr. Casey Weerheim from Sioux Falls South Dakota. Looking for results like Dr. Casey give us a call at 877-252-1230
http://www.aretechiro.com/
https://uppercervicalmarketing.com/omom
https://uppercervicalmarketing.com/upper-cervical-chiropractic-marketing-case-studies/
Dr. Davis: Hey everybody! It’s Dr. Bill Davis here with Dr. Tyler Evans and Dr. Mychal Beebe, from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. How are you doing docs?
Dr. Beebe: Hey Bill!
Dr. Evans: Hello!
Dr. Beebe: We’re doing great, good to be here.
Dr. Davis: Awesome. So, we’ve known each other for a few years now, and I think it’s awesome to see how you guys have grown and moved through different steps in your careers, and it’s just really cool to have you guys on the podcast today, but for anybody out there that doesn’t know you personally, can you both introduce yourselves to our audience?
Dr. Beebe: Sure. So, we are really excited to be sharing with you and we listen to the Upper Cervical Marketing podcast all the time. It’s just an awesome distribution that you have and has helped us out a lot. So, we’re happy to share our story.
My name is Mychal Beebe and I am from originally in New England but went to Life Chiropractic College West and graduated in 2010, and after that moved up to Seattle, Washington in 2011, and became an associate of Dr. Michael Lenarz’s. So Dr. Lenarz has a number of practices in the Seattle, Washington area, and I worked directly with him in his Sedro-Woolley office, which is fairly infamous, and we’re there together for about nine months and then he said, ‘Hey! Dr. Beebe, I want to open a practice downtown Seattle. So, he provided the capital and I did the leg work and we opened the practice together from the ground up. Literally, training the staff, putting the waiting chairs together, and I worked that practice and built it up from 2011 until about 2015, and then picked up, moved across the country and opened this practice, which I co-owned with my husband, and we opened that together in March of 2016.
Dr. Davis: Awesome.
Dr. Beebe: It’s a little bit of a whirlwind.
Dr. Evans: Yeah.
Dr. Davis: Very cool, great introduction. Tyler, how about you? Can you give us an introduction?
Dr. Evans: Very similar. So, I grew up Indiana and went to Life Chiropractic College West from 2008-2011 and met Dr. Beebe Mychal there, and at the time I was an active member in Delta Sigma Chi and met Darren White while I was in school, and was taking the Blair. I took the Blair class in school and the Blair elective and ended up going up to associate with Darren White who is a former associate of Michael Lenarz and got to practice alongside Darren for a short time, which was a fabulous experience. I learned a lot just from being around that guy, and then he stepped out of practice, and went into a Neuro full-time, and at the same time Dr. Beebe and I actually enrolled along with Darren’s help. Darren afforded a handful of associates and other doctors across the country the ability to do the Upper Cervical Diplomate Program and that was the first round and did a scholarship.
So, thank You Darren White for that. We really appreciate that, and that kind of that experience along with being around Dr. Lenarz there in Seattle, and a lot of the other Upper Cervical docs, really give us a good base, and we moved out here to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to be closer to Dr. Beebe’s family, and then we opened up our practice in 2016, and we’ve been going for about two years now, and it’s been really fantastic. We’ve created our Vision at Green <5:34>. It’s awesome.
Dr. Davis: Awesome. So, you both mentioned some mentors that had a big impact on you, right? And we’ve had Dr. Lenarz on the podcast before and I’ve been chasing Darren White now for three years or something. He hasn’t come on yet, but both of them have tremendous clinic systems and clear chiropractic and health first chiropractic, and so talk a little bit more about the impact that their mentorship or other mentors that you’ve had have made on you and your growth.
Dr. Evans: Well, I can talk real quick. Coming up in school, getting just to know Darren was fantastic. He actually taught. He donated his time in school and taught. He taught a Blair, it was an overview course at Life West, which is no longer available but it was really cool to get the breakdown of headspace, and how to grow your practice, and hearing all the any trending new ideas about marketing and business management while we were in school, and so Darren was a big influence on a lot of people at Life West while we were there as well as Shawn Dill. We both went to school while Shawn Dill was actually teaching. He taught Philosophy I to me. I think as well as you too Mychal, and Shawn actually did an Upper Cervical program at school too for students. It was called that something coaching program, which was very influential to a lot of kids at Life West.
So, Life West when we were there had a really big Upper Cervical influence, and so that really kind of got me looking in that direction. I think the thing that really drew me into the Upper Cervical world was Mashall Dickholtz actually senior. He presented, I think it was my first semester quarter there at school, and he presented and he had this pointer, and he was pointing around, and he was talking to the audience and he said, ‘If you’re not doing Upper Cervical work, you’re not doing specific work, and that’s all that matters, and he was just so adamant about good quality work and a fine pencil and fine flying markings and fine measurements and it was really something to behold, and he was at the time I think maybe in his 80’s when he gave that talk.
Dr. Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Evans: It was really impactful and then I went on my search and found Darren and yeah the crew that I ended up training with but…
Dr. Beebe: Yeah, mentorship I think is really important for an Upper Cervical provider and I think it’s like with any art, you can learn leaps and bounds if you compress somebody else’s experience and kind of download it from them.
Dr. Davis: Yes.
Dr. Beebe: So, I worked with Dr. Lenarz and I give him a tremendous amount of credit for my clinical expertise, and I think that’s where the rubber meets the road because we can talk about all the fancy practice systems, and all the fancy languaging and scripting that you want, and your practice can look really know cutting-edge but if you can’t deliver the service that you’re providing, which is to get sick people well, and to teach them about the innate healing ability of the body, then it’s not going fly.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: And so, the clinical systems are the most important thing, and if you could work with somebody day in and day out, and observe their clinical decision making. See them handle the difficult cases, watch what they do in conversations when things are going really well, that was something that I saw from Dr. Lenarz was somebody was like, ‘Wow doc! You’re amazing! This is wonderful.’ It’s great and instead, he turns it right back around and says, ‘Your body is doing a wonderful job. You should really be proud of yourself. You’re showing up. You’re doing the work. You’re going to get the result.’ And just that refinement of education in a patient is so vital because rather than taking all the credit when things are going great, that means you have to take all the credit when things are not going great.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: So, you don’t want all the credit, you don’t want all the blame, and so also seeing how he would handle difficult conversations and that type of nuance with both clinical expertise as well as communication, I don’t think is something that you can necessarily get in just a one-off seminar, three or four weekends a year.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: I think that seeing the day in and day out can be hugely valuable, and being at somebody’s side when they’re looking at a difficult series of x-rays or when they’re looking at somebody and it’s questionable as to whether to adjust or not to adjust can be so very, very helpful, and so the clinical expertise and having the mentorship there, I think is the number one thing that’s been most valuable for me and my associateship, and that says a lot because my associateship and my associate experience has been invaluable on a lot of different levels and I would definitely be remiss <11:02> if I didn’t mention some of the other docs in the diplomate program, which I also learned from Julie Meyer-Hunt has been a big influence as well as Scott Rosa and Jeff Shelton in Calgary and Jeff has really influenced a lot of our ideas around how we work with professionals and how we manage our patients as well as how we manage our staff. He has been invaluable in that way and the professional piece has really helped build our practice.
Dr. Davis: Yeah. So, let’s shift in that direction because you were sharing with me before we started the recording just some things you guys are doing that just have been tremendous for your practice from a professional referral standpoint and some of the strategies that you use that have been very successful, and so I want to talk about those and some of the nuts and bolts that are associated with that, and so what are some of the things that you’ve implemented in the practice, now only a couple years in that really have produced a lot of fruit?
Dr. Beebe: Yeah. So, when we worked in Seattle, I was there for five years and I think Tyler practiced there for four years in a bit, and a lot of the systems were driven around screening and bringing new patients in the door.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: And so, when we were thinking about moving out here to Portsmouth and wanting to open a practice, we knew we had the tools to screen. So, we got new patients in the door the next week but we also wanted to develop relationships with professionals so that we wouldn’t have to be screening five, ten years in.
I think screening can be a very valuable tool to help a young doctor kind of hit the ground running with patients and cut their teeth on how to say, stand in the face of somebody saying, ‘no’ and be confident with that.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: But at the same time at 10 years into my practice, I don’t want to be screening once a week. I think that there’s more valuable use of my time.
Dr. Davis: Sure.
Dr. Beebe: And so, those relationships have been really helpful in actually building our practice. So, in 2017 which was kind of the first full year that our practice was open, over 60% of our new patients were generated by professional referrals.
Dr. Davis: Awesome.
Dr. Beebe: And one of the tools that we used for those professional referrals was something that we called ‘Provider Night.’ ‘Provider Night’ was a system that I actually kind of stole from a physiatry office back in Seattle. So, I got in relationship with some physiatrist and they helped hosted an event in their office and they did it monthly, and they would bring in other providers. So, a lot of times because we’re right next to UDub <13:51>. It was UDub Medical Doctors or researchers. They had some acupuncturists.
Dr. Davis: Sure.
Dr. Beebe: I’d never saw them have a chiropractic speak but they would have these other professionals come and speak, and then other healthcare providers would come and listen, and it’s really about just exchanging information to create a community.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: So, when you have somebody who might be a difficult case, then, ‘Okay, if I’m having trouble and we’re clearing out their spine but they’re still having an issue with their feet, who’s the podiatrist that I recommend, and you know what that podiatrist does because at some point they may have shared at the ‘Provider Night.’
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: So, because we were just starting out and kind of time was a bit shorter, we decided to do it once a quarter. So, we did it once a quarter and we found a provider that was very well known in the area, and we found a date and time that works for them to come and speak, and we did a two-hour segment on a Thursday evening from 6:30 to 8:30, and essentially we would provide some drinks, some beer, wine and soda water, some appetizers, and from 6:30 to 7:00 people would come and mingle. The provider would start to speak around 7:00 to about 7:45. There’s some Q&A from 7:15 to 8:00, and then from 8:00 to 8:30 people kind of mingle and wrap up, and we’ve been doing that now for the past two and a half years, once a quarter, and it now has a reputation. We have a mailing list of providers of over 60 providers and our office was only a thousand square feet. So, we kind of started on a bootstrap.
Dr. Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Beebe: We didn’t take out a big loan to start this practice, and so, we get between 10 to 20 providers per provider night, and so we’d love to have a larger space for it but 20 was standing room only, so.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: Yeah, the provider nights have been awesome, and I would love to hear your thoughts Dr. Evans.
Dr. Evans: Yeah and I think to go along with that, it’s providing objective criteria in our office that allows us to communicate with other practitioners, and doing that on a consistent basis and creating reports that we then sent out, so that we’re speaking the same language. We’re giving them updates on… When somebody sends a patient to you, they want to know how that patients doing. They don’t just want to kind of go to the wayside and…
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Evans: …for the best kind of thing.
So, it’s really important that, okay. Yeah, they come to the ‘Provider Night.’ They’ve become part of the group and then you communicate with them and communicate in a way that they understand and hopefully see some change in, and I don’t think they need to see a hundred percent change. It’s just little functional changes make a big difference even for the patient but for the providers they see that, and they see the value. So, we do reports. Every week, we do a weekly meeting.
I know you’ve talked about on the talks before about how important a weekly meeting is, and at the end of that weekly meeting with your retention stats, and when we do retention stats, we always say, ‘Okay. So, it’s been a week. We have these people that were referred by a provider had their reports sent out. Okay, when that person hasn’t, that person has. Good, we need to do that, and get on top of it.’
So, we have a tracking system to make sure that we’re doing those communications and staying on top of it.
Dr. Beebe: Yeah. Tyler touched on a really important topic and in communicating with professionals in a way that they can understand, and it’s really important when I’m communicating with another professional. When I describe the adjustment, I don’t say, ‘Oh well, it’s toggle drop piece <17:45> Blair torque adjustment.’
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: That is a language that they don’t understand.
Dr. Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Beebe: …and so, I say, ‘It’s a non-manipulative adjustment. There’s no extension-rotation or lateral flexion of the neck. There’s no cavitation of the joint. It’s done with my hand in the special table. The patient is in a neutral position,’ and that little difference in language will really help a provider immediately know what you’re talking about, and it makes a difference, so that you don’t kind of get caught up in the lexicon <8:16> of having to talk with them about subluxation or having to talk with them about a toggle torque adjustment.
Dr. Davis: Right. Yeah.
Dr. Beebe: When you’re creating these relationships, all of the relationships that we have started because we were curious about what that provider did, so that we could refer our patients to the best person for that specific specialty. Whether it’s optometry, naturopathy or physical therapy, the people who are in our provider network are the people that we reached out to and hit the ground or hit the pavement and knocked on the door and said, ‘Hey! I heard you are really good in the area. I’d love to know more about what you do, so that I can get my patients better faster.’
Dr. Davis: Awesome. So, that’s going to be my next question. So, how did you build these relationships, so you literally called up different practitioners within the community and you made appointments or whatever, and you went over to their offices and with the heart behind it, which is a lot of times we talk about professionals? You have to come into it with the right heart, right?
Dr. Beebe: Yeah.
Dr. Davis: You have to come in with to with the right mindset, the right heart, that it’s about helping your patients, and helping their patients, it’s about the people not about how can I serve me, right?
Dr. Beebe: Oh yeah.
Dr. Beebe: …and when you go into those offices with that mindset, it makes a huge difference in how you develop those relationships. Is that been your experience as well?
Dr. Beebe: Huge difference in how you develop the relationship, and getting your ego out of the way.
Dr. Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Beebe: Like providers will never trust somebody that says, ‘Oh, I can help that 100%. I can help that 100%.’ Like, yeah, we are really good and how we market it ourselves is that, we work primarily with the upper neck, and we’re concerned with spinal health from the top down, and we are work specifically with headaches, head and neck injury and neck pain.
Although, oftentimes we see other spinal related conditions because the cervical spine influences the rest of the spine, and that’s kind of how we spoke to providers, and they got that.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: …and they weren’t looking for us like, I think that if you are a young doctor or even if you’re a doctor that’s kind of looking to get some more professional referrals, if you are talking to another professional and you’re every answer to their question of condition, ‘Can you help this,’ is ‘Oh yes 100%! I can help that 100%. I can help that.’ A red flag is going to go off.
Dr. Davis: Sure.
Dr. Beebe: If you say to them, ‘I’ve seen a lot of that, and I’ve had a lot of success, and if I can’t figure it out I’ve got a great network of other people that I work with and can manage those issues with, then that trust is going to be a little bit deeper.
Dr. Davis: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean having enough humility and honesty is a great way to build relationships with anybody, right?
Dr. Beebe: Yeah.
Dr. Davis: …and especially, and I’ve talked with Jeff Shelton extensively on this subject. I think even on this podcast and he talks a lot about it’s really about just developing friendships just like you would with anybody else, right? And it’s developing friendships with professionals who, it just makes sense for you to help each other after that, and ultimately for the benefit of the patient, right?
Dr. Beebe: Yeah, and making friends with those people and when you do find somebody that you really kind of think up with, then you say, ‘Hey! Who’s the person that you refer to when you need a shoulder guy?
Dr. Davis: Yes.
Dr. Beebe: Who’s the person you need when you’ve got a hand issue? And it’s kind of like, okay, open up your role and that once you have that one relationship with a good provider, then they can open up their role, especially if they’ve been in the area longer.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: …and then you have. So, for us there’s a couple of very instrumental providers. One is a naturopath named Dr. Chatel <22:10> and one is an optometrist named Dr. Kaczynski, and Dr. Kaczynski is actually coming to the Blair conference in October to present to the Blair group…
Dr. Davis: Very cool.
Dr. Beebe: …on some of the collaborative staff that we’ve done together.
Dr. Davis: Very cool.
Dr. Beebe: So, we’re really excited about that, but like with Dr. Chatel and Dr. Kaczynski, we got some good rapport going with them, and then we said, ‘Okay.’ So, we want to get our patients better faster. Who are your people and then we could go and say, ‘Oh, Dr. Smith, Dr. Kaczynski said that you were her knee guy.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: We work with Dr. Kaczynski all the time, which automatically increases their level of confidence in you.
Dr. Davis: Perfect.
Dr. Beebe: And so, leveraging those relationships in an intelligent way is really important as well.
Dr. Davis: Yeah, that’s tremendous. So, the Provider Night is quarterly basis, two hours, 6:30 to 8:30 on a Thursday night. You get like you said 10 to 20 people on there, in a standing-room-only and that’s just been a tremendous benefit for your practice and for your patients.
That’s great. It’s a great thing to share that with our audience, and so I know another thing that we had talked about was, in your previous associate positions you were in a mostly an insurance-based model, correct? And so, as you shifted, as you went on into your own practice, you went in, and now you’re in a fully cash, all cash practice. And so, talk about that transition why you made that transition, and what were some of the challenges, how you have been able to overcome those, and just for anybody that’s out there that is either in that insurance position now and they’re thinking about moving to cash or they’re coming out of school or coming out in social position and they’re deciding which way they want to go.
Dr. Beebe: Yeah, I will definitely be happy for us to share about that. I just want to circle back around to the Provider Night one second.
Dr. Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Beebe: Just because there is a piece. I just thought of that’s fairly important because like any system, it requires work, and so the Provider Night, we set the date with the provider probably three months before it happens, and then we send out, we have an Eventbrite. We have a Facebook page. We send out the Eventbrite and the Facebook information around six weeks before the event.
You do some personal follow-ups with the event. It does require a lot of work to make the event go, because people are busy, and for them to take time and energy from their family and come to an office.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: I’m not getting paid for it. If you want a high-quality practitioner, and we have MDs present. We have naturopaths, like people that do not necessarily need to build their practice because their practice is already self-sustaining.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: Those are the people that you want, and so it does require a lot of management and work to make sure that the timing works out for everybody, and people can show up and be there. And so, that system without mentioning kind of the marketing of the Provider Night, it doesn’t work without it.
Dr. Davis: Sure. Great. We’re glad you’re able to share that and had that in.
Dr. Beebe: Yeah. So, Doc, would you like to share about cash and insurance.
Dr. Evans: Well, in Seattle we were providers with all the major insurance companies, and when I first got out of school, it was still pretty solid on reimbursement, and then just in the 4 years while I was in Seattle, it started to get to where there were more prior authorizations. It was just getting tougher to get that normal level of reimbursement that we were initially getting. And so, like when I talked about that quite frequently, and as well as some of the other associates that we work with there in Seattle, and kind of game planned it. We knew that when we moved across the country, we wanted to try to shift that a little bit, and talked with a lot of people about different systems, because there’s a lot of different ways you can do that.
You can do completely catch where you do no insurance at all, where you’re not taking any insurance information.
We do take insurance information in. We do bill out of network benefits, which is we find it to be helpful. There are some patients that do have some good out of network benefits, and so for them that’s a good plus, a value-added, and it tends to still, it’s okay. The paperwork isn’t too rough for us there.
The thing I think that is, the trickiest is Medicare, and I’m sure you as you know Medicare, it’s not easy to navigate that, and from what I found with in chiropractic, you can’t really not do Medicare. Maybe that’s a gray area but you know you have an MPI number. If you see a Medicare patient you need to be billing Medicare.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Evans: So, we do that we do the Medicare work, and that’s probably the majority of the work that we do.
Dr. Beebe: …actually the majority of our patient population is cash but we do have some Medicare patients.
Dr. Evans: Right.
Dr. Beebe: The only insurance billing that we do is Medicare.
Dr. Davis: Got you.
Dr. Beebe: …and so yeah. We do insurance supported reimbursement essentially, which is the patient covers the fees in the office. We will build the patient’s insurance, and then the insurance will reimburse the patient, and the only insurance that we’re contracted with are Medicare, workers comp and PI.
Dr. Davis: Got you.
Dr. Beebe: I think that the conversations that Tyler and I had when we wanted to figure out what we wanted to do insurance or cash, really came down to what was the practice ideal. What did we want to have as our practice, and we are not looking to do a lot of high-volume, many visits per week, lot of treatment modalities. We didn’t want to do any kind of rehab mode… We do some rehabilitation exercises but we didn’t want to do a lot of rehabilitation services or modalities, and so if we wanted to practice like that, doing the insurance route would have cut our office visit average significantly to the point where we would have been forced to see a lot of patients, and with how we want to practice and detail of our initial exam and our integrity with the exams so that we write these reports for other providers, we needed to be able to see a bit of a lower patient volume and get more for each patient visit, so that we would be able to have a sustainable practice model, and so that lends itself to a cash model.
And so, it really depends on how you want to practice because it’s about choices. If you see a practice where you maybe even employ a physical therapist, then you have many different modalities that you want to have available for your patients, then insurance may be something that you really want to go with. For us, that’s not what our vision was.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: We really wanted to focus on the adjustment and providing a good upper cervical care and providing good kind of chiropractic knowledge to the greater provider area, so that means we wanted to see a little bit fewer people spend a little bit more time with them and get paid very well.
So, I think that our office visit average is somewhere around $86 a visit, which is a comfortable spot to be and something that cash affords us.
Dr. Davis: Yeah, that’s awesome. So, keeping your office visit average at that level in a cash practice is, that’s rare. I would say in general, and so what is some of the ways that you would like structuring of the practice or things that you’ve added in as far as adding value I guess or that people say, ‘Yep, I don’t mind paying that amount in a cash practice because of the level of value that you’ve established in their minds.
Dr. Evans: Well, I think that a big part of that that starts out is our imaging. We do cone beam CT which has a higher value right off the bat, gives us a lot more clinical information. It’s 3D x-ray. That’s just the place that we start from.
We do a very thorough exam probably neurologically speaking, and just upper cervically speaking. It’s a very thorough exam. So we recharge for that, and that value then goes into how we communicate with other providers. So, we’re able to communicate what they’re looking for in those tests, and then in care we do exams through care, which is important progress exams, which is a really important part, and I think that’s a lot of that is Dr. Beebe, as much as I would not like to say, but in practice in Seattle, I was more focused on just adjusting and like just seeing patients, and not so much about the exams and progress, but it’s really important, and I can’t stress that enough. It’s changed my practice tremendously because I can see changes that I wasn’t seeing before, and so can they, and that’s a lot of value right there just those progress exams.
Dr. Beebe: Yeah, I think that’s a really important piece when a patient is coming in, and they have had a condition for 20 years, and they’re sitting in front of a 30 something doc, who they’ve seen countless doctors. By the time they’re in their 60’s and they’ve had chronic migraines for 20 years.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: … and this doctor sitting across from them and says, ‘Okay, well I can solve that.’ Well you know what, sometimes we hit the home runs and sometimes we can but sometimes it can, and one of the things that patients are looking for is progress, and to measure that progress… I mean, in the human condition, the human spirit, we our content if we’re seeing change and progress, and we’re not necessarily expecting the homerun miracle case.
And so, patients really respect that. They get it and they understand. That’s another way that we also communicate that it’s not necessarily about just getting rid of the headaches but it’s about keeping your spine healthy and functional to the best of your body’s ability for the rest of your life with just few adjustments as possible, and that is something that, when they start to see the progress and even though maybe all of their symptoms might not be gone, they get that.
‘Okay, well I’m taking care of my spine and it’s taken down my migraines from everyday to now. I have one a week or two a month, one a month, what other pieces of the pie do I need to plug in there?’ And then, it’s a great opportunity to say, ‘Well, hey! You know what? I know this great physical therapist that’s going to work on your movement pattern. I know a great naturopath that’s really going to help you with some supplementation because it might be some deficiencies or toxicities in your diet.
Dr. Davis: Right.
Dr. Beebe: …and so, those progress reports help people see change and that’s what they’re after more than getting rid of all their symptoms, and if you only focus on the symptoms and your practice is going to be symptom-based versus if you can show progress and educate about spinal health and your practice is going to be about taking care of the spine.
Dr. Davis: Yeah, absolutely and something I’ve been noticing as we’ve been talking, you both have different things that you’ve learned from each other and also that you have different strengths or whatnot that you may have, and so for anybody else out there that may be a couple going into practice together or they’ve met in school and become a couple, which happens a lot. Right? As it did for you.
What what are some of the challenges or some of the things that you’ve really been able to learn about working together every day both professionally and personally that maybe you could share with others that may be in that same circumstance?
Dr. Beebe: Yeah. I think that being having many different levels of relationship. You have to be good about separating those boundaries and whatever we’re talking about whether you are friends with the patient as well as there’s a patient in your office as well as they’re another health care provider or if you are a husband and a wife as well as business partners as well as friends as well as colleagues.
There’s a lot of different levels of relationship, and being able to draw some clear boundaries around those is really important. There’s a pretty hard line that we both have to remind each other about, is like no talking about patient care at 10 o’clock in bed.
Dr. Davis: Yeah.
Dr. Beebe: Both of us will sleep into it and then we kind of look at each other and we’re like, ‘Sh*t! I am sitting next to you at 10 o’clock in bed. I need to just not be talking about Mrs. Johnson and her headaches.’
Dr. Davis: Right, yeah. Exactly. That’s a good point.
Dr. Beebe: Yeah. So, having those healthy boundaries, and then also I think from a business colleague standpoint, as a husband-wife team, for us and everybody is different. I think it worked really well to have different silos. So, playing to each other’s strengths, my strength is in management of staff, patient communications, practice systems and some of the technical clinical aspects, and Tyler and I see really well eye – eye on the technical clinical aspects but I know nothing about the technology. So, Tyler did all of the purchasing of our practice equipment, essentially networked with office together. He put his foot down on Chirotouch. Chirotouch has been a great tool for our office and he wanted kind of this Cadillac of software for running our office, and I was wanting to do something less expensive because again, like I said, we didn’t take out a big business loan to start this package.
We did it with some kind of a bootstrap and I can’t imagine where we would be without Chirotouch because it does allow us to have, like access to reports and also access to clinical outcome measurements, like neck pain disability index or the random 36 that we’ve implemented with some of our systems, and so that’s been really helpful, and Tyler is really pioneered also our CBCT and how we have worked with that in our practice and also develop that a little bit beyond what some of the general teachings on CBCT in the upper cervical community are right now, and it’s been invaluable.
Dr. Davis: Awesome.
Dr. Evans: Yeah.
Dr. Beebe: Playing to the strengths and really trying to just respect one another through the process, and then also we as chiropractors I think we are all on the same side of physical, chemical and emotional well-being. And so, the emotional well-being stuff, we try to support each other and take a good care of our bodies. Alright sorry, the physical well-being stuff, we try to support each other taking good care of our bodies and chemical, in terms of eating healthy but the emotional well-being, Tyler and I have also worked with counselors and coaches on how to set up a good relationship through the practice and it hasn’t always been the easiest thing to
do but I think it’s been really rewarding.
Dr. Davis: Awesome. Well, I think we could talk all day. We’ve been having a lot of great conversations today, and I think it’s brought a lot of value to our audience but before I wrap up just wanted to give you guys a chance to share anything else that you’d like to share with our audience whether it’s an encouragement or whatever, anything else that each of you some time to share something before we wrap up today.
Dr. Evans: Well, we have a business coach that actually, he told us about this guy, Darren Hardy who does this video Dale and Darren daily. It’s really interesting, just a couple minutes a day but the other day Darren’s video was about success, and how success flows in and out of life and that it’s easy to achieve success once. It’s easy to get from the couch to the 5K and do that 5K one time but it’s really hard to do it consistently. It’s really hard to achieve a high OVA cash practice, week in and week out with new patients coming in. It takes consistent work where you have to look at what you’re doing weekly, daily, monthly, yearly, what are your goals? What is your vision? What are your action steps to get there, and if you’re not looking at the basics and the fundamentals, you have no foundation and that success won’t be repetitive.
It will be up and down, and I struggled with that a lot over the last few years. When I first started in practice and Mychal’s been a fantastic help in that, and just going back to the basics and really owning those basics that’s what’s going to create good success long term is owning the fundamentals.
Dr. Davis: Awesome.
Dr. Beebe: Yeah. Tyler I can’t echo that enough either and I would even say that the fundamentals is just being a good chiropractor first.
I think it’s so easy to get caught up in the shiny systems and the shiny fancy office with the leather chairs and none of the success will follow if you can’t deliver the results, and so the results for me is where I get my juice, is where I find it so much fun to practice.
I recently had a patient, so she joined our mailing list when we were actually doing some of the upper cervical marketing work with you Bill and she joined that mailing list. She’s got a new patient appointment. We were much more expensive than the other chiropractors, so she cancelled a new patient appointment. She started with another chiropractor. She worked with them for about six weeks, and then she ends up in our office, and she just came in today and she’s like, ‘I’m feeling better than I felt in years,’ and she didn’t need an adjustment. She was happy to put our regular office visit fee is $65. So, she was happy to pay $65 for me to look at her, tell her she’s doing good, high-five her, and she was on her way, and we’ll see her in another month, and I think that it’s because she has experienced the difference of what really specific care can provide, and that care has to be done with integrity, and with just getting the results for the patient, and that’s what it’s all about.
Dr. Davis: Awesome. Well, again great info today. I appreciate both of you and I think this will going to bring a lot of value to our audience, and so appreciate you guys, appreciate what you’re doing and I’m great rest of your day.
Dr. Beebe & Dr. Evans: Thank you very much Bill. We’re happy to be here.
