Speaker Dr. Bill Davis
Hello, hello. We are getting ready to start in just less than three minutes. We'll be starting this month's webinar, how to get off the treadmill of solo practice to help more people. This is Dr. Bill Davis with UCM Practice Growth Systems, and we are getting ready to start here in just a little over two minutes.
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This is the five step plan to scale your practice and serve more people. I'm Dr. Bill Davis with UCM Practice Growth Systems. Very excited to present this to you today. This can be some great information, packed full of nuts and bolts information to help you right away.
And we are going to be starting here in just a little, a little over two minutes. We will be getting started on how to get off the treadmill of solo practice to help more people. This is the five step plan to scale your practice, serve more people.
I'm Dr. Bill Davis with UCM Practice Growth Systems. And if you're getting ready to join us in the podcast or the webinar, I should say, try to set aside all distractions, focus in on what we're doing, get a pad of paper, get something to take some notes with.
There's going to be a lot of great stuff for you to be able to write down and help you right away. We are just about a minute and a half away from getting started on how to get off the treadmill of solo practice to help more people.
This is the five step plan to scale your practice, serve more people. I'm Dr. Bill Davis with UCM Practice Growth Systems. And we will be starting here in just a little over a minute from now. We'll be starting right on time, right at the top of the hour and looking forward to getting started with this material.
Lots of great stuff here to go over with you. to get off the treadmill of solo practice to help more people. In less than a minute, we will be starting on the five-step plan to scale your practice, serve more people.
I'm Dr. Bill Davis with UCM Practice Growth Systems and we are excited to get started here in just a little over 40 seconds or so. We will be starting and thank you for joining us. We're just getting ready to get going here.
It's about 30 seconds away. I'm Dr. Bill Davis with UCM Practice Growth Systems and we will be going through the webinar, how to get off the treadmill of solo practice to help more people. This is exciting material.
This is exciting information to be able to share with you. If you're in this place of solo practice, we are very excited to have you here. We'll be starting in less than 10 seconds, right at the top of the hour here.
We are getting ready to start right about. Now, welcome to the webinar for this month. I am Dr. Bill Davis with UCM Practice Growth Systems and we are going to be going through an awesome, awesome amount of information today.
The topic of today's webinar is how to get off the treadmill of solo practice to help more people. This is a five-step plan to scale your practice and serve more people and you know, this is an exciting, exciting topic for me.
I love being able to help doctors scale their practice, help more people in their communities. We've been doing this for many years now, over 12 years.
We've been working with doctors to help them grow their practices and you know, as we start this this webinar today, I wanted to ask you a question and it's, you know, are you tired of feeling like the bottleneck in your own practice?
If you have this situation where you're in solo practice and you're working long hours, your schedule is maxed out, you know, vacations just feel like a luxury and you've thought about hiring but you just don't know where to start, this is going to be where we really are able to help you today is with this situation.
You're in that solo practice situation. You feel like you're in that treadmill practice where if you're not on that treadmill, then nothing's happening with the practice and we want to help you to move through that stage of practice growth and so, you know, if you don't know me, I'm Dr. Bill Davis. I work with a great team here at UCM Practice Growth Systems.
Tony Hook is our Director of Client Success and Tony and I work together really to help upper cervical doctors grow their practices, grow through the different practice stages that we've been able to double dozens of practices over the years, help doctors build million-dollar practices, add associates which is a big part of what we're going to be talking about today,add additional locations, start practices profitably, add additional team members, improve efficiency and effectiveness. These are the kinds of things we do every day along with great producing great content.
Just like this webinar today, we also have, you know, we do a podcast every, every just about every week, interview a lot of the top upper cervical doctors in the world. We do our upper cervical practice survey every year.
We've written two editions of our of the UC practice success handbook, upper cervical practice mastery. And so these are the types of things we do every day to help you grow your practice. And no matter where you are in the growth stages, we have information and services and products to help you grow.
Specifically, what we're going to be talking about today, though, is doctors in the first two stages of practice growth, where you're in that solo practice in practice growth stage one or two. And we'll talk more about, you know, what percentage of doctors are actually in those stages of growth.
Right here on this slide. And this is, this is from our most recent survey. We did our, every year we do a practice survey, interview or survey of upper cervical doctors. And based on our last survey, 2024, fall of 2024, 65% of upper cervical practices are solo practices.
So it's still by far the majority of practices. 25% are in practice growth stage one, which is at, you know, collecting less than $20,000 per month. 40% are in practice growth stage two collecting more than $20,000 per month.
This has improved over the years. It was 80%, you know, 10 years ago when we first started doing the surveys. But, you know, the question I have is, you know, why aren't the majority of practices, multi-doctor practices yet?
And really what I've found is there's, there's about 10 different reasons why. And some of these, you may, you may have multiple of these reasons, but chances are you're going to have at least one of these reasons why you are in solo practice right now.
And so what are those 10 common reasons doctors stay solo, even when they're ready to grow? And so the first one is fear of losing control. You might worry that bringing on another doctor will mean losing control over your patient care or your business decisions or your practice reputation.
You might like making every decision related to your practice, but what this leads to is bottlenecking the practice, right, in producing, preventing true scalability. In reality, delegation creates more freedom, not less, but some solo doctors struggle with trusting others to take care of patients the way they, they do.
That could be one of the reasons why you're solo. Another reason why is that your personal identity is tied to your practice. Some solo doctors have built their... practices around their name, their personal brand, their clinic reputation, their clinical reputation, I should say.
And you might believe, you know, patients come to see you, not another doctor. So making, this may make you hesitant to introduce another, another provider into the practice. This mindset, though, really what it does, it creates a job, not a business.
And this can lead to learn long-term exhaustion, limited freedom, and financial limitations as well. Another reason why you might be solo is fear of hiring and managing other doctors. Hiring, training, and retaining an associate is a new skill set.
Many solo docs may not feel they're prepared for it. You might be worried about finding the right fit, training them properly, or, you know, making sure that you have good quality control. So you just avoid it altogether.
Ironically, the right associate can bring in massive additional revenue and take workload off of workload pressure off of you as the owner. Another reason why you may be solo is you may be focusing on short-term thinking versus long-term growth.
It might be focused on your immediate earnings rather than long-term wealth building, you know, thinking, you know, I take home 100% of my revenue right now. Why would I want to share it with another doc?
But a another reason why you might be solo is fear of change or fear of the unknown. Transitioning to a multi-doctor model requires a mindset shift. It requires leadership skills and strategic growth planning.
You might fear the unknown, choosing to stay in a comfortable, familiar, but limiting solo practice. You might overestimate the risks and underestimate the rewards of expansion. These are all part of that fear of change or fear of the unknown.
Another reason why you might be solo is misinformation or bad experiences. Maybe you've heard horror stories of bad associate hires and assume it doesn't work, or you've had, you had a bad experience yourself with an associate once and now you're gun shy.
But the reality is that bad hiring and poor onboarding frequently lead to problems, not the multi-doctor model itself. Another reason why you might be solo is avoiding conflict and leadership responsibilities.
Leading a team of doctors requires setting expectations and managing performance and having difficult conversations. You might be avoiding leadership challenges, preferring to work alone rather than deal with potential conflicts.
However, great leadership skills are learned, not inherited, and avoiding growth means avoiding higher income, greater impact, and long-term stability. Another reason why you might be solo is misunderstanding life balance.
You might be thinking, if I just work harder now, I'll eventually have the freedom I want. But in reality, staying so solo creates a cycle of dependency where you can never step away from the practice without revenue dropping.
That is what a treadmill practice is. A multi-doctor model actually provides more personal time, flexibility, and financial security. A ninth reason why you might be solo is the fear of patient resistance.
You might be thinking, my patients won't wanna see another doctor. They only wanna see me. But when positioned correctly, patients actually appreciate having greater availability, shorter wait times, and consistent care, even if it's from another doctor.
A waiting list practice is never good. The key is training patients to trust the practice, not just the individual doctor. And lastly, the reason why you might be solo is just lack of an exit strategy.
I've never thought about the fact that at some point, you're going to leave this practice that you have. You might... not have a clear plan for retirement or practice transition. Without a multi-doctor setup, your only exit strategy is selling to another solo doctor, which is a lot less likely, or simply closing your doors, which nobody wants.
A multi-doctor practice increases business evaluation. It makes it easier to sell or transition ownership profitably. And so the reality is that a multi-doctor practices when in the long run. While staying in solo practice may feel safer and more comfortable, it comes at a huge cost.
No scalability, no ability to step away, higher burnout risk, limited revenue growth, difficult or impossible to sell later. A multi-doctor practice allows for higher earnings with less personal workload, more freedom and flexibility, scalability, financial security, and a real business that operates beyond you as the owner.
So that's really what we're going to talk about today is how to get off this treadmill of solo practice so you can help more people. And there's five steps we're going to walk you through to help you do that because the reality of a treadmill practice is it's a practice that does not produce income if you're not seeing patients.
You must consistently work in the business rather than working on the business, constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on strategic growth, regularly running into capacity issues, struggling with life balance, vacations, maternity leaves are extremely difficult to take in a solo practice.
And it can lead to burnout. It can lead to long hours. It can lead to limited freedom, no or limited voc vacations or inconsistent revenue. And so the number one reason why solo practitioners feel struck, feel stuck is that they are trapped in a job.
They've created this for themselves instead of building a true business. And so we want to help you build that business because we don't want you to just be trading time for money. Your income is directly tied to how many patients you see in a treadmill practice.
If you haven't built scalable systems, so you have to, you've got to personally manage every detail, you may fear delegating or don't know how to effectively build a team, and you may feel trapped in the, if I don't do it, nobody will get it done mindset.
So the solution to all of this is to shift from a solo practitioner to a business owner mindset. In order to do that, you've got to systematize operations, so the practice runs smoothly without you, hire and train a team to share the workload, leverage automation and marketing to create predictable revenue, move from practitioner mode to CEO mode, focusing on leadership and strategy.
This shift allows you to help more people, increase your income, gain freedom. instead of staying stuck in a never-ending cycle of work. So the mindset shift that you really need is that working harder isn't the answer.
The key is building a business, not just a job. That's what we wanna help you do today. So the five essential steps to scaling your practice. We're gonna go through each of these in detail. Step one is to systematize your practice operations.
Step two is to delegate and hire the right team. Step three is to automate where possible. Step four is to build recurring revenue streams. Step five is to focus on leadership and vision. Let's get right into this.
So step one, systematizing your operations. So within this step, there's five steps, okay? So five steps of step one here of systematizing your operations. So the first step within systematizing is to create a repeatable, scalable patient experience.
This is key because what you wanna move away from, when you're in a solo practice, frequently you have a personality-driven practice, meaning that it's your personality, it's your way of doing things that your kind of charisma or whatnot is driving the practice.
And in order to get a consistent patient experience when other doctors are seeing patients, you have to have systems in place to be able to get repeatable experiences. So before adding another doctor, your practice must provide a consistent patient experience.
That's the key of moving away from a personality-driven practice. So the action steps with this one is to document your new patient process. Start with the new patient process. Create a step-by-step SOP, standard operating procedure.
Outlining how new patients are greeted, onboarded, educated, the consultation, the exam, the report of findings process, how care plans are presented, and financial discussions are handled, right? Every single aspect of that should be written down.
You should have milestones in place. You should have scripting in certain points if that's necessary, but at least specific things that need to be done at each one of these steps, that entire new patient process has to be documented in order to systematize your operations.
You also want to standardize your adjustment process, right? Whatever your upper cervical technique is, you should have a way that you check patients, you have a way that you adjust patients, a way that you recheck, all of that is laid out in protocols so that it's followed every time with every patient.
Because when you bring in another doctor, you want to be able to show them, this is how we do it. in this practice, right? This is how we check patients, this is how we adjust them, this is how we recheck all those types of things.
You also wanna make sure you're creating milestones. Train your team to answer questions consistently so patients trust the practice, not just the doctor, right? You don't wanna be, again, the bottleneck of the only one who knows everything within the practice, right?
Training your team, helping them to understand how to answer common questions is key. You also wanna automate your follow-up systems, use email, text, software to automate patient education, appointment reminders, reactivations, all these types of things.
The more you can automate, the better, we'll talk more about that later as well, give you more specific examples. The second step in systematizing your operations is to optimize scheduling and workflows.
A common reason why solo doctors resist hiring is fear of losing control of their schedule. Systematizing ensures efficiency and predictability.
So a lot of this starts with making sure that you're using block scheduling, having specific blocks for new patients and special appointments with consultations, exams, report of findings, all of that, having those blocked out within the schedule, having specific patient power hours where you're seeing existing patients and having that be already booked out within the calendar,
Within the schedule on a day-to-day basis is key. So then when you bring in another doctor, you can lay their schedule on top of yours and you both have block schedules that work together. Frequently, you want to stagger your blocks so that when you're seeing, for instance, existing patients, they're seeing a new patient and then vice versa.
So having that optimized schedule is key to get it ready for the next doctor coming in. So the action... here is to start using block scheduling now. Organize your patient visits into adjusting blocks, special appointment blocks, progress exams as well.
You want to make sure you have those broken up in the calendar just to reduce chaos now. You want to get that really laid out within your calendar, so then when you bring on the next doctor, it's going to be a lot easier for them.
You want to reduce your involvement in admin tasks. Try to identify non-revenue generating activities like paperwork and emails and scheduling. Delegate them to staff members. You also want to use AI systems if possible.
We'll talk more about this a bit later, but doctors, consult notes, soap notes, these types of things can be dramatically improved efficiency-wise with using AI systems. Train staff to handle front-end education using more videos and handouts, email sequences, team training, so that you're not having to do as much patient education.
You still want to be doing some, but you want to have that systematized as much as possible. Implementing online booking, digital forms, these types of things again can dramatically improve efficiency of your front desk as well.
So, you know, if you want help figuring out all of this type of stuff, we do a free practice readiness call. If you want to check in, really understand what it is that you need to get in place to get an associate in your practice, just go over to website ucmgrow.com, click on start growing, schedule a free practice readiness call, and we can help you go from there.
Continuing on with systematizing your operations, systematize hiring and onboarding, right? Many sole docs resist hiring another provider because they feel they're afraid of bad hires, which I understand, right?
So when you create structured hiring and onboarding systems, it prevents this. So we can, we'll talk more about that in a bit as well. So writing, you know, the action steps around this is to write a clear job description, right?
Starting to really lay out what are the roles, responsibilities, expectations for this new doctor, you know, what we recommend is a position agreement and a job scorecard. Those are some very, very useful tools.
And then using a hiring funnel, instead of hiring reactively, when you create a proactive recruiting system with pre-screening questionnaires and structured interviews, short trial period before hiring, all these types of things are really, really helpful.
And we recommend creating a 90-day training and onboarding plan, right? Really have a good plan of how you're going to bring a new doctor up to speed within your practice, teaching new doctors. technique in patient communication and practice philosophy, how you do things, what it is that you're all about within a practice, your mission, your vision, your core values, those types of things.
Another part of this is to implement a weekly team meeting. If you're not already doing that, highly recommend you start. This ensures that you have that consistent communication, accountability, alignment within the practice, really moving you towards your vision, and that will get you ready for bringing in a new doctor in.
Another part of systematizing operations, step four here is to automate and delegate non-clinical tasks. Solo doctor can only scale if they remove themselves from non-clinical tasks. So that is related to these action steps.
So one is to hire and train a strong office manager or CA, right? You want to empower them to handle... things that you don't have the time to do, such as staff management and billing collections and HR and compliance, these types of things that you need somebody to do.
If you can delegate this to a team member, that would be ideal. Outsourcing what you can as well, right? Delegating bookkeeping and marketing and insurance billing to external specialists if you do insurance.
Using technology to reduce workload, right? Automating appointment confirmations, pacing reactivations, follow-up emails. Implement a KPI tracking system, measure key performance indicators like new patients and retention rates, average office visit average, these types of things.
And then the last part of systematizing step five here is to build a scalable business model to prepare for growth. Once a solo practice systematizes, easier transition into a multi-doctor model. So the action steps here is to shift the patient mindset from doctor to practice, right?
So you want to start bringing the clinic as a team-based experience rather than just one doctor, right? Helping them, helping each patient understand that, hey, we have a team of doctors that, we have a team here that works with you to help you get well, stay well, these types of things.
It's not, it needs to not just be about you, it needs to be about the clinic and how you guys work together to help patients. You also want to prepare for expansion by defining your profit margins, right?
Ensure the practice is financially stable before bringing on another doctor. We recommend that you're at least $35,000 a month in collections with about a 50% overhead before hiring an associate.
And so if you're not quite at that level yet, we recommend, you know, continuing, you start doing these things that will prepare your practice, but also increase the overall collections of the practicebefore bringing on another doctor.
And then testing small first is another way you can do this. Consider bringing an intern in before committing to a full-time associate, right? So if you can get connected with some of the chiropractic colleges, become a preceptor, and start bringing in some interns and start getting in a feel for what that's like, that can be a good first step for you as well if you've never hired an associate.
And start to develop an exit plan, right? Systematizing allows the owner to eventually reduce their hands-on work, expand or sell the practice for higher value, right? So start thinking long-term about what is the practice going to look like as it goes through these next few stages of growth.
So, these five steps will help you to systematize your operations, creating that repeatable, scalable patient experience. That's step one, optimizing your scheduling and your workflows. That's step two, systematizing your hiring and onboarding.
Step three. Step four was to automate and delegate your nonclinical tasks. And step five is to build a scalable business model to prepare for growth. So, that's the first step there within the five steps we're going to talk through.
And if you want help with that systemization specifically, I highly recommend you go over the website, ucmgrow.com, and get an appointment with us. So, once you really have laid out and systematized your practice operations, the next step is to really delegate and hire the right team.
And so, we talked a little bit about how to systematize that, but let's get more specific on delegating and hiring. So, when you go to hire your associate, the first step really here is to clarify the vision and redefine your role, right?
What is your role going to look like when you have another doctor within the practice? Because when you have a better picture of what your role is going to look like, then you can begin to properly define the role of the other doctor as well, the associate doctor, right?
So, when you define your ideal future role, how many patients you're going to be seeing, what tasks you're going to be delegating, those types of things, then you can set clear growth goals. You can talk about, okay, if we bring on another doctor, we'll increase our capacity.
This will lead to, you know, helping more people within our community. All these types of things will help you tremendously to get a better picture of what you're looking to do with that vision. And you don't want to hire until you know what you're building, who you need to be to become to lead it, right?
So, you're going to have to grow. and you're going to have to change as you step into this new role of leading other doctors. The step, the second step here in delegating hiring is to hire support staff first to buy back your time, right?
If you, for instance, if you're in solo practice right now and you have no CAs, that is the first step. You've got to hire a CA begin to train them. You got to start to delegate non-clinical tasks to them and, you know, think about outsourcing some of these things as well.
If you're doing a lot of this stuff in-house, whether it's bookkeeping or financials or different things like marketing, whatnot. So working on delegating as much as you possibly can is key and then create the structure first so your associate can walk into that well-oiled machine, not dysfunction, right?
So you want to have a solid team in place that's ready to bring on a doctor that you can really lead well. You can't lead and mentor well if you're buried in busy work. And the third step here of delegating and hiring the right team is to hire for culture, not just credentials, right?
So your core values, the core values that you've defined, what makes you, your team, a we, is way more important than just their resume, right? You want to have somebody that really fits in with who you guys are as a team, what your philosophy is, what your mission is about.
These types of things are more important, even than their resume. You want to use behavioral interviews, working interviews to test for fit. This is all wise to do as much as you can with test tasks and having them actually walk through the practice in different ways and understand what they're like, how they'll handle different situations.
And then setting up a mentorship and onboarding, training them your way and define success early. That 90-day onboarding plan is key. You're not just hiring an extra set of hands, you're hiring a future leader, really.
And that's the goal is, if you can really pour into this person, they can later pour into other doctors as well. So that's the second step here in scaling your practice is delegating, hiring the right team.
The third one is to automate where possible. Really, a good way to think about automation is to try to automate what you don't want to do twice, as much as possible, right? You can't automate everything, you can't automate adjusting patience, but automating what you don't do, what you don't want to do twice is a good rule of thumb when it comes to automation.
Any task you find yourself repeating or your staff finds themselves repeating with little variation, anything that's definitely related to any kind of like documentation or emailing or reminding, you want to ask, Can this be automated or at least templated in some way to make it more efficient?
And so let's talk about some different ways you can automate. So one of the easiest and most effective ways to automate is to use AI systems, especially as it relates to your consultation documentation and your soap note documentation for existing visits.
These are some, I mean, there's some great programs out there. One of the best ones that I've found is Freed, F-R-E-E-D. You can go to the website getfree.ai and learn more about it, but it's a HIPAA compliant.
It essentially records, you know, your interaction with patients and then gives you a summary or breakdown of everything that was discussed so that it goes directly into your EHR for both new patient consultations and also for existing patients.
So that will save you a tremendous amount of time if you're still taking notes by hand or having a team member. take notes. There are other options out there, Sukey, DeepScribe, PlotAI. These are all different options that essentially do similar things to help you to systematize your and automate your day-to-day visits and new patient consultations.
You know, you can use a sign like this. This is a common thing that you want to have up just in within your office. You know, doctor uses ambient listening dictation software that transcribe your visit for entry into your chart.
The software is compliant with HIPAA laws. Recordings are secure and deleted after transcription. This allows them to spend more time with you, treating your, you know, your your your condition and less time performing data entry.
If you do not want to use this technology used for your visit, please let the staff know, right? So just having something like this up within your consultation room or your patient adjusting rooms or whatever just helps your patients to understand what's happening with the use of this type of software.
Other ways AI can help, posture screening, AI-driven software that analyzes posture and alignment from photos or videos. This can help track patient progress over time. This can really help with your progress exams.
That's another a nice tool that is out there, posture screen. I mean, there's so many different things you can automate though with it as it relates to online scheduling and pre-screening using different tools like JotForm or intake queue or CairoSpring to automate appointment booking, collect health histories before they step into the office, right?
Have that all go directly into your EHR. You can also automate your appointment reminders, email, SMS reminders, use different types of softwares to do that. Welcome email sequence. This is another, this is something we use with all of our clients.
New patient email sequence where we, we begin to educate patients during their, their first interactions with the practice, using a CRM to sit automated welcome series emails to introduce your practice and really understand upper cervical chiropractic philosophy.
And then automating the follow-up emails as well, just reinforcing everything that you're teaching within patient education is key. Care plan remind, care plan reminders, helping them to understand, you know, when are their progress exams, all these types of things and just having different kind of educational content dripped out to them over time.
All of these are ways to automate. There's ways to automate all of this. Post-visit review requests. There's different, different softwares you can use for that so that every time someone comes into the practice, they automatically get sent a Google review request so that they can get that you can get those consistent reviews.
Different referral campaigns too. A lot of this has been, can be automated as well, asking patients to send referrals in, send in their their friends and family as well. Also billing and payments, a lot of this can be automated auto charge systems, services like Cairo Fusion, PaySimple, FortisPay, automate recurring payments for care plans.
You can use digital invoicing, send automatically send statements, receipts via email, all of this is as much as you possibly can automate it. So automate where possible is this is another essential step to scaling your practice.
The fourth step is building recurring revenue streams. Why you want recurring revenue, it's crucial for a multi-doctor practice is because it creates financial stability during transitions.
You know, when you first bring on a new doctor, say you're collecting 35, 40 thousand dollars a month and you bring on an associate, at first while they're getting up to speed, while it's you're going to have your your profit margins are going to shrink a bit and so you want to make sure that you have good recurring revenue streams so that you can handle that initial transition of having a new doctor in the practice.
That first three to six months typically is when you want to make sure that you know you have plenty of income coming in to support the new doctor who is getting up to speed. It helps to support that predictable cash flow, cover those associate salaries, it frees you up from roller coaster of one-time visits, right?
You want to reduce one-time visits as much as possible or eliminate them completely within your practice and it allows you to reinvest into other aspects of the practice, marketing, team training, infrastructure, and really when you have recurring revenue streams, it will increase the long-term valuation of your practice.
So what are recurring revenue streams? dreams. Number one is care plans. You know, using care plans, 93% of doctors use care plans within their practice as of our last survey. And so most doctors are using care plans at this point, which is great.
We've been talking about it for over a decade. I'm glad people are listening. You know, having prepaid plans or monthly installment plans for corrective care is key. And then having wellness memberships as well, having ongoing monthly care after their initial correction or, you know, after that initial care plan is really another effective way to have those recurring revenue streams.
Family plans as well, where you have discounted monthly rate for a whole household. There's corporate wellness programs as well, where you can have, you know, different kind of employer sponsored monthly wellness contracts, these types of things.
And you may also have like digital education or health subscriptions, depending on your practice type. but having some passive income through online content or courses can also help with recurring revenue.
So the first and most important of the recurring revenue streams is to have a care plan for every patient who comes into your practice where they have a clear picture of what they can expect from their care and they can understand how they're gonna pay for their care over time and they can really get clear on that from day one.
So having a strong day two conversion processes where you're going through the report of findings and the care plan and helping patients to understand what they can expect and offer plans for people to pay, either they can pay for upfront and receive a discount, they can pay monthly or weekly options, whatever it is, and then using auto payment tools is really key with this to reduce friction, just have that consistently come in and make sure that your care plans include progress exams.
You wanna make sure that you're consistently helping them to understand where they, where when they started, where they are now, these types of things. So for example, a three month care plan with three payments, for instance, at $1,800, it's $600 per month in recurring revenue for those three months.
So beyond the care plans when you're building recurring revenue streams, the next thing to be thinking about is wellness programs, building long-term loyalty, maintenance programs, these types of things beyond after the corrective care is completed, monthly recurring care depends on the person, depends on the practice and all these types of things, but something that is a consistent monthly quarterly fee,
Something like that where they can pay on an ongoing basis and it's just automatically taken out of their bank account. That's a great way to do it. You wanna just help them understand this is just part of a practice, of healthy lifestyle, build tiers for individuals, couples, families, use email automations to promote the benefits of staying under care long-term.
Corporate wellness partnerships is something that some doctors have been able to also do within their practices to build recurring revenue streams, partnering with local businesses, employee to offer like employee care.
You can have monthly or annual agreements, do on-site health talks, posture screenings, employee discounts, win-win. This is a win-win for employee productivity and practice growth, really. You know, there's, there's ones where, you know, they pay a certain amount.
The business pays a certain amount for their, for the people to be able to come in each month. This is just another great way of building recurring revenue streams. So, you know, steps to starting to build that recurring revenue is really to audit your current patient base.
How many of them are on some sort of plan, right? Or what percentage of your patients are doing care plans at this point? How many of them are on wellness programs? These types of things. Start to really get a good picture of that and then you can start to improve it over time.
Just creating, you know, care plans and beginning to have membership options and these types of things. And then setting up auto-paced systems, right? You wanna make this as easy as possible for people to be able to pay for their care.
Train your team so that they understand why you are implementing care plans. If you have never done that before or why you're implementing wellness programs or whatever it is. And promoting reactivations and transitions to wellness care so that it flows easily from your initial care plan into the wellness plan.
Or bringing people back who have fallen out of care through reactivations is another way to increase the number of people who are in recurring revenue plans. So that's the first four steps. And the last step of the essential steps to scaling your practice is to focus on leadership and vision.
When you clarify and communicate your vision regularly, that's when you really start to help your team to understand where you're going, right? Why are you hiring an associate? Well, you're hiring an associate because of your mission.
You're hiring an associate so that you can help more people within your community, right? So having that three to five year vision for the practice of where you're going, how many doctors you're gonna need to do what you're looking to do, what kind of impact are you going to be making in the community, and then sharing that often in team meetings and in one-on-one meetings and onboarding with new team members.
Just cast this vision consistently and regularly because it matters. A clear vision will give your team purpose. It'll attract the right type of doctors and other team members. And it will... make sure that everyone is aligned behind where you're going.
Another part of focusing on leadership and vision is to develop yourself as a leader, not just as a clinician. You know, you want to continue to improve as an adjuster and these types of things and how you interact with patients and how you connect with patients, but you also want to grow as a leader.
Great clinics are built by great leaders, not just skilled doctors. And so understanding what you need to do, what you need to learn on, how you need to grow when it comes to your personal leadership skills is important.
You want to invest in leadership training, books, coaching, mastermind groups, seminars. Learn how to inspire, delegate, hold people accountable, and elevate your role, right? Transition from being the practice to building a team that carries your standards forward, right?
And why this matters is your leadership ceiling will become the lid of your team's potential. to scale your leadership has to grow. It just does. You've got to grow as a leader so that you can help more people in your community.
And lastly is to identify and develop emerging leaders, right? Your future clinic's strength lies in the leaders you raise up, not just the ones you hire, right? As I've talked with doctors who have added multiple associates over the years and now have even situations where one of their associates has become their clinic director of their practice or has gone on and they've opened a second location and that they're now a clinic director at the second location.
You want to be thinking about how can I encourage this new doctor as a leader as well? How can I help raise them up in their leadership capabilities? And identifying team members as well. CAs, which of your CAs has the ability or the potential to say an office manager or has that type of initiative and alignment with your core values.
And mentor them. Part of what your goal and role is as the leader of the practice is to help them to share in leadership responsibilities. Give them, delegate them things that can help them to grow as a leader.
Coach them through their wins and mistakes. Why this matters is multiplying leadership ensures your clinic can grow without being bottlenecked. So that is those five steps and I want to give you some specific examples now of some doctors that we've worked with over the years that have really been able to implement a lot of these steps and it's really helped them to help more people in their communities.
One example is Dr. Kurt Sherwood. Long time client of ours. We've been helping for many years now and you know he's been through a lot of things with his practice and hiring associates and not going well, and now finally getting an associate through a non-traditional way that switched techniques from a full spine technique, and it's really become a great associate for his practice.
And now they're looking to hire another associate. It's really encouraging to see how, as Dr. Sherwood has consistently applied these steps to systematize his practice and grow as a leader and help to really understand what he needs to do to make his practice as successful as possible and help as many people in his community, how that's translated into a great experience both for his associate and for his patients.
Another great example is Dr. Barbara Reed, who we've worked with, and with her associate as well, just helping her to develop as a leader, helping her to understand how most effectively to, to standardize what she's doing, to have accountability processes in place to help her associate to thrive, and that has really helped her.
Her practice grow, her associates practice grow, and them to help more people in their community. And another example is Dr. Patton Daniel Len who have just become absolute associate masters as we've worked with them and now have multiple associates within their practice and have applied these things over and over with multiple associates and have seen them all grow and develop as well.
And so I'll tell you, these five steps work. They work very well and they will help you to get to where you want to go. If you want to get off the treadmill of solo practice and really move into a multi-doctor practice that works, these five steps are key.
But, you know, what we found over the years is there are circumstances where you either don't have the time or you need some guidance when it comes to your specific practice information. And so we've developed a done-for-you associate recruitment system that we have now to help you find the right doctor without the headache.
And so if you are looking to add an associate to your practice this year, we want to tell you about this program because it's really, really fantastic for you to be able to get what you need, which is another doctor, but without a lot of the headaches that go along with it.
And it starts with the practice readiness verification. This is the initial call and I would recommend you do this regardless of where you are with your practice. Just really getting an understanding of where your practice is financially.
Is the team ready? Is the systems ready? That's what we do in this initial call. And so I'd recommend right now, go over the website, ucmgrow.com, schedule an initial practice readiness verification call where we really can walk through this with you if you're on this webinar right now.
Now, schedule that initial call, because that's going to really help you to get going in the right direction. And if you end up working with us on this, on this program, what we'll do with you is we will help you to define the role extremely clearly, because this is the key.
When you set the expectations properly on the front end, it's going to dramatically reduce problems in the future. And so we're going to help you define the position with clarity and confidence, give you a position agreement, where you'll have your key responsibilities, your key results areas, and your key performance indicators all in that, in that position agreement.
We'll also work with you in developing a job scorecard so you can have monthly review sessions with your associate and really help them, you know, hold them accountable to their key accountabilities.
We'll also give you biannual performance review paperwork so you can adequately give them good feedback every, you know, twice a year where you're walking them through where they are excelling and where they can grow.
And we'll also work with you on creating an offer letter. How much should you pay this associate? How should you pay them? These types of things, we will help draft that for you so it's ready to send when you find a good candidate.
Along with that, we will work with you on the promotion and the placement of your associate position. We'll handle all the recruiting visibility that you need. We're gonna interview you on our podcast so that we can spotlight the opportunity.
That's a way that many doctors have found associates over the years. We're gonna help you create a compelling recruitment video that we can use on social media. We'll post the position on job boards, schools, technique groups, associations.
We also have direct outreach to our upper cervical club network where we can connect with the upper cervical clubs at different chiropractic practices or chiropractic colleges to give them understanding of your position.
And work with you on maximizing exposures so you can get the maximum number of candidates. Amplifying your opportunity across multiple channels, posting your recruitment video on different upper cervical specific Facebook groups for you, sharing your video on all of our UCM social media channels.
We'll also blast out your opportunity to our targeted upper cervical chiropractic list and also develop a 3D direct mail campaign to send to every chiropractor in your state. There's many chiropractors out there who are in their own practices that aren't happy right now.
They'd rather be working for someone else. They would like to make a change with their technique. These types of things, these type of candidates are more difficult to find, but we've got some great techniques to find them and get them into your work.
And so if you're interested in this done for you associate recruitment system, go to ucmgrow.com, schedule your practice readiness verification, that first step within this process, and we'll tell you more about it, talk to you about what it would take for us to help you.
Because really what we want to do is if you're ready to bring on the right doc, we want to talk with you. We want to help you to find the associate that fits your vision, your culture, your mission, so you can grow with confidence.
ucmgrow.com is where you schedule that appointment. And what we're doing is we're only taking five new doctors this year for this program. We're currently interviewing doctors through April. If you want to be next, go to the website ucmgrow.com, schedule that initial appointment.
In addition to this, once you schedule that appointment, we'll also send you our practice scaling readiness checklist. And this will give you the ability to check off some things and really get a clear understanding of different aspects of the practice, many of the things we went over today to get clear on what you need to work on if you're not quite ready yet.
So regardless of wherever you are with your practice, this is the first step. Go to ucmgrow.com, schedule that initial appointment, and get started from there. Thank you so much for being part of this webinar today.
If you haven't got that appointment do it now, ucmgrow.com, schedule that initial appointment, and we will go from there. Thank you all for being on the webinar,
And as we always say, Go Team Upper Cervical!
