Speaker Dr. Bill Davis
All right. It's 10 o'clock. I'm Dr. Bill Davis, the UCM Practice Growth Systems, excited to be with you today. Really excited to help doctors start right in their own upper cervical practice. I'm going to be helping you to have a profitable first year in practice.
For over a decade now, we've been helping upper cervical practices to grow and really to start right is the key to that. If you are brand new in practice, if you're a student, if you're an associate, if you're coming from another technique into upper cervical, this is going to be really awesome valuable information for you.
In the last, you know, over the last 11 years, we've helped over 100 upper cervical practices start right and we understand the challenges. We understand what it takes. We understand the, we know the answers to the questions.
We know it works. We know what it takes to be profitable. So let's get into it. Let's get right into it. And you know what? The key is to build, I'm going to teach you how to build a profitable UC practice without losing yourself, right?
Because when you go into your own practice, you don't want to have somebody else's practice. You want to have your own practice. You want to have a practice that's unique to you. If not, you keep working for someone else or you would go work for someone else if you're coming right out of school into your own practice.
And so want to make sure that you are a reflection of the practice that you start. And that's why we, you know, we titled this webinar, launching your legacy, right? Because that's what it really is about.
It's about building a legacy that starts with you. It starts with your personality, it starts with your unique gifts and skills and abilities. And so we're going to be talking about these five key steps to starting your own UC clinic.
And it's really. really, really crucial to understand these steps, but we're also going to show you how to get these, get these steps actually done because that's the whole thing. It's not, you know, information without implementation just leads to frustration.
So we want to help you not only know the steps, but implement the steps so that you can get your legacy launched. And so who am I? I'm Dr. Bill Davis. You don't know me. I've been around now for a couple of decades within Upper Cervical and, you know, we've been helping people with helping them grow their practices, helping them to help lots more people in their communities, helping them to, to help,
help grow Upper Cervical in general. You know, I, I built an all cash Upper Cervical specific practice. I was blessed to do that before breaking my neck, mountain biking about, about 13 years ago now.
And for the past 11, we've been helping. upper cervical practices grow. UCM Practice Growth Systems is the name of our company and we help upper cervical specialists grow their practices. That's what we're all about.
And, you know, over these last 11 years, you know, we've been blessed to work with over 250 upper cervical practices, helping them grow, helping many of them double their practices, dozens of them, helping many doctors build million dollar practices, add associates to their practices, add additional locations.
We've helped over 100,000 new patients find upper cervical practices through our systems. I've interviewed over 150 of the most successful upper cervical specialists in the world on the Upper Cervical Marketing Podcast.
And we've written two editions of the UC Practice Success Handbook, Upper Cervical Practice Mastery, Learn Success Secrets of the World's Top Upper Cervical Doctors, which is a must-have if you are starting in practice, if you are a new doctor, if you're a student coming out of school, an associate coming out of an associate position, the book is an absolute must-have.
So let's get right into what we are going to talk about today. And I'll tell you, what's cool is if you stay to the end of the webinar, I've got a special, some special bonuses for you, help giving you brochures and posters that you're gonna be able to use in your new clinic and give you a great way to access those.
So if you stay to the end, you're gonna learn all about these bonuses that are gonna be included today only. So what are we going to do today? We're gonna talk about finding the right location, avoiding dead areas when it comes to setting up your new practice.
We're gonna talk about how to differentiate your unique upper cervical specialty. We're gonna talk about making sure you have the digital marketing assets that you have to have in order to launch a practice.
in today's world. We're going to talk about some mistakes I made when I was first in practice and how I went through six CAs in my first six months in practice so that you don't have to do the same. We're going to talk about how to get your first 25 Google reviews even before you open your practice.
We're going to talk about how to set clear expectations for the practice, how to really lay out your mission, vision, and values for your practice, how to build a powerful mindset and habits so that you're ready to rock and roll on day one and what you really need to focus on right now in order to make this happen.
So we all, you know, we talk about this a lot. If you've been looking at our content, watching our content, listening to our content, we talk about the practice growth stages. all the time because this is the key to understanding how to continue to grow in upper cervical practice is understand the different growth stages, understand the different plateaus, understand the different places you get stuck.
And when you are starting your upper cervical practice, this is the beginning of growth, right? And it's all about starting right, right? Saving time, saving money, learning what you need to focus on and what you need to outsource right from the beginning.
And that's really what we're going to be focusing on today is starting that upper cervical practice, that initial growth stage. And so there's five key steps to this. Five key steps we're going to talk through, help you understand and really give you a ton of value on.
These five steps, choose your location wisely, understand your mission, vision, values, master your mindset, get ready to hire a first team member and get new patients in the door, okay? So we're going to go through these, all of these and give you tons and tons of value all along the way.
So key step number one is to choose your location wisely. When you open a new practice, you've got to think through a variety of different things. So you can avoid dead areas and put your practice in a place that's going to give you the most opportunity for success.
And so when breaking a practice location, you want, ideally you want to be in a community that can be accessed from a 360 degree radius, right? So for instance, if you are going to be put a practice in a coastal area, half your practice drawing radius is eliminated, right?
So instead of a 360 degree drawing area of people being able to come to you from all around the practice, only half of them are, only half of that radius is able to, or that diameter is able to be drawn from.
And so you don't want to do that. You want to stay away from coastal areas, come a little bit more inland, you'll be able to serve more people. But you also want to be picking areas that, are growing and not dying.
Those are those dead areas, right? So if you're looking at an area where you're going to put your practice, you want to look in, you know, where is their new construction? Where are their new jobs? Where are their new technologies?
Where, and even like when you're looking at shopping centers, if you're looking to put in your practice in a shopping center, you don't want a shopping center that, you know, is half empty because there's been, you know, three of the main businesses that were in there closed five years ago and they haven't been able to fill those spaces, right?
That's not the kind of place you want to be. You don't want to be in an area where there's, you know, a lot of just, it's an old broken down area with a lot of graffiti and things broken and not being replaced and that type of thing.
You don't want to go into these kind of areas. You want to go into an area that's growing. that's, that has, like I said, new construction, new opportunities within an area because that is going to be a better area for a practice to be located in.
You also want to pay attention to traffic patterns. Make sure your office is in a convenient location that can be easily accessed from freeways or major roads, right? You want people to, you know, be able to, to stop at your practice on their way home from work or stop at your practice on the way to work easily accessed in a, in a geographic location that's going to be able to be accessed from a variety of places.
So let me give you an example of this. So one of our, our clients, Dr. James Blanford, and, you know, he, when we, you know, we talk about making sure that we have the right man or the right woman, the right plan in the right land, right?
So we're talking about the right land and, and obviously that's important. It's important where you put your practice, but the right plan is really more important. If you have the right plan in place, which includes picking the location, then the rest of it is relatively, it's relatively easy.
It's going to work. If you're going to have the right plan and you execute on that plan, then you're going to be able to move in the direction of success relatively quickly. And so Dr. Blanford is an example of this.
So we, we worked with him with our Start Right Program and launched, helped him launch his practice. And then within the first few months of his practice, we were able to move him into our, our next step, which is our silver plan, and then work with him through our silver plan and help him continue to build his practice.
And he's moved from start to practice growth, stage one into practice growth, stage two in less than a year. And then he's moved into our gold plan, which is helping him to continue to grow. And now we're moving into the practice growth stage three with him.
That is our goal now is to move to where he can bring on. and associate. And so that's really the goal with this is if we can get you started right and start to move through these phases as quickly as possible, get out of that do everything doc stage quick, grow beyond 20,000 a month in collections, begin to really start putting the pieces in place.
You can get out of the misaligned doc stage and get into that trailblazing doc stage where you've got your first associate in the practice as quickly as possible because what you don't want to do is start wrong where you're you're just struggling for years and years.
You get stuck in that do everything doc stage and it's very difficult to get out of there if you don't have you don't set yourself up from for success right in the beginning because we run into a lot of docs in that in that stage who've been there for three years, five years, ten years and now it's a matter of oh man there's all kinds of bad habits there's all kinds of things that have that have been established wrong.
to break down all of that in order to start to build back in the right direction. So you don't want to do that. Instead, if you can hit that ground running, move through those first two phases, first two stages of growth as quickly as possible into that trailblazing dock stage, because that's when really you've got not just a job, but a business, right?
Not just, not just relying completely on you for the practice, but having a system in place, a business that can run without you, which is key for stability, security and practice, flexibility and practice, all those kinds of things so that, you know, eventually you can take a vacation, you can take time off, you're protected if something happens like what happened with me and you get, you get injured,
you know, all these kinds of things, they begin to happen once you get into that trailblazing dock stage. But before that, it's, man, your practice is really vulnerable. And so helping you work through those first two stages as quickly as possible is key, just like we did with Dr.
Blanford. So key step number one is choosing the right location, right? Avoiding those dead areas, making sure you get things set up for success from day one. Key step number two is to understand your mission, vision and values, right?
So defining your mission, why is your practice, why does it exist, right? So you can have that purpose-driven practice, having a vision, where you're going, that preferred future, what is the practice going to accomplish over time, and having those core values, clarifying those values so that you can build a team to work together to really be successful.
This is, you know, my favorite quote from B.J. Palmer. I use this quote all the time, a man without a purpose can be distracted, but a man with a purpose cannot be stopped. And this is an absolutely true statement.
I've seen it over and over and over with successful upper server. practices, they have a purpose. They have a clear purpose and a clear understanding of what they're about as a practice, and it starts with the person, right?
You have to understand what you're about as a person and be able to translate that into the practice, and that starts, and that is directly translated into the mission, vision, values of the practice.
And so the core values is essentially what your company is all about, what your practice is, the collection of characteristic that outlines what it means to be a team member of your practice, right? It makes, it's what makes you a we, right?
So if you're talking about your practice and you say things like, well, we do it this way, we do it that way, right? That's what you want to establish is, is to have that we, right? Have that clear we of who you are, and that's what your core values is all about, getting that we.
The vivid vision is, breaking it down so that, whoop, breaking it down into a preferred future, getting some clarity on where you're going, right? And a good vision is broken into three sections, who you are, who your patients are, and where you're going, right?
If you keep your vision focused around those three things, break it down into very clear sections. You'll have a really great vision that you can empower your team with, encourage your team with, help them to see that you have a purpose in mind when it comes to the growth of the practice.
And then the mission is that one sentence rallying cry that your team can get behind and say, yep, that's what I do. I do that every day. This is what our practice is all about. It has to fire you up.
It has to fire your team up. And so really dialing in your values, your vision, and your mission is a crucial piece of getting your practice started right. So that's what you wanna do. You wanna, this key step number two is really think through your purpose as a person and how that's going to translate into your practice in your mission, your vision, and your values.
Key step number three is to master your mindset. Your mindset is crucial to your success, doctor. You need to know what you think about, right? And be thinking about what you think about, right? You can't just constantly be thinking about things that are going to lead to your downfall in practice, but instead be constantly filling your mind with what is going to encourage you to succeed.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to listen to our UCM podcast. Our podcast is packed full of mindset and habits from people who have done it. right? This is, this is what you want to do. When you want to be successful in anything in life, you want to learn from people who are doing it, right?
Who are actually successful in what you're looking to do. If you want to have a successful upper cervical practice, then you need to be listening to people who are successful. And that's what our UCM Podcast does for you, right?
It puts into your mind, every single time you listen to it, you're going to listen and you're going to learn mindset and habits that are going to help you to continue to build your UC upper cervical practice.
And so you can do this for complete, for free. It's a free podcast. I mean, it's an absolute no brainer. If you listen to our UCM Podcast every day, which is what I encourage you to do. If you're not, if you, you know, if you're three months from practice, if you're a year from practice, whatever, start listening to our podcast every day.
get one of these into your mind every day. They're about, you know, 30 to 45 minutes. It's a great thing to listen to when you're exercising, when you're driving, those types of things. Just get the podcast and just start listening to it.
We have over 200 episodes and so you can listen to these and you're going to learn from every single one of them and it's going to help you to really master your mindset. So that's a simple, simple way to really start getting your mindset under control.
Another part of your mindset is understanding what you need to do, defer, or delegate. There are certain things when you are, you know, when you're getting ready to start a practice, it can be a very distracting time.
You've got so many different things, so many different things that people are telling you, so many different things that, you know, that seem like they're a priority. But if you can focus in on what is most important for me to do, right?
What is important for me to defer to later to do, and what is most important for me to delegate to others, if you can master that, it's really, really key part of keeping your mind focused on what's most important.
And so here's three things to do, right? These are do, do, definitely things that you want to do, you want to focus on when you're getting ready to start your upper cervical practice. And one of them is to build your reputation as quickly as possible.
As I told you, what I encourage all of our doctors to do is to have 25 Google reviews before they open their doors, right? And so the way you do that is once you get your Google listing set up, which we'll talk more about later, but once you have that Google listing set up is to ask every friend, every family member, every calling of yours, anyone who you've taken care of, anywhere else, to leave you a Google review,
right? Just go on and leave you Google reviews. Get them on, on there. You want to try to build as many as you can before you even open your doors. Number two is to go and start meeting health practitioners in your community, right?
You don't build a practice by sitting in your office, right? You've got to get out and start meeting people. You've got to talk to people in your community. Make a list of health practitioners who are in the community and start talking to them.
And we'll talk more about how to build a health practitioner referral network in a minute. And the other thing is to spend time recording videos, right? You want to get used to talking, right? Get used to talking to a camera because it's going to help you to continue to learn to communicate better with patients.
If you think through different aspects, different frequently asked questions, different things that you are going to need to know in your upper cervical practice and start making videos about those and begin to put those on to social media, that can help you in many different ways.
But your communication skills, the most important, while at the same time beginning to build an online presence, which we'll talk more about in a minute. The other thing is you got to think about what to delegate, right?
Don't, you don't want to waste your limited time doing things that are outside of your expertise, right? If you, you know, you're then trained to be an upper cervical specialist, you want to focus your mind and your time on being an upper cervical specialist, right?
Don't get caught up doing things like building your own website or creating your Google listing or designing your logo or building your social media pages or designing your business cards. All this kind of stuff is just a distraction when you're designing, when you're, when you're opening a practice.
Focus on the things that you can do that are most, most important. So key step number three is to master your mindset. Really dial this in. Like we talked about, get in, start listening to that podcast if you haven't already.
That is a great place to start when it comes to your mindset. Key step number four is to get ready to hire your first team member, right? This is an absolute necessity. I don't care who's told you this, but you do not want to open a practice without a CA.
It is a recipe for failure. You don't want to do this. You can't effectively do this alone. You cannot move through these stages effectively alone. What ends up happening to doctors who don't hire a CA when they first open their practice is they get stuck.
They get stuck in that do everything doc stage that we've talked about. And it's extremely difficult to get out of it by yourself. If you don't have a CA to help you with, because an upper cervical practice has two jobs.
There's a CA job and there's a doctor job. And when a doctor tries to do this CA job, they can't do their doctor job as well as they should. When you're answering a phone and talking to a new patient on the phone, while at the same time, there's a new patient in your office, you can't do both those jobs at the same time, right?
So it's an absolutely crucial thing. Don't listen to people who are telling you, oh yeah, you want to keep your overhead load by not. hiring a CA when you open your practice. That is the classic stepping over a dollar to pick up a penny, right?
You don't wanna do that. Every upper circle practice should have at least one CA. It's an absolute necessity. So what do you mean to do? You need to learn how to lead people, how to inspire people, encourage people, help them to really develop as people.
That's actually part of being an upper cervical doctor, right? You're gonna be leading your patients to better health. And so in the same way, you wanna be leading your CAs into the understanding your mission, vision and values, understanding what the practice is all about and why.
it's so important. You want to learn everything you possibly can about hiring ideal team players. The book, Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni is a must. You want to listen to that book, learn what it means to be humble, hungry, and smart because you want to learn how to hire, train, and develop chiropractic advocates, right?
Upper cervical chiropractic advocates as your CAs. And I'll tell you, I learned this the hard way. In my first six months in practice, I went through six CAs, right? Because I hired and I learned and I hired and I fired and I learned, right?
I went back and forth and all this and by my sixth one, I finally figured it out, right? I don't want you to have to do that. I want to want you to be able to equip you and help you with this and I'll tell you one of the most important things that I learned in those first six months is making sure that I set clear expectations for every single team member who is involved in any of our businesses,
right? So from my practice to my agency now, I am making sure that I have clear expectations. And it starts with having clear results, right? Key results areas, KRAs, these are the results you're looking for them to accomplish in the position.
Every team member in your practice should have at least one KRA. Most team members have between three and five and it's such a crucial part. We have doctors that come back to us, come to us who've been in practice for 20 years and they never really had a clear expectations for their team members and their team members are struggling.
They have a hard time being successful in their positions because they don't know what to, they don't know the target and so you can't hit the target if you don't have a clear key result area. The other thing is making sure you have KPIs.
These are key performance indicators. These are the metrics that determine whether or not a result is happening, right? So for every KRA, there should be at least one KPI, right? Typically, there are anywhere from three to 10 KPIs per KRA.
This is a crucial step in clarifying each of the roles in your team. This is what many people come to us for, is to help to establish these KRA's and KPIs for every member of their team. And it's a really, really crucial step if you want your CAs to be successful in their role.
Now, we do have some free resources for you. I'd love to share these with you. If you go over to the website, ucmpracticegrowsystems.com or upperservicalmarketing.com, it's the same website. You can land there either way.
And if you click on Resources and Practice Grow Tools, you'll see a lot of great free resources we have, including our Hiring Resource Kit. This can help you to create a position agreement with CARES and KPIs.
It'll also help you create, you can download our job scorecard template. This is how you can keep your team members accountable to results over time. This is really, really crucial stuff, guys. You gotta make sure that you have clarity when it comes to what you expect from your team members and how to hold them accountable to it.
So key step number four is you gotta be ready to hire that first team member. So learn everything you possibly can about it and get going on hiring that very first one. Key step number five, get the new patients in the door.
We're gonna talk about some ways to do that right now. So first I wanna give you a little caveat. Avoid the biggest mistake in digital advertising. Don't do ads when you're brand new in practice. This is something that I see a lot of doctors do.
They waste their limited amount of money on advertising when there's so many other things you could be doing to generate new patients in those first three months. And so I encourage you as somebody that's been doing this for over a decade, digital advertising, Facebook ads, Google ads, these types of the Instagram ads, these are all very valuable things within an upper cervical practice, but they have to be timed at the right moment.
They have to be at the right amount of budget for a practice, brand new practice that's not the best use of your money. I encourage you to instead focus on recording videos, right? Record videos, learn how to make good video content, frequently asked question videos, condition specific videos, your story videos, upper cervical specific videos, video testimonials, focus on the before and after state,
and then just put them everywhere. Get all of these resources created. to videos because then when you're ready to start advertising, then you're going to already have a bunch of things that you can use with your in your advertising strategies.
And then the other thing is making sure you're getting those Google reviews, right? Like we talked about, get those 25 Google reviews before you open, do everything you can to make that happen. That's going to help you way more than spending money on Facebook ads, especially if you're trying to run on them yourself.
The other thing is building that health practitioner referral network. As I've told you, encourage you to listen to the website, start going through those website episodes. But when you get to episode 40, or you can skip right to it, if you really want to learn about this, this one is a goldmine.
Episode 40 of the UCM podcast talks about how to build a whole practitioner referral network. I speak with my friend, Dr. Giancarlo Ocada. We speak and we break it down in step by step by step exactly what you need to do to make this work and how it uh how to make this an effective source of new patients for your practice.
He gives you clear even scripting everything that he has used to make this happen. He built a practice with with you know up to 80 percent of his new patients were coming from health other health practitioners.
So highly recommend that podcast to learn about health practitioner referral network building. The other thing is you got to make sure that you have the pieces in place to generate referrals right. So when you start in a new practice, when you open a new practice, you've got to be thinking about this whole process right.
This whole patient education process, the new patient phone call, the consult exam, imaging and report, the care plan presentation, your progress exams, your patient education system, how it all works together and how it's going to work together to not only keep the patient in care so that they can get great results but also so that they understand the value of the care and be able to refer others right.
So that is a crucial step to be thinking through and developing a process for when it comes to your new practice. Another another part of this is as I mentioned you got to get out of that practice, you got to get out and meet people, get out and serve, serve in your local church, meet people and you know getting involved with a rotary organization, other charity organizations.
Get out in the community, become a fixture in your community. People need to know that you are someone who cares about the community that is engaged in the community, wants to help serve in the community.
So here's you know some key things you can be doing to get new patients in the door. Do your digital marketing smart, build that health practitioner referral network, work on your referral process and get out and serve in the community.
These are all really key things. So we've talked about five key steps to start starting Europe, UC practice, but this is really just the beginning. We talked about, this is, you know, these are five things that, that you need to do, right?
This is the information, but the implementation is the key, right? Like, as I mentioned before, information without implementation leads to frustration. And so you want to make sure that you implement, and I'm going to give you a really, really easy way to do that today with what I'm going to talk about next.
So this has been a great webinar, and hopefully you've learned a lot about what it takes to really start a upper cervical practice well, and really get started with all the things that are most important to be successful.
And so I wanted to give you a couple of other ideas on, on what you can do next. One is you can get our book. We have a book that we've recently released called The 7 Growth Stages of Upper Cervical Practice.
This is a fantastic book no matter where you are in practice, but definitely when you're just starting out, when you're starting in practice to be able to understand what's necessary in those early stages is really a huge, huge time saver for you if you can learn that.
And you can get the book over at our website, ucmgrow.com, you can purchase the book there through a link in the resources tab. And then the other thing I wanted to mention to you is our Start Right program.
And this is really something that we've designed for doctors that are starting practices. It really has everything that you need to start right, all the things that we've talked about today in this webinar and so much more to really check all the boxes, get so many things done for you all in one with one program.
And so again, to learn more about the Start Right program, find out more about it. You can just go over to the website, ucmgrow.com, schedule your initial appointment with us. We can talk with you more about the Start Right program and how it would work in your area.
Thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate you and all that you do. Excited for you to start your practice and leave a legacy. And as we always say, go team Upper Cervical. Thank you.
