A saying that almost everyone knows is that it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and a second to ruin it. When building and maintaining a practice for over ten years now, we have not strayed too far from our initial strategy.  Create a practice that provides practical/evidence based care at a fair price with little to no treatment plans. Thus far, the strategy has worked fairly well for us.

There are practices that will try to sell treatment plans that are accompanied with numerous therapies and treatments over several months, while I can’t argue that people get better with those types of plans, it’s just not the type of practice that I, myself, would want to go to.

Other practices run on a corporate model, where the care is extremely affordable.  I question how quality the care is, when every patient that walks in the door gets a two minute adjustment and is out the door before the car is even cool.

There are practice models for everything in between, from multidisciplinary models to functional medicine to shadow adjusting and foot baths. Chiropractors are a unique bunch to say the least. Conventions make for an interesting time because of the vast array of personalities.

I’m a relationship person, while I like adjusting people and feel that I can deliver a quality adjustment, I do feel that adding features to the treatment can be beneficial. Acupuncture, laser or any of the other therapies we offer in the practice do add to the benefit of the care. If the therapy is not warranted we don’t do it.  I appreciate the conversations I get to have with my patients and getting to know them. My wife thinks I’m weird based on the number of things I can remember about random people, but I like it, the conversations can get interesting.

I know more about farming and cattle then I thought I would ever know, but it’s interesting to me as it’s a business just like any other business that is run. I’m starting to see initial patients graduate from high school and college, getting into the real world and complaining about paying bills.  I’m actually trying to put a larger emphasis on just having more fun in the office, most people in the world would be envious of what I get to do every day but I feel that sometimes I take myself a little too serious at times so if we start laughing in the office, feel free to join in.

Plain and simple, we like simple in the office.  The longer I go, the more I appreciate simplicity.  We keep our billing straight forward, the treatments are geared to the specific patient and scheduling is almost too easy in the offices. Walk-ins are welcome and DOT physicals are scheduled same day (while I still recommend pushing the date closer to the expiration date).

While reputation isn’t on the time of my mind on an hourly or even daily basis, I do think about it periodically and we don’t plan on changing anything drastically about the office, other than we are letting people know that we are trying to keep things simple and if certain things aren’t getting used we will most likely be eliminating things that don’t bring value to the office.