Over the course of the past 2-3 years, my wife and I have become personal finance gurus. We have paid off student loans and tried to set up ourselves and our family up for many years to come, while this is not an instant results endeavor but small steps can make a big impact. Part of the process of investing is compounding, where your initial money and investments start to make gains on the early work.

One of the major parts that people don’t like about investing is the ability to mentally withstand the ups and downs of the market. Your 12% gain on average is not a smooth path; you could see a 20% loss or gain on any given year. So you have to be able to stomach the volatility.  Most financial advice  indicates that the major index funds are self cleansing, the top 500 companies in the US will be an ever evolving thing, companies will come and go. So you don’t necessarily have to choose individual stocks, you can choose the broad index and catch the majority of the gains that the market puts out, but you have to be able to stomach the roller coaster.

The art of running a business is a lot like investing. Days, weeks, months and even years have their ups and downs but I’m banking on the fact that compounding in business will also be the same.  We have been performing chiropractic care, DOT Physicals and most recently drug/alcohol testing for the last 12 plus years. Financially this has been a weird year, not that it has been bad but just strange on the collection and billing end.

Healthcare is a changing and ever evolving profession, not just for chiropractors. The market will eventually figure itself out, while we as a profession may not like the path we will get to a stable point again. Longevity should be beneficial if you are able to work through the ups and downs. The adage is that time in the market will outweigh timing the market, so you may come into the profession at just the right time and your experience will look entirely different than someone that has been on the job for decades.

The amount of goodwill and benefit of having people through the door for the past decade along with offering a variety of services (I’m hoping) should be beneficial in the long run.  DOT Physicals are a prime example, we have a strong base built and hope to build the drug/alcohol testing along with continued growth of the physical side of things.

There is another saying that comes to mind, “Comparison is the Theft of Joy,” so when a young chiropractor comes out of school and looks into starting into the profession, just know that your experience will look entirely different than your peers, so don’t try to compare yourself to others in the profession or even healthcare in general. The time you come into the profession, the demographic of patients that you see and the state you work in, will all have an impact as to how see the profession and your future.

In short, I’m banking on the fact that business, like investing will go through ebbs and flows that may not be fun or comfortable but the light and path should be worth it. Let your valuable patients and services carry you through the hard times, compounding gains along the way throughout the years. And lastly, do not compare yourself to other people in the profession because based on the time that they came into the profession and length they have been in practice the perception will be completely different.