EPISODE 441: Priming the Pump

Hey, chiropractors. We're ready for another Modern Chiropractic Marketing Show with Dr. Kevin Christie, where we discuss the latest in marketing strategies, contact marketing, direct response marketing, and business development with some of the leading experts in the industry. 

Dr. Kevin Christie: [00:00:00] Hey, doc. Welcome to another episode of Modern Chiropractic Mastery. Today I'm bringing you a solo episode titled Priming the Pump, and we'll dive into that and what that means for your practice. But before I do, wanted to make a little bit of an announcement, I am going to be hosting a free, free for students, students only.

This is, uh, only going to be four students, and it's going to be in Boca Raton on November 22nd. It's gonna be from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM It's gonna be a free. Student Business workshop, we're gonna dive into, uh, about four hours of business and, you know, the really understanding from a student perspective what you'll be getting into.

And we'll talk a lot about the business of practice, practice analytics, content marketing for chiropractors, strategic community outreach strategies. Our goal is to really get you. Um, primed for practice, whether when you graduate, you are an associate or you own a [00:01:00] practice or you're partnering, whatever it is, these are the things you're going to need to know that frankly you don't get in school.

Uh, no fault of their own, but you don't get a lot of this in school. And we're gonna have to limit it to 24 attendees. But we have turned our practice here in Boca Raton into a teaching facility where we're able to, uh, convert our big open rehab area into a classroom. We've got chairs and classroom tables.

We've got a, a big one of those smart boards now, and a whole nine yards. That'll be a first class experience for you, how to learn about business. So check out that registration in the show notes here again. Uh, we, we will limit it to 24. Uh, it is free. You will have to secure your spot with a credit card, and if you do not show up, we will charge you a hundred because, again, since it's free and we can limit it 24.

I don't want a situation where. Uh, we, we get people signing up and then not really deciding to come. And so you gotta have a little bit of skin in the game, but again, you will not be charged if you actually [00:02:00] show up to it. And so that'll be 24 people. November 22nd in Boca Raton, Florida. So awesome. Hope you, hope to see you there and start learning what you need to learn to take it to the next level when you do graduate.

All right, so let's talk about priming the pump. Uh, I'm gonna share an audio here in a little bit of where, um, I kind of got this, and, and it's something that I've talked about a lot necessarily, not using that terminology, but, you know, priming the pump for business growth involves laying a foundation, uh, for expansion by, you know, optimizing resources, building momentum, and.

And setting up sustainable systems, and ideally, you gotta be doing things and you gotta trust the process that the work you're putting in is going to help you grow professionally and it's gonna help your practice grow. There's such an epidemic of chiropractors. Um, not putting in the work and then [00:03:00] blaming the profession.

Yeah. Is the profession challenging? Are there negatives? Yeah. We see 'em in Facebook groups all the time. People posting and little do they realize every profession. If you had a Facebook group or a, uh, any type of, uh, state association meeting of any type of professional, they're all gonna be complaining.

We just don't see that. We, we know our. Struggles as chiropractors, but there's a lot of other struggles within a lot of other professionals, uh, professions. And ultimately the ones I see that are. Complaining too much or complaining loudest aren't necessarily doing what it takes to overcome the challenges within our profession.

'cause I know a lot of chiropractors that are, I am in a fortunate situation to get to talk to chiropractors of all stripes, and I've got chiropractors of all stripes that are doing well and I would say. There's a handful of characteristics of those docs that are, but one of 'em is, is they've continued [00:04:00] to prime the pump and they've continued, uh, to trust the, the process with that and have some delayed gratification.

Right? Like realizing if I'm, if I'm doing this amount of community outreach, uh, I may not see the new patients tomorrow, but I'll see them down the road. Uh, it's been fascinating now that I've been practicing for. You know, 20 years. And then in this particular practice that I've owned outright for 15 is sometimes I get new patients where it's from an event I did eight years ago.

Right. And it just, this summation effect of doing a lot of stuff over time starts to bear fruit. But you have to be able to prime the pump. And too many people. Um, put a lot of thought into growth, but not a lot of action into growth. And so I wanna, uh, go right into this little audio. This is from Zig Ziglar.

It's a few minute clip of him talking about priming the pump.

I got a couple of good friends who [00:05:00] many, many years ago were riding around in the South Alabama foothills. It was a hot August day and, uh, they got thirsty. Bernard Haygood was driving. Jimmy Glenn was the passenger. They pulled behind this old abandoned farmhouse. And, uh, Bernard hopped out. He ran over and there was an old, uh, pump on the well, and he grabbed the handle and he started the pump.

How many have ever used one of these old-fashioned water pumps? Can I say your hand please? Okay. Well he just a pump in away, you know, and after about three or four minutes he said, Jimmy. Better get that old bucket over there and dip some water out of the creek. We're gonna have to prime the pump. How many of you know what I'm talking about when I say you gotta prime the pump?

Well, for you, underprivileged, non pumpers, that just means you gotta put something in here before you get something out there. Can't you just see an old farmer standing out in the fields in October and saying, Lord, I know I didn't plant a thing this year, but if you gimme a big crop this year, I'll plant more than anybody [00:06:00] next year.

It ain't that way, folks. You gotta put something in before you can expect to get anything out. Well, it is just a pumping away, you know, that's hot. It's August. I mean, uh, the question is, is how much pumping are you going to do for a drink of water and. Finally, old Bernard said, you know, Jimmy, I don't believe it's any water down there.

Jimmy said, yeah, it is Bernard, you know, in South Alabama, the wells are deepened. Oh, we are glad they're deep because the deeper the well, the cooler, the cleaner, the sweeter, the purer, the better tasting the water. And isn't that true of life? Isn't it true that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can learn?

To do it well. We'll never know how much more success we would've had had. We just had a little more pumping in there and pump and pump and pump and pump. Well, finally, oh, Bernard just got disgusted. He throw up his hand, he said, Jimmy, there just no water down there. Jimmy said, don't stop barn Bernard.

Don't stop. If you stop there, water's gonna go all the way back down and then you're gonna have to [00:07:00] start all. Over. The reality is, folks, and I'm totally convinced of this, this is a story of America. This is your story. This is a story of success. This is a story of life. I believe with all of my heart, that if you will pump long enough and hard enough and enthusiastically enough that eventually the reward is going to follow the ever.

And then once that waters. Starts to flow. All you gotta do is just keep a little easy, steady pressure on it, and you're gonna get more water than you can possibly use .

Dr. Kevin Christie: So you can see someone like him has got a lot of energy and if we are all blessed with that charisma and energy, we probably would do better. Uh, but what he's saying is true, and you can apply that to any endeavor you're doing. And we're going to obviously apply it to chiropractic today. And I just wanted to cover.

Kinda briefly, you know, five steps to, to prime your pump for your chiropractic, uh, practice. And so step one [00:08:00] is you gotta nail your vision. You gotta get super clear on what your vision is. What's gonna motivate you to achieve that, uh, vision. You know, I, I, we do a lot with our clients on getting. Um, the overall vision, but then a three year vision, like, you know, and it's goes back to that R factor question from Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach.

You know, what has to be the case three years from now for you to be happy with your role, your results, both personally and professionally, and answer that question, what does three years look like? And I want you to take the time to write out your three year vision plan. What does it look like? In your practice or in your, uh, just professionally.

And then maybe you sit down and you say, okay, now what does that mean for me personally? So step one is you gotta get clear on what your vision is. Step two is you need to know your audience inside and out. We do the audience builder exercise for all our clients. Like I, if, if our clients don't get one thing, they're gonna get clear [00:09:00] on who their audience is.

So that when they actually start to take the action necessary, it's got a higher chance of working. So you gotta know your audience. And we, we do that. I've taught, I read, I wrote about it in the book, right? You can go to amazon.com doing it right? Modern Chiropractic Marketing. It was published by Parker University five years ago Now.

So that's a big thing that I've always talked about. Step three is you wanna streamline your operations. You, you definitely gotta get efficient within your practice. And again, that's another thing we tackle with our clients. Everybody throws around the word systems and that's important. And you really gotta get your operations functioning well so that when you do get some new patients in, it's a great experience for that patient.

And then they refer, right? So many people, their operations are not good. And the patient does not give them a full chance or, uh, may stick through their treatment plan, but aren't gonna really recommend them. We've had, we've all done businesses like [00:10:00] that where it's like, we're kind of pot committed. We do it, but I'm not gonna probably come back after this dinner.

I'm not gonna refer my friends, whatever. Right? So you gotta streamline your operations. It's so important. Next step four is amplify your marketing. Right? This is something I harp on all the time, whether it's consistent content marketing in the, in the online world, you know, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and emails, your patients and blogs and just getting content out there.

Uh, or it's, it's community outreach, strategic community outreach to, to where you're really meeting a lot of people in your community consistently. It's, this is such a big one. Uh, you know, you might meet 10 people. And two of them refer to you and that's okay. And then you meet another 10 and then you get two referring like you meet a hundred and you got, uh, 20 people referring to you, whatever you know.

And so it's not gonna be a home run all the time, but you gotta continue to prime that pump And getting out there and meeting [00:11:00] people or putting out content consistently, that is definitely priming the pump. Even if you don't think marketing works, you're, you're, you're, you're not right. But you just probably gotta get better at it.

But you gotta be consistently amplifying your marketing and in step five, plan your finances. You gotta really, really understand your finances. I, I don't have all the details right now, but, uh, each year, at the end of the year, we do a online course that's very digestible over six weeks, and we are going to do one on.

Finances this year. Uh, it'll, it'll be December, we'll probably launch it to sign up in November and it's gonna be good. We've got, uh, Holly Tucker and we've got Christine Odel already kind of signed in to, to do a, a module on that. I'm gonna do the rest and you're. The people that take that are gonna really, truly understand their practice finances and how to plan that.

So you gotta make sure that you've got your a, a really good [00:12:00] grasp of your financials, uh, and that's gonna help you also, uh, prime the pump. And, you know, another way that we, we do this, uh, with, with our practice, with our clients, we have the CSA digital dashboard. If you're a CSA member. Uh, which is only $99 a month, you get access to that.

If you're an MCM member coaching client, you get access to that as part of it. But we have a whole tool on there called the Indicator Scorecard, and it's when you track your leading and trailing indicators, you know, example, the trailing indicators gonna be your new patients or let's make it even more, uh.

Niche. It's like, let's say you want to have five MD referrals per month to your practice. That would be a trailing indicator. What are the leading indicators that you're doing to actually get. Those MD referrals, what, how are you priming the pump to actually get those MD referrals? And so we have a whole scorecard where you track that.

You track all your trailing indicators and then what leading, you know, how many [00:13:00] MD meetings are you gonna do per month to make sure that happens? Where if you're trying to get, uh, more reactivations, what are you doing with that? Are you trying to get more Google reviews? What are the. Uh, leading indicators to get more Google reviews, right?

So we, we lay this whole thing out for you, which is essentially a documented strategy to prime the pump for your practice. And we do it every quarter. And September's always a. A good month. It's one of the ones where we do q, you know, quarterly planning for our members. Uh, so in September, all of our, most of our calls are geared towards Q4 planning so that our clients really finish the year strong.

Uh, you know, I, I've said this multiple times, but as we know, January 1st is the start of every year, but it really feels like September is the start of the year. Everybody's back to school, everything's back to normal. Uh, you know, family vacations are done. And you know, this is when you gotta, you know, everything's back to normal.

I got no more summer malaise excuses, and we gotta get it going and let's finish [00:14:00] it strong. And let's not just kind of tail off at the end there. And so we do a lot of Q4 planning and September's a great time to prime the pump. And if you haven't been priming the pump, maybe Q4 is the time where, you know, I'm gonna prime the pump hard and then, you know, keep on going into 2026 and make sure 2026 is my best year ever.

And then the same thing for 27, 28, and keep on growing there. And so, just consistently do what you need to do to grow that practice. If you don't know, you know, some of you. Know what you need to do when you're not doing it. And we all got reasons why. Some of you don't know what needs to be done and you're kind of frustrated with it.

And that's where, you know, either way you fall on that, we're here to help you out. So, you know, check us@modernchiropracticmarketing.com if you wanna find out more of our programs on how we can help you, uh, prime the pump of your practice, and then ultimately get the results that you've been dreaming of.