EPISODE 488: What is a MCM Chiro?

Hey, chiropractors. We're ready for another Modern Chiropractic Mastery 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] 10 aspects of being an MCM chiro. That's what we're gonna cover today. Uh, before we do, you know, one of the things that we're gonna talk about that's in the 10 is providing a remarkable patient experience, and one of the things I know we do in our practice is, uh, we use Stop Pain. We have a little gift basket of different things, and we have, uh, that as an, uh, opportunity for them to take on their first visit as a gift.

Uh, and if not, we sell it, you know, not necessarily to them, but we have a whole rack of that that we do sell to patients as well. And it's, uh, part of the clinical and it's part of the patient experience, and you should check them out at stoppainclinical.com. They are awesome. That is S-T-O-P, one P, A-I-N clinical.com, stoppainclinical.com.

All right, let's, let's dive in. Uh, what is an MCM chiro? I got 10 things here. I actually got 11, but the first thing I'm gonna start out with, and it's not part of the 10, it's just a table stakes, [00:01:00] is you gotta be a great clinician. I think one of the things that I am proud of our coaching clients, our membership, our mastermind members, uh, they are all really good clinically, and then they want to get better at business.

Uh, they are not trying to put lipstick on a pig. They're not trying to get good at business to overcome not caring and being bad, uh, clinically. So that's, that's out of the gates. Uh, so what are the other 10? What are the 10 parts of this that I consider an MCM chiro? Uh, me and the other coaches kind of jotted down a list of what we try to achieve when we are coaching chiropractors.

And, you know, we had recently... Just a little bit of a history of our, uh, name, MCM. It used to be Modern Chiropractic Marketing. We started out really focusing on content marketing. We still focus a lot on content marketing and marketing in general. Uh, but then we, you know, we realized this is like we're more than that.

[00:02:00] We're really all things business. And so we are now Modern Chiropractic Mastery, which has been the podcast name for a while. So the podcast was Modern Chiropractic Marketing for a while, and then we had changed that a q- maybe four years ago to Modern Chiropractic Mastery, but kept the company as Modern Chiropractic Marketing, and then recently, this past year, changed it all.

So we're all Modern Chiropractic Mastery, and I just really like that word mastery And, uh, a book I recommend is called "Mastery" by Robert Greene, and I read that quite a few years ago, and it really gave me a lot of, uh, insights into what mastery is and that, you know, sometimes it's a longer game and, and it also doesn't necessarily ever end, and you're always trying to get even better.

And I just really like that word mastery in general. And, uh, when you combine modern, uh, chiropractic mastery, I like it because we wanna keep you modern. That's always ever-changing, [00:03:00] right? And mastery is always ever-growing, and you have to have both of those, right? You gotta stay modern, and you have to keep mastering things, and that's clinical, and it's also from a business perspective, even if you're an associate.

So let's, let's get, get going, right? So again, we talked about great clinician, you gotta be that. The second thing, and I-- uh, you, you gotta dominate the patient experience. And I heard someone, I always forget who it was. Sometimes I attribute it to someone that, that may not have actually said it, but it wasn't me, I'll say that from the get-go, but I do believe in it, is that a doctor who is good at business just means that doctor provides the ultimate in patient experience, and there's a lot of facets to that, right?

Um, and you need to develop that, right? You need to develop that patient experience. And it's everything from the clinical to the way your team makes them [00:04:00] feel, to the how nice your office is, to the communications you have, to the niceties, right? I, I did a whole, um- talk on this in London recently, and really the difference between service and hospitality.

We also talked about the friction-free patient experience, like how do you reduce the friction points? How do you provide exceptional service? What is hospitality that service isn't? Uh, and I'm actually, uh, having another, um, patient experience master class here in Boca Raton coming up in September, so you can, uh, reach out to me.

I've, I've promoted it a little bit. It's in our Facebook group. Go to our Facebook group, um, Modern Chiropractic Mastery. Uh, about five thousand chiropractors in there, and you can find it in there as well. It's coming up in early September. It'll be here in Boca Raton. Uh, but you gotta really dominate the patient experience, and that's something that we harp on with our clients consistently.

How to be remarkable, [00:05:00] right? How to, how to be worth remarking on, and the patient experience is a big part of that. All right. Number two is you have a very strategic community outreach plan, right? Um, we have a whole system for this. We use our practice growth dashboard. It has, I think, eleven tools on it now, and one of them is a really good set of tools on developing a strategic community outreach plan that is credibility enhancing, not credibility detracting, right?

And that's something that we coach on a lot, is that you're doing things out in the community that are positioning you in authority and not making you look bad, right? We know historically a lot of chiropractors have done a lot of things that aren't necessarily savory. So you need to have a strategic, strategic community outreach plan.

You might be in the stage of your career where you have more time than money, and that's where you gotta do it. You gotta put the time out there in the community. Uh, you may be in a stage of your career where you have more money than time, [00:06:00] and you can re- invest in, you know, maybe associate doctors or community out- community outreach people.

Maybe you do specific things like meetings with doctors and attorneys and, and then maybe the other doctors in your office are doing other things, right? But your clinic has a strategic community outreach plan.

All right. The third one, consistent content marketing, right? That is what we started our company on, as I mentioned before.

Like, you are producing content and getting it distributed out consistently You are becoming a leading educator in the community. You are an authority figure in your community around health-related information, and you're getting it out there consistently, right? The Content Marketing Institute is where I kinda got my formal training on content marketing, talked about being consistent and a lot o- there's, uh, the, the book I always like is "Epic Content Marketing," and there's six principles of content marketing, and I've talked about that a ton.[00:07:00]

Um, you need to be doing it. Um, we, we have a system for that for our clients. Our-- actually, our signature program, we, we do the marketing for you, right? We've actually, um, have adapted that. Now we have, um, our clients shoot short eight reels. We do all the production and distribution. We have them shoot a couple longer form videos, like a few minutes.

We do that production, distribution. We email your patients and, and basically y- we plug, you plug our team onto yours and, and we handle the heavy lifting of the content marketing. You become the subject matter expert. Your clinic needs to have consistent content marketing. You need to be emailing patients.

You need to have some social media presence. You need to be posted on Google Business Profile. Your website has to be a content marketing hub. Uh, the list goes on, but it's very digestible for you when it's done right.

Uh, number four is gonna be practice systems. Your practice has systems. I know chiropractors talk about that all the time They wanna have systems [00:08:00] for their practice, but they don't take the necessary steps to do that and document it.

You know, that's everything from, yeah, a, a patient experience system, a new, you know, a marketing system, a front desk system, a training and meeting system for your business. Uh, there's a lot of different systems you need. Um, some of them are built in, right? Like if you get an EHR, that's like a... that's your EHR system, and some of them are not.

Um, you, you're gonna have your clinical systems, um, but you know, you gotta have things like, okay, here's our Google Review system. Here is our, our, uh, patient adherence system, right? So we have all these systems that we, um, make sure our clients start to implement. It takes time, but it's worth doing. It, it definitely does-- can take some time, but you need some guidance on that.

So in MCM Cairo has practice systems. Next, and number five is elegant sales, right? Whether you are a cash [00:09:00] practice or you are an insurance-based practice, and you're gonna have add-on services. Some of the best practices I'm seeing right now, not all, but are in network with insurance, but have add-on services and are doing a good job with elegant sales.

Uh, we just got back from our East Mastermind a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago now, in Maine, and we had a whole weekend of sales, and it was really great, I thought. It went really nice and, you know, I'm able to tweak some of the things that we teach our chiropractors in our coaching program on elegant sales.

So you do well with that. You're not overselling. You're not browbeating people. You're not selling stuff they don't need, right? You're, you're selling things they do need in an ethical manner that just gives them an opportunity to, uh, get results essentially. Okay?

Next, and number six is you have, and I mentioned this on the systems part, but you have optimal patient adherence I think this is one of the things I love to [00:10:00] tackle first.

Um, and we actually, um, we ran, um, a cohort, and we're probably gonna do that again, you can reach out if you're interested, um, of associate training program where we took, um, a handful of clinics and we said, "Okay, we're gonna do g- we're gonna run your associate doctor through 12 lessons, two a month over six months, and we're gonna go over things."

And one of the big ones was patient adherence, because we see that struggle the most with younger docs, no doubt, associates. Um, but you-- there are really cool strategies to optimize the patient adherence. And again, uh, you know, words have meanings, and sometimes people don't like the word patient retention because they think of like, you know, selling a big, huge care plan that someone doesn't really want or need and then have to, um, do all these tricks to retain them.

Um, I, I-- you know, you can use the word retention adherence. I u- we use adherence [00:11:00] now because it just, it, it's a good word. It's fine. And, and basically, you're essentially providing, um, an evidence-based guidelines of care for whatever their condition is. Now, if they wanna then after that, which we love, is convert them to performance care or maintenance care after that so they can just stay healthy, uh, that's awesome, right?

So that can go into perpetuity. That's fine. Um, but we really gotta make sure that adherence is, is good, right? If you're setting someone up for two times a week for three weeks and then one time a week for another two weeks, and they fall off after, you know, all these new patients are falling off after two or three visits, that is gonna be really hard to get optimal outcomes.

And if you're not getting optimal outcomes, it's gonna be really hard to get referrals and I mean, it's just, it's a practice killer. So we, we really hammer that with, with our clients.

Next, number seven is, oh, this-- I got a love-hate relationship with this word, [00:12:00] um, but scale. But I, I like to put it as scale to vision, right?

So I think scaling and, you know, there's a lot to it. Like scaling is important. There's coaching companies. Uh, one I actually kinda like, there's a book that I recommend called "The Science of Scaling," and that is by Benjamin Hardy. Um, he's got a whole entrepreneur coaching group thing now. It's quite expensive, so, um, I would only look into it if you can really handle quite a bit per month.

It's, uh, not for the faint of heart. But his concepts are pretty good. Uh, I, I, I shouldn't say pretty good. They're really good. And I think there is a, you know, I think there is a, a lot to s- to scaling, but I think you have to scale to your vision. The mistake is, is that People just assume scaling means having multiple locations, or it means you have to be to $2 million in a clinic or all these things, right?

Um, but really what you need to do first is get very clear on your vision. That's why whenever we get a new member, first thing we [00:13:00] do is write out the R factor question, which is simply We have them write it out to us is simply, you know, three years from today, what has to be the case for you to be happy with your results, both personally and professionally?

That's a strategic coach concept or in question. They call it the R, R is for relationship. Uh, but essentially we want to know what your vision is because then we can scale to the vision, not just scale to someone else's vision or because, you know, Alex Ramosi says you need to. I like Alex Ramosi, not, not bashing him, but, uh, he's got a lot of great information, but, you know, his vision may not be yours or how he does things may not be yours or it may.

Um, but you got to scale to what your vision is, and I think we do a good job of, of helping out with that.

Uh, next is, uh, entrepreneur, right? We wanna, we wanna, especially if you are a business owner or you wanna be at some point, we wanna turn you into a entrepreneur as much as we can. Uh, again, you know, I rely on Strategic Coach a lot.

Again, they're, you know... [00:14:00] I love for-- I, I have referred a lot of people to Strategic Coach, a lot of my current or past members to Strategic Coach. I had a, a buddy of mine recently who, uh, I asked if he wanted to join our mastermind, and he's like, "You know, I've been thinking about it." He's a very high-level chiropractor, and he's like, "But I've also thought about Strategic Coach.

What do you think?" And I said, "Honestly, do Strategic Coach." I think where he's at, he needs Strategic Coach. They do have a pretty substantial minimum, uh, personal income that you have to... I think it's up to, like, 250k now to join there, and I don't think it's also for everybody. Even if you're at 250, uh, k in, in personal income, not clinic revenue, personal income, even if you're at that, I don't think it's for all chiropractors.

It just depends on what your vision is, kind of going back to that. But they are what has helped me, and that's kind of my operating system as an entrepreneur, and I think MCM does a really good job of having a particular operating [00:15:00] system for chiropractic entrepreneurs and within that. And, you know, it's everything from having, uh, I'm gonna steal some of this from Curt, uh, Kippenberger, one of our coaches, who talked about how do we help with situational IQ.

I think that's what's so helpful with having a coach, and Kurt, one of our masterminds, mentioned, he-- and I forget where he got this from, but, uh, sometimes when you're in the jar, it's hard to read the label. So, like, when you're in your clinic, it's hard to read the things going on around it, and you need that outside help.

I have that. Um, the mastermind is that for me. Strategic Coach is that for me. I always have people around me to be able to read that label 'cause I'm inside the, the jar, obviously. Um, and so situational IQ is helpful, resiliency, uh, not being left on an island, right? So I think a lot of chiropractors struggle with the entrepreneur aspect of it because they don't have the, the people around them or certain things like that, and so I think we do a good job of that as well.

So we try to help you [00:16:00] become the best version of entrepreneur that you want to be, frankly, and what that vision is

Next, and number 10 is cash confident, right? I did a whole course on this. So we, we've-- I basically took that course and put it in. We use Circle now, circle.com. It's a really cool app with all our clients where we communicate, they can message me.

We've got, uh... I post some content in there in general. We, we have a online course in there, and I put the whole conf- cash confident course in there as part of that. And we really try to get chiropractors to get confidence within their, their money. It doesn't happen overnight for everybody. It goes up and down.

I can talk to a chiropractor who's been doing it for 40 years who's very successful, and they can start giving you many times where they didn't feel confident in the cash flow. But overall, in the arc of their career, they have done well, and they have. And that's what we wanna make sure you have, have a system for your finances, okay?

And then lastly, um, number 10 is, is I took [00:17:00] this, I did that episode on, um, the seven principles of influence by Robert, Robert Cialdini, and his number seven was unity. And I'm kinda putting that as our number 10 of what makes a MCM Chiro is, is really, you know, having that connection with other chiropractors that are like-minded going through similar things.

And it's something I know we've, we've 100% created in the mastermind. Um, the re- the return rate of the members is pretty staggering because of that and other things. It's just, uh, putting on a good product, uh, to be honest with you. Uh, but then even on the coaching side, so our coaching clients that aren't in the mastermind, um, that Circle app, our group coaching calls, uh, access to the different coaches, myself, um, all on the same kind of goal of, of what type of chiropractor we wanna be has created a, a sense of unity within that.

We're, we're working on things to [00:18:00] make that even better. Uh, you know, certain things we're gonna do. Um, Kurt had a good idea of doing a, um, kinda like a once a call, once a month call in addition to our other stuff that's, um, more like brew and business. We could call it bourbon and business, but I don't know, there's a lot of non-alcoholic drinkers now amongst the, the millennials and Gen Zs out here.

Uh, so something like brew and, and business where we just, you know, talk shop, shoot the shit about business, bitch, complain, um, positives, opportunities, obstacle, all this stuff, right? Having someone, having people to just kinda connect and, and talk more about practice, the, the positives, the, the concerns, the opportunities, uh, all the, all the stuff, right?

And so we're continuing to work on creating more of a unity within our members, and I think, um, we do that. It's been cool. Sometimes we'll see, uh, you know, the Adjust-A-Thon is coming up for MPI, which I highly [00:19:00] recommend that. Go to, go to their website, motionpalpation.org. Um, I know we've got Kurt and Gage from our MCM company gonna be there.

Alex, she's in our-- gonna be there. She's from our MCM company, and then we have a bunch of MCMers, whether it's masterminders or, or coach, uh, coaching clients are there. And I just love when we're-- You know, we've also had a lot of, uh, pictures from there. We've had pictures from the Shockwave, um, Academy when-- especially when David Rudnick is teaching it, where there's MCM members there and maybe wearing their hat, and they take pictures together and send that to me and stuff.

And so it's been pretty cool to see that grow as well. So, um, and that's why we, you know, we ultimately developed the Doing It Right framework was to encompass this. We're not trying to put you in a box, and you have to do things this way. We're giving you a framework and applying that to your or, you know, whatever different clinical, um, strategies you have.

And, uh, yeah, trying to [00:20:00] make it, uh, to where you're enjoying what you're doing. And a big part of enjoying what you're doing is feeling like you're making progress, um, from a professional standpoint in business. Uh, I always say it's like I could take two chiropractors, uh, chiropractor A and chiropractor B, and all things being equal, everything being equal, except for chiropractor A has some-- has a good business, right?

Like it's, it's cash flowing well, and they're growing, and, you know, they just have a good business around their great clinical versus the other one who's a great clinician, but the business isn't pulling its l- its weight. That, you know, chiropractor B is gonna face burnout quicker than chiropractor A.

It's just the, the way it is. And so we want you to have the mindset as you're gonna be great clinically, and you're just gonna keep on getting better business-wise. And it, you know, s- for some people, it happens right away, right? And then some people, it takes ten years, and that's okay. It-- You'll get there if you keep on putting in the work and developing what we would call mastery, right?

And, uh, [00:21:00] again, check out that book. I, I know I mentioned a few books, but check out that book, uh, Mastery by Robert Greene. And, um, if you think you need help with, uh, your clinic, we'd love to help you out. We have very friendly terms, in my opinion, on making that happen. So go to our website, modernchiropracticmastery.com, and we'd love to help you out.