Q:  How do you truly maintain focus with all that a small business owner has to juggle in the effort to maintain work, life, and spiritual balance for one's self when the funds are not yet adequate to hire and delegate projects, responsibility, or anything else to a third party?

That's a great question. How do you maintain all of these things when you're the one cleaning the toilets, putting out the sign-in sheets, welcoming people in, answering the phone, adjusting patients, doing your reports, and taking care of new patients? The answer is

Q:  I heard you say that certainty is what you sold. What was the pivotal event that changed things for you, or was it more than one?

I was asked once by a Ph.D. professor who was a patient of mine what is it that I 'sold'. Now most chiropractors don't like the word 'sales'. They're healers, not sales people. I get that, but have got to get over it!  We do sell and we damn well better be

Q:  Did you advertise for specific conditions?

This is a really tricky question. It belongs here, it belongs in philosophy, but did I advertise for specific conditions? I guess the answer is yes. I did a lot of Ritalin workshops for ADD and ADHD. I did a lot of ear infection workshops. I did some stress related workshops and ones on how to raise a healthy drug free family.

Did I advertise back pain?

Q:  For longevity, what are your suggestions about technique, style, and growth from a technical standpoint? How would you go about adjusting and making sure you stayed on top of the best techniques to keep you in practice for a long time?

It's important stuff. When you start building volume and you start seeing a lot of people, I don't care who you are, your body's going to start showing it; wrists, elbows, low back.

One of the best things you can do right now is make sure that

Q:  If I wanted to see 500 patient visits per week, how many adjusting tables or rooms would I need to have?

That's a question that I really can't answer accurately because it depends so much on your technique, how big your office is, what style of practice you have, what kind of flow you design and what kind of hours you're going to keep.

Q:  How do I find the bottleneck areas of the practice and how do I fix them?

By bottleneck, I'm interpreting capacity limitations, or places where things slow down and limit your growth and volume. Those might be physical bottlenecks. Your hallway might be too narrow. You might not have enough rooms. You might not have enough tables. You might need to take the doors off your rooms. You might need to blow down walls and go up with concepts.

You need to look at capacity limitations physically, but much more importantly and more commonly,

Q:  What's the best way to start out after graduation? Should I sub-lease? Associate? Start my own practice?

I can't give you answer without knowing you. In fact, I still couldn't give you an answer. Only you can. There are several things you could do.

Q:  Everything has fundamentals. Once you know them, it takes an average player to either be a good or even a great player. What are the fundamentals of chiropractic?

That's a good question because we all know that Tiger Woods goes back to fundamentals. He goes to his coach and has him analyze his swing and work on the 'fundamentals' even though we'd all agree he's already a pretty good golfer. We know that NBA stars video themselves shooting free throws over and over again, but they're pretty damn good at that.

Fundamentals are the name of the game, and fundamentals in chiropractic come down to

Q:  What would you say the key is to keeping overhead low?

First of all, just being conscious of this is huge because so many docs let it get out of control and they end up working their butts off just to pay expenses. Running a practice isn't cheap, but understanding a few basic principles can end up saving you a tremendous amount of money and stress.  Do it right, and you can build an Epic Practice with an overhead that won't put you under!

Here's how:

Q:  How many staff did you have and what were their roles?

The number of staff I had varied. At one point, I had three for a little while. I usually had one full time CA and one part time CA. The reason I was able to do that and see a significant volume was because my practice design.

I'm not talking about the physical design per se, more so the structure and design of my processes and the outcome I desired. I had a very, very simple practice because I'm a simple person. I don't like complexity. I don't like stress.