Given the climate of healthcare today, practitioners of all types are working harder then ever to run a successful business.

Being a chiropractor comes with a unique set of challenges — advice comes from a lot of sources on how best to handle practice concerns. But are you listening to the right people?

You can learn a lot from your peers, but you need to be careful about who and what you are listening to.

Advice, while most of the time is well intentioned, may not always be good advice. Every day, people get told to do one thing or another from a well-meaning colleague or family member. However, one big question to ask yourself when deciding what to do with this advice would be, “is this person an expert on the subject?”

Expert advice

An expert would be someone proficient and trained in the subject at hand. As a chiropractor, you are an expert in treating musculoskeletal maladies. If you were to ask a roomful of chiropractors about how to treat a shoulder injury, you would receive great advice from just about everyone asked.

However, if you were to ask them the best way to get new patients, the advice given in return would range from serviceable to absurd.

Marketing and advertising is not something you are trained in during your professional schooling, yet it is something many have an opinion on. How many times have you heard, “I don’t do any advertising, my practice is all referral.”

To follow this advice would be near practice suicide especially for a new practitioner. While referrals are an important part of the growth of any office, the profession, now more than ever, must be visible in the public eye. Chiropractic must become a household name to more than the current 8 percent of the population that utilizes our services.

If 80 percent of the population saw a chiropractor, imagine what that would do to the health of our communities. Taking that a step further, imagine what 80 percent of the population would mean to the success of the profession. This will not be possible if the profession does not get over the “mom and pop” mentality that seems to permeate the chiropractic landscape.

Lesson learned

One good lesson to learn from some of your more unfortunate colleagues is to not count on the referral-only plan. You must have a marketing and advertising budget, calendar, and system in place to continually attract new patients no matter what the financial climate may be.

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