What is Your Chiro-Identity: How Self-Discovery Can Set You on an Exciting New Path in Chiropractic

Welcome to this edition of Catch Up With ChiroTouch. My name is Dr. Ronnie Simms, and I'm your host today. Our whole goal with this is to help you reach your full potential.

And we think that what the world needs more now than ever is chiropractors to be at their best. So this podcast is in the spirit of that. And so today we're gonna really dive into helping you find your chiro identity.

I feel like so many chiropractors on this call and in the profession today are having a little bit of what we call identity crisis where they just don't know really what their unique gifts and talents are and they maybe are operating as a round peg in a square hole and it just, there may be either burning out or they just don't know what to do next. So I could not have a better guest on with me today to talk about these things. I'm really talking about a wonderful guy named Dr. Allen Miner.

And Dr. Allen, if you haven't met Dr. Allen, is one of those unique individuals within chiropractic that has so much to say, but he does it in such a humble way. And I just really appreciate that about him. He's got the real humble spirit of a leader that is just willing to help and help chiropractors grow.

He not only operates and owns a beautiful family wellness practice in Albert Creek in New Mexico, Health Quest Chiropractic, where he has multiple associates in multiple locations. He's also co-founder and principal in a wonderful company that I use called Chiro Match Makers. And no, this is not a chiropractic dating service.

Chiro Match Makers is a business that helps chiropractors, like myself, like you, help build your dream practice and build your dream team by pairing you with the right associates and the right CAs to reach your vision. And so Dr. Allen Miner, welcome to our show. We're so glad to have you here, brother.

Thanks. And so let's go ahead. I'm gonna dive right into the questions, okay?

And I think this topic is right in your sweet spot based on our past conversations. But the first question is, is this whole thing about finding your true identity? You know, when I say that, a lot of docs on the call are gonna probably be looking at this going, well, how do I do that?

You know, and most people, I think, kind of think they know their identity. But as I learned when I went through your work, I realized some things about myself that I just didn't know. So can you kind of talk about that and talk also within that answer about the different kind of genotypes and breeds within our profession?

Yeah, sure. It's, like always, we like to say, this is all come about from our scar tissue, from our failures. And we do, we have clinics in Albuquerque, New Mexico and in Dallas, Texas.

And starting out on that path, we failed several times pretty miserably and pretty expensively. And I'm one of those people who just always had this vision of scaling a lot of clinics. And as I started that, we really tripped coming out of the gate with a couple offices, we ended up having to close because they failed.

And in that stress, in that burning down process, there were a lot of answers for me. And you know how things work, Ron, that all of a sudden the right people kind of came into my life and gave me some insights. And one of the big insights was starting to analyze why some groups, not only in chiropractic with offices, but other groups in all aspects of life.

Why do some groups just kind of click in and you've been in practice with multiple practices long enough, Ron, that you've seen that. You get those teams in periods where it's just, there's something special. And you get those teams where everybody's off beat and things never get going.

And so I knew that if I wanted to scale multiple clinics, we had to figure this out. It was just too expensive to have practices fail. And so lo and behold, there's an entire science, an entire world behind measuring predictive behavioral makeup of individuals.

And as we started looking at that in my own clinics, we got some really profound insights on why, we actually were able to very strategically and systematically measure and predict how certain groups and individuals worked together and who was most poised for success under our system inside of the culture of our offices and who is really primed not to succeed. And that has just really enabled us to move things to where we're at today. And it wouldn't have been for that understanding.

And so then at the time, I was involved in a CEO group and I started having other CEO members ask me to help them with, you know, they'd been on their third COO in the last year, or somebody had two great salespeople, but eight that weren't performing, or just all these funny scenarios that we started using these tools on and kind of honing this skill and this craft. At the same time, I had other chiropractor friends starting to reach out saying, hey, I heard about what you're doing. You know, we keep having turnover at the front desk or in the back office, or we can't find an associate who will stay longer.

They're not performing how they want. And so when I say Chiro Match Makers was formed out of scar tissue, it really was us working on solving our own problems. And all of a sudden by very organically word of mouth, friends started saying, hey, can you help me over here with my assistant, with my CA, with my office manager?

And that is how this was born. And so you're right, we've now literally done behavioral assessments on thousands and thousands of chiropractors, Ron. And what's become very evident is there are, broadly speaking, three big categories of chiropractors.

And the majority of chiropractors fall into a category we call caregivers. Roughly 70% of our profession are caregivers. And those are people who are very clinically minded.

Their focus is, you know, they're very loyal, very strategic, very systems-oriented, phenomenal physicians, typically great adjusters, great notes, great exams, very thorough. And what was really fascinating is these are not people that traditionally have been celebrated in chiropractic. These are people who oftentimes, you know, one of the things we're working to eradicate at Chiro Match Makers is even the term associate doctor just immediately implies less than, and they're not, those are colleagues.

You know, we always point out, you don't have brain surgeons saying, I'm an associate brain surgeon at the hospital. It's just, I'm a brain surgeon, you know? But they are an associate, they don't own the hospital.

But so just the nature of the profession, kind of looking down on associates, not edifying these people, and they make up the majority of our profession. And what we found is the most successful practices have found a way to stop this hierarchy and really bring this to where there's colleagues working side by side and are paid appropriately and are really honored for their strengths. You know, we've learned in my organization, when somebody's in the right role, doing the job that is congruent with how they're hardwired, how God designed them, you don't have to motivate a person anymore.

They're excited to show up for the work. It's after all, why they got educated, why they became chiropractors. You know, there's a lot of work we've done to...

What's interesting, just a little tidbit, is one of the most demotivating things for a caregiver is uncertainty. And what's the majority of care plan, excuse me, of compensation plans you see in chiropractic for associates? It's these sliding scales with if you hit this, we'll pay you that, and this level, and that level, and you could not more quickly demotivate a caregiver than having that pay structure in place.

And yet, that's what most of the profession has done. These are people in other professions who are typically engineers, architects, physicians, accountants. They're very specific, detailed oriented people, and surprise, guess what?

It's the majority of our profession, and we've done a really poor job of creating a great home for these people. And so, here's my big secret sauce. We're creating a great environment for these people.

We're really lift them up, give them the tools they need, but we support them. These people are not energized by going out in marketing and screening. They're typically a little more introverted, but boy, you get them one on one with really clear systems and procedures, clear expectations, and a really solid pay that's not based on all these numbers.

And you'll be shocked at how well these doctors do and how passionate they are in their practices by simply being able to express why they went to school in the first place. So that's one big category is caregivers. The other end of it is entrepreneurs.

We find that's roughly 10% to 15% of the profession. And those are the big personalities in chiropractic that we've all seen. Very extroverted, very dominant, very outgoing, typically big visionary kind of people.

They usually really suck at details. You could probably go behind ChiroTouch's metrics and very quickly see which offices had more detail or in its systems people and which had more visionaries. Lots of new patients, lots of energy in the visionary offices, but the back end is usually just a hot mess and vice versa.

The real detailed offices, the notes are great. The re-scans and care plans are well taken care of. All the coding and billing is great, but the front end is kind of quiet.

And so anyways, we've been measuring how to analyze people. So you've got entrepreneurs, you've got caregivers, and somewhere in the middle of those two are something we call business builders. And that's about the other 15% of the profession.

And these folks are outgoing, but they lean more towards systems orientation. And at the end of the day, they do really well in a kind of an environment where they can kind of have some autonomy, to have some wiggle room, to do their own thing, but not completely. You know, under the umbrella of another system, they really succeed and do well.

And so we've really seen, and these are all based on behavioral archetypes that are very measurable. And that's maybe the challenge we have in chiropractic, is most people don't have a self-awareness of how they're wired. Or even if they do, they think, well, you know, I really am not extroverted.

I'd rather not spend my weekends doing screenings and doing talks and networking, but I don't think I'm gonna make a good living if I don't do that. So I guess I'm just gonna suck it up and figure it out. And unfortunately, that's a really high probability that person's gonna burn out because they're having to act in a way that's opposite of what's natural to them.

So that's really our work is if we can just help the profession understand itself and get people into the right roles and into really great positions, it really becomes a win-win for everybody. Ron, medicine figured this out. I mean, you can go to get a degree to be a hospital administrator.

They let the doctors be the doctors, and then they bring in hospital marketers and hospital admin, and people are all in their wheelhouse doing what, you know, my big epiphany in my business group was I had a plumber who had this 30-year business, $20 million plumbing business. He'd leave town for two months at a time, and I figured out pretty quick his secret is he had a team of 30 plumbers who'd all average being with him for like 15 to 20 years, and when I asked him, he said, I pay them better than anybody else, and they all get to do what they wanted to do in life, which is be plumbers. And he said, they don't market, they don't sell, they don't deal with admin, they don't deal with scheduling, they don't deal with job planning and estimates.

I hire those people because they're experts at that. And it was really that epiphany because I'd been the guy trying to make my associates go out and market, and I'd get really frustrated because then they wouldn't perform how I performed. And I was missing the big picture of all of this.

And so that's really how all this work came about. And those are the big categories, entrepreneur, business builder, caregiver.

Well, that's very interesting to hear how you came to that kind of conclusion through your own scarts issue and your own, let's say failings, that man, I need to add a layer here. And your CEO group is where you first got exposed to that. So prior to that, I was curious, were you just going off your gut, like, hey, I like this guy?

And how did you do it before this objective layer you put in place?

Yeah, I built a big practice on my own with me in the middle of it. Well, when you're not in the middle of it anymore, it changes pretty quickly. When you have satellite offices.

And so A, I was on a CEO learning curve and that I realized, all right, it's not the same thing to build a big thousand a week practice when you're in it as it is to build these satellite clinics. And I spun a doc off who had helped me build a practice who was a far end caregiver. And we just sent 300 patients with him to start a satellite clinic.

And just from the beginning, that thing just atrophied and atrophied. And it was just, it was an unfair expectation. And then I had another guy who was the other end of that entrepreneur who actually learned about chiropractic in my practice.

So I had a lot of loyalty and man, did he hit the ground running for six months and grew that practice really quickly. But then before you know it, was on to the next thing and on to his own practice. And we were like, wait, time out.

So it was really maybe a blessing that I had such a wide juxtaposition of the two extremes that helped me, like you said, from scar tissue kind of get some insight. And so I was doing it off the gut. I was doing it off of loyalty.

I liked them. They were good people that had helped me out. So I wanted to reward them back and very blind to how the dynamics would change when you're in these satellite environments and those people are having to create the culture of the clinics they're in.

And I was just, I think gut's a good way to say it, Ron. I was trying to just kind of figured I was successful here. That must be the next steps to this.

And I really had to eat about $600,000 in losses and the pain of that and the humility to just really recognize, I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to scaling these businesses. It's not the same game as me building a practice with me in it. There's one pearl of wisdom I'll share with docs is my advice when everybody wants to open another clinic is all right, step one, you need to leave your clinic for three months.

You can't step foot in it. All you can get is monthly reports. And when you show back up in three months, if it's grown or stayed the same, you're ready to start opening more clinics.

And the reason is that shows that that clinic has all the systems and all the right people in place that it can run independent of you. Because when you're in a clinic and you're trying to run another clinic, you're shocked at how quickly your energy is divided and now your existing clinic drops and now the new clinic's not doing what it's supposed to do. And so your existing clinic can run without you in it for three months, then you have something ready to scale up.

And until you can do that, don't waste your time on a second clinic because you're just creating an incredible money pit and headache and time suck for yourself that you'd be better off just to grow the clinic you're in. And you know, most of us, our clinics do become personality driven. We help to build them and that's what you've got to avoid if you're trying to build something that's scalable.

Yeah, and that's a great point, Doc. You know, we talked in one of our podcasts about, basically what you said there is getting to a place of anonymity. And I personally have finally arrived there to some degree.

You know, I show up at my practice on a Friday to get an adjustment and walk through and nobody knew my name the other day. I was like, this is wonderful. And years ago, I had my feelings hurt, but now I'm like, yeah, baby.

But I really appreciate you being so transparent about your past and some of the mistakes you made and that you didn't give up. That to me is just a sign of a true leader. Now, let's dive a little bit more into this self-discovery, self-assessment.

What does that look like? Kind of walk our listeners through, you mentioned ProScan, but if I were to enlist your services, I thought it was wonderful when I enlisted your services. The first thing you guys did was say, hey, we need to get to know you better, Ron, before we start trying to build this dream team.

And so walk us through that a little bit. What's that look like? And then give me in that answer, give me some scenarios of some beautiful relationships that you've seen that were created through this level of process procedure you're talking about, and maybe give a couple of examples of ones that didn't go so well.

Yeah, first of all, it depends on where you're at in your chiropractic career. What season are you in? Are you a student?

Are you just launching your first practice? Are you an associate with the practice, a new associate, an associate who's been at the practice for many years and you're looking for a change? Are you scaling your practice, maybe looking to open more practices or grow your practice larger?

Are you looking to exit out of your practice? There really is that arc to our profession. And so it depends on who's where, is how I'll start by answering that.

So Chiro Match Makers is a staffing company, and we kind of meet all those different areas for people who are looking for jobs. We call those doctors our talent. They are the talent of our profession.

And a lot of times the starting point is a program we created called NEXT. And NEXT is a way of me paying something back for that I was given when I was in school, Ron. There was a doctor named John Whitney who since passed, he was Canadian, and he offered a program my last year in chiropractic school called Whitney Transitions.

And Dr. John came in and kind of highlighted some different options you could go through as a graduate. And it was really illuminating and enlightening for me. And I've never seen anybody do it since.

And I realized with the work we do at Chiro Match Makers, also there's been an evolution in the options that people have in jobs. So there's now 10 tracks inside of chiropractic that we've highlighted that a doctor can take. And we go through from the entrepreneurial end of the spectrum, the most capital intensive, most expensive, highest risk, all the way through the business builder.

And then there's the five different, six different options that associates have now that people don't realize, all the way down to the least risk, lowest cost of money to the doctor and everything in between. And so we based that on, like you said, self-awareness, which we call the ProScan. And that is a system that has been around since the 50s, and they've done over 3 million scans now.

It's the most researched product that exists. And we have the exclusive license inside of healthcare around the world for this ProScan. So it's really been neat for us because typically these are sold into Fortune 100 companies and their HR departments use them.

And even their lowest level license costs about $20,000. So it makes annually, so it makes no sense for a chiropractor to who's hiring a couple of times a year to have access to this. And we were able to negotiate where we can do these one off for chiropractors, which really changed the game that we now have this tool that gives people this insight, takes about four minutes to take a ProScan and you get literally 20 pages of insight into how you're hardwired, your natural self, the stresses that are in your life today and that outward self.

If you ever are an owner and have interviewed somebody, and who you interviewed and thought you were hiring was not the same person three months later, that's because that person was under stress, adapting, adjusting their natural behavioral profile and you were reading the wrong, not the wrong person, but you weren't reading who they naturally are going to be. So that's the ProScan. So for somebody who is coming out of school, looking to change jobs, looking to be an associate, our next program is awesome.

It's a $1,000 online course that goes through 11 different courses of all those tracks and overview and understanding of the ProScan. For students, we do that for $2.99. And I think you guys will share the link.

So that's one side of the equation. For owners, we do a discovery process for owners who are looking to considering hiring an associate. And what we find actually is half of the owners we talked to aren't yet ready to hire an associate.

So what we do at this discovery process is, we go through their clinic and their clinic numbers and their goals, and we go through the owner's pro scan, and we help them build out an avatar for an associate they're looking for who would fit into the role that they have. And we really help coach chiropractors as well, because a lot of chiropractors want it all. They want the person who will stay there for 10 years and go market every weekend and do screenings and bring in 50 people a week.

And build great relationships with parents and give great adjustments. And the truth is, that's not reality. You've got to pick where you're going.

So part of our process is we always do an initial call with anybody, a consultation at no charge, and kind of get into the nuts and bolts of what we do. And so those are kind of the different areas of where somebody engages with us to start getting that level of self-awareness. For me, the success is firsthand.

Our clinics now, our average doctor has been with us for eight years, Ron. They're all making over a couple hundred thousand dollars annually, and it's really rewarding to see. We have something that I think is sustainable for the profession.

I have a real concern with the $250,000 average student loan that our students are coming out with. And there's still a lot of jobs. Chiropractors are wanting to pay $50,000, $60,000, and you don't have to be an economist to know that math does not bode well for our profession.

And so one thing, the things that we're conscious about at ChiroMatchmakers is we only take on jobs that really we know we can place. There's an interesting stat today, Ron. There are four jobs available for every one associate doctor.

So there's been a massive shift since COVID. There's a lot more job openings than there are chiropractors. And so that's given the power to the associate doctor, which a lot of associates are surprised to hear.

In fact, one of our clients, the highest paying associate job that we have come across, that associate is making a little over $800,000 a year. So we're seeing these numbers that are representative of what a doctor should be making. And that's representative of you have to have a really solid business and the flaw in our profession.

A lot of times chiropractors try to hire an associate to come save their practice, save their butts. They pay them nothing, but if they perform really well, they'll give them a sliding scale. And guess what?

If somebody's really good at that, they're going to go run their own practice pretty quickly and not stick around with you. So for my success, I'd say it's in our own clinics. I've really gotten to see this play out.

We've been at this now for four years, and so every year, our data on our placements and how long our placements stay, because we find the right person who's the right match for the right role, they're happy. They're making a great living there. Believe it or not, if you're an owner, you don't think this way, but most chiropractors have zero interest in owning a business and dealing with payroll and managing stress and debt and marketing.

And if they can just show up and love on people, serve with their hands and go home and have a great weekend with their family and make a good living, I mean, that's what they got into this for. And then we're all kind of shocked to learn that no, you gotta run a business if you wanna be successful. So in the other end of it, that's probably the horror stories in the practice.

We have a lot of burned out chiropractors, a lot of chiropractors who were probably never should have gotten in practice. They weren't really wired for it. They didn't want to, but they didn't think they had another choice.

And so when they learned that, wow, there's some jobs out there that pay six figures and I can just be a chiropractor, and they really get reinvigorated and excited. That's the good and the ugly of a lot of the people that we're dealing with right now. And also students, just with Next, we go into the schools and we talk numbers.

I'm not afraid to tell them, here's what we're seeing a base salary start at. And here's, as we go through the tracks, there's different tracks of associate doctors with corporate clinics and single clinics and franchises and people that are doing plant to partner. And other people do like clinics where they plant a satellite for the associate to purchase it.

And there's a wide variety out there right now, but it's exciting for people to really understand what their options are and not just think, I gotta take this $50,000 a year job and work Monday through Saturday and screen Saturday and Sunday. And fortunately, we're seeing the tide shift in our profession where there's so much demand on the talent that they can say, you know what, no thanks, I'm gonna take the three and a half day, $100,000 job and love what I do instead of trying to grind this thing out. And if you look at any other profession, Ron, they've figured that out.

Dentistry is maybe the best example. 15 years ago, everybody in dentistry went and worked for themselves. Now, 85% of dentists go work for a company and make a great living and don't have that stress.

And so for the 15% of us that are entrepreneurs in chiropractic, you're darn right, you better go open your own clinic and open lots of clinics because the world needs us. But for the majority of chiropractors, you just gotta pull alongside somebody with favor and success and ride that wave and you have a lot more enjoyable career.

Wow, that's a great answer. You know, I can't help but think about my own career track and what you described for me as a client of Chiro Match Makers. It's just changed my whole perspective to where now I can still use my gut, but it's at a different stage of the process.

Having my one four-year associate, I thank you guys for. But just looking back at that going, you know, wow, this guy's in the right seat on the bus. He's doing the right job the right way with the right attitude.

And it's just beautiful to see because he's happy. He loves it. He loves not having to worry about the electricity bill or malpractice renewals or, you know, setting marketing calendars and 90-day project planners and looking at, you know, scorecards and scoreboards and KPIs with our staff and all the stuff that guys like you and I.

One question, did he practice on his own? Did he own his own clinic at some point?

He did for a while.

Those are our favorite, a lot of chiropractors have a negative association around a chiropractor who maybe failed in practice. I'll tell you, it's the opposite. We have found they make the absolute best team members because what you just said, they appreciate you deal with that.

They're so thankful to have a great home. And so it's funny how many chiropractors get really negative on seasoned docs. And boy, it's the opposite.

It really is.

That's a great point. I just can't, my heart of hearts just can't help, but think how much more successful, how much more impactful would chiropractic be in our society if doctors like you and I, who are entrepreneurial spirits, were doing all this due diligence and process procedure before adding people to their team. I just can't imagine.

I just feel like chiropractic would grow dramatically if we, so I guess the question on that is, what percent of hiring doctors out there, whether it be the corporate chiropractor or the franchise model, what percent are hiring associates without doing this type of stuff? They're just going off their gut.

I'd say most. I mean, what we do is a very blue ocean. You know, most chiropractors have heard of these low-level Myers-Briggs, disc, Colby, strength-finders, and they kind of think, okay, this stuff's kind of cool, or they use it, not realizing most of those are not EEOC compliant.

You're actually not, they're considered discriminatory. So they're designed to be used after you hire somebody. A lot of chiropractors use those as screening tools, which we've had a few instances where docs end up getting sued by somebody because you didn't hire them because of that test you gave me.

Well, the one we use, that's a really important fact, is it is compliant with EEOC because it's not discriminatory in any way.

Interesting.

Most people don't, and so it's kind of this blue ocean business we created where there really wasn't anyone doing staffing well in chiropractic, and there was nobody using these assessments to help build out teams, which again, has been used in Fortune 100 companies for the last 40 years. They figured this out long ago, and why are these companies, multi-billion dollar companies, well, in large part, they figured out how to assemble different teams. And so, it was just a neat opportunity through again, our failure and trying to figure out, what's the best system.

I don't think most chiropractors, they have a pretty low level awareness. It is a gut level. Oh, you adjust like I do.

You seem to have a similar philosophy. Great, let's come together. And we talk about most people hire for technical reasons, like a chiropractic degree or a technique, but they fire for behavioral reasons.

You rarely fire for technical reasons. And so to miss that whole part of your hiring process, our doctors who get this, who are very busy, they're not staffing experts, and they recognize, I don't even wanna talk to somebody unless I know on paper, they're the right fit for who we're looking for. Because we're funny as chiropractors, you start talking with somebody and you can't help, but love them and think you can fix them and change them, and you start bonding to them.

And we really kind of try to bring the data on the front end before that happens to know, if they're not a match on paper, I don't even want you to waste a second of your time because your time is better spent adjusting people, educating people, growing your practice. So you should be sitting with five people who on paper are exactly the right person who you should be hiring. Now you can figure out culturally if you guys vibe.

But that really hedges then, you towards success in hiring. Because the most painful thing from any business owner is having to rehire, having to train. You know, when your front desk is turning over, that looks so bad to your patients versus the clinic where that same great face has been there for five, 10 years.

This is how you get that right. You can measure for loyalty. You can measure for patience and longevity.

If it's important somebody stays for 10 years, that's a measurable trait. If it's important somebody's really loyal to you, that's a measurable trait. If it's important that somebody's a leader, because you don't want to be, that's a measurable trait.

If it's important somebody's the rainmaker, and they can go out in the community and they're extroverted, those are measurable traits, but you got to pick. You don't get to have all of them. And none of us do.

Just as entrepreneurs, we just get a little better at faking some of those. Usually it's the detail stuff we fake until you find some CA or wife or husband or somebody who kind of shores up your deficiencies. And that's how we kind of get the thing down the road.

But that's not a true business.

Just how expensive are these mistakes?

I mean, I'll tell you, my clinics literally were, the one clinic was a $300,000 worth of annual care plans we sent down there and the thing closed. You throw on top of them the other lost money on tables, on signage, on leases, on everything. It was probably more like 400 or 500,000.

I always say 300, but there's a lot of stats. Most people say a bad hire costs you anywhere from three to five times the first year salary. I know that's a moving science.

Where it really has gotten more expensive is Google. You get the wrong person in there and they start pissing your people off and you get four or five bad Google reviews. Those don't go away for years and years.

That has an impact on your business. So, having, again, and you shouldn't start hiring people until you have really clear systems. Because if you're just trying to teach them what you did, that's your personality that made that work.

And so, that's where the whole thing about stepping out of the practice for a few months, that means that you've got a training manual and office systems and procedures and people have been trained. And now once you have that defined, you can define who's the right person that should be running those different tasks. And that's really the secret that makes any business, not just a chiropractic business, really home.

Yeah, and I'll tell you that idea that you just shared is pretty a daunting ideology for a doc to think about leaving this practice for 90 days. And I just love that though, as really a microscope on the practice to say, did this person build a personality practice that's all based on them? Or did they build a true business that's durable, scalable, and hopefully someday exitable, I don't know if that's a word.

Yeah, it is. And there are a lot of great chiropractic coaches now out there that train these things. And that's maybe the thing for entrepreneurs to realize is you don't have to reinvent this.

It doesn't even have to be a chiropractor. There's other coaches that can help bring in systems, but you need to find somebody who can help systemize what you're doing. And that is how you really, that's the old emeth, right?

Yeah. You're the grinder, the technician doing it. And if you're really gonna become the business owner entrepreneur, it's getting systems in place.

So then, it's not so difficult when somebody leaves you either, because it does happen. But if you know the system, you got the procedures and you know the right person you're looking for, it's a lot easier to move somebody in when somebody does leave you.

Yeah, and I think chiropractic is marked by chiropractors selling their practice for pennies on the dollar. And like where I was an associate, wonderful practitioner, love him. And he sold his practice and I believe that it closed.

I'm not sure entirely, but I just feel like, you know, I don't know about you, I know this is your mission and my mission is to leave a true legacy behind. You know, we leave that practice, it's gonna be stronger than it was when we left it. It's gonna keep getting stronger like a true business.

And so I think back to what you said about the E-Myth with Gerber's idea of, you know, that whole idea that you have a business when the reality is you made yourself a really good job, and you better be really, really good at saving money in that model. Otherwise, guess what? You're gonna sell your practice and have to go get another job to survive through the end of your life.

So that doesn't have to be the case. So if you could help me on this, in your visionary soul, your visionary heart that you have, look at chiropractic and talk to me about the next 10 years, what you would like to see.

Let's not even double what I like to say. What we're seeing right now at Chiro Match Makers is what we're calling gentrification of our profession. There is big money moving into our EHR companies, private equity, they have bought up these companies and consolidated them.

Same things happening to chiropractors. Probably every couple of weeks, we get a call at Chiro Match Makers from some group with millions and millions of dollars that are wanting to scale 50, 100, 200 clinics in the next year, and they want our help. That's why I tell you, there's only one chiropractor for every four jobs right now.

There's a lot of money. A lot of business people have realized, these chiropractors have been in a bubble over here for a long time, and a lot of them have these really loyal patient base. A lot of them pay out of pocket for many years.

We should consolidate those people up. So I think you're gonna see what happened with dentistry in the next 10 years. Also, Google's forced that.

If you're not a good business owner, the world knows about it. You kind of have to drop your drawers, and you start seeing those Google reviews, and naturally, those businesses atrophy, and a lot of those people will naturally then go work for businesses, chiropractic offices that are working properly. So I think you're gonna see some level of consolidation within our profession, and kind of a bigger corporate imprint in the next decade that comes in.

Now, there's an opportunity for clinic owners on that exit strategy. If you've built a solid business, there's more buyers out there with more money who are interested in your clinic. There can be more opportunities for associates, because usually corporations understand on a higher level, you gotta pay people well and treat them well for them to wanna stay there, especially in a service industry job where the chiropractor is using their body to provide the service.

It really is important that you're taking great care of that individual. So that's where I see it trending, quite frankly. We have seen a very clear bifurcation out of COVID is we've seen so many practices and groups having record months, days, years, and we've seen a lot of practices close.

And so I think you're just kind of seeing the stress of the world right now. Let's be blunt, those practices that taught people that chiropractic is part of a wellness lifestyle did really well during COVID, those practices that were all about pain relief and people were afraid to come in because they didn't want to get exposed are a lot of practices that really atrophied. So, and in general, we tend to be biased that a cash practice tends to be a healthier practice because people value your services more if they're using their hard-earned dollars to pay your services.

They value it. If it's a third party like an insurance company or an auto insurance company is paying your services, people just don't have that natural value. Somebody else is paying for it.

So we do find, and you are subject to changes of insurance companies then if laws change, if regulations, if payment and codes change. So I think you're going to see, they're not, you've seen it with the joint, I call them the planet fitness of chiropractic. They've kind of taken that lower end, low cost model, but hey, our practices benefit.

We get a lot of people who have been to the joint who come into our practices because we do different, we use CLA Insight, and they want some measurement and more objectivity. So I think there's a lot of room right now, Ron, for chiropractic chains and groups to kind of become the orange theory, the soul cycle, the yoga studio where people are paying a couple hundred bucks a month for their membership instead of the $10 a month. But the joint's got the low end of the market cornered, they're growing with it.

I think it's a positive thing, exposing chiropractic to more people, but there's a lot of room at the other end to be the high end. And so I think you're going to see kind of a race into that area. You'll see other people consolidating insurance who are really good at doing insurance.

Huge opportunity. You'll continue to see groups doing functional medicine, and there's so much cool functional stuff out there that these groups that combine nurse practitioners and doctors with more of a chiropractic philosophy. There's a lot of our baby boomers are really interested in not getting old and wanting to take advantage of that.

So I think you'll continue to see those kinds of... Our Dallas practices are primarily pregnancy and pediatric focused, and man, are we just booming out there with it. There's a huge referral network and that whole tribe of different practitioners, the sports recovery.

There's a lot of room for us in chiropractors. There's a lot of positive opportunity, but I think you're gonna see some kind of silo consolidation in these different areas in the next decade.

No, I completely agree, and I'm so glad you elaborated on that. It's very encouraging for our listeners to hear that. And I like you believe that chiropractic's potential is so high because we all know that chiropractic works, and we just have to follow some of the other professions out there, like you said.

And it's not bad to model what we do after the dental profession. I mean, dentists are doing great, man. You see dental practices everywhere and big groups and whatnot.

So I'm completely with you. I'm completely behind that. And so I hope somebody on the line right now is hearing this going, these guys got my attention.

I wanna step it up. I wanna go to the next level. I wanna create a true business that's scalable, durable, and is gonna help more people.

And I really am encouraged by what you said there, Allen. This has been wonderful. You and I could probably keep talking on this stuff, but I think that's a good place to cap it right there.

I know we had a couple of calls to action. One of the resources you mentioned was this next program. So we're gonna make that available on the show notes.

And I highly recommend, if you're a doctor on this call and you haven't personally gone through any self-assessment or self-discovery, maybe you being on this call is your time to take action. We need chiropractors at their best right now. We need you to take action and start discovering who you are so that you can begin to build your team and know what type of people to add to your team.

And having somebody else do that for you is so freeing. I can't tell you. I'm in a search right now with ChiroMatchMakers and it's been a great process.

Little harder than it was three years ago. Like Dr. Allen said, there's more jobs than there are associates. So it's a competitive market, especially for me in California.

But I'm still optimistic. I've got some great candidates I'm looking at right now. And it's just so nice to have an objective layer that is laid before me that I don't have to look at until it's all sudden done.

And then at the end, I can use my gut level instincts. And it's at that point that those will serve me well. Anyway, I really appreciate you, Allen.

You're wonderful. It's been a great time together. I would love to have you come back on again because you have so much wisdom.

And for those of you on the call today, I just think now's the time to take action. We need you to take action. Chiropractic needs you to take action.

Our communities need you to step up and really start looking at your practice as a true business. If you're that young student or that associate, maybe now's the time to go through some self-assessment and start looking for that place where you can really thrive and really feel like you're in the right spot. And so I want to applaud you also for taking the time to be on this podcast.

We believe anytime spent on personal development is time well spent. You'll never regret it. And mostly make sure that you're taking care of yourself physically and that you're getting adjusted.

And I just want to thank ChiroTouch again for doing these podcasts. I think they're wonderful and we're going to keep it going. And I hope you guys are enjoying these.

So once again, this is Dr. Ronnie and Dr. Allen. Thanks again. I appreciate your brother.

Thanks guys.

Take care, man.

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