Choosing your Chiropractic Technique

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our third episode of Catch up with ChiroTouch, our new podcast series where we talk about the state of the chiropractic profession, best practices and recommendations to manage and grow your practice, and share expert advice with a variety of guest speakers. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Brian Blask.

I'm an account executive with ChiroTouch, where I consult with chiropractors to determine which software solution is best for them. Today, we have Dr. Nick Fanning to talk about family wellness and chiropractic techniques that are effective in a small town setting. Dr. Nick runs a family wellness practice in Nebraska.

He's a long time chiro-touch client and specializes in helping patients deal with stress. Great to have you today, Dr. Nick.

Appreciate it, sir. Thank you.

First of all, I want you to tell our listeners a little bit about you, your practice, your style, how you got to where you are.

Absolutely. When I graduated from Logan back in 2009, I was an associate for about two years in lincoln, Nebraska, and it's really focused on more like CBP, Pedibon, postural rehabilitation type of a practice. What happened is that while I was practicing there and there was the intention of potentially buying that practice, there was, with my wife being from Western Nebraska, she had people that we were trying to refer people to.

Unfortunately, not a lot of the local chiro's over here would actually adjust children. There's things with kids in wheelchairs or behavioral issues and neurodevelopmental stuff going on and just basically birth trauma. It was up to us to pack up our bags and head out west.

After two years of being an associate, I opened up practice out here. A lot of people, they had their doubts. You like you're already in a saturated market.

People that have been going there have been going to the same two other chiropractors there for 30 years. You might want to do it this way. I thought, you know what, if I'm going to strike out, let's go down in a ball fire.

I developed my practice exactly how I wanted to have it. There's oranges and blues and a great color scheme and good energy. It was all about wellness and just raising vibration overall and focusing on kids, which nobody else in this area had been doing at that time.

It just took off from there. Because we changed the conversation from back and neck pain to stress, that seemed to make all the difference. Then of course, with people's testimonies and of course, the results that just snowballed from there.

We do family wellness, we do a lot of kids. I still do the postural work and some of the rehab stuff with that too, but it's kind of goes hands in hand. It's kind of weird being out here where I don't get to completely specialize.

I have to be kind of a jack of all trades, but it allows me to have that conversation with people saying, hey, I'm just going to tell you truth and I want you feel empowered to tell me what you want, but I want to sleep at night. Let's make sure that we talk about everything that we found here and what we're going to address and maybe come up with a long-term plan. Because I don't have the benefit of burning through new patients here.

We have a lack of options here, so what are we going to do about this? Even though my focus is family wellness, there are those clients where I have to treat on a triage basis or a pain basis. But it's up to me to educate them and to inform them where my truth lies, and tell them what their options are on that.

That's what the last nine years here has been like, and it's just been a ton of fun. We've been just trying to rock as many lives as we possibly can, just like every other chiropractor out there.

That is amazing. I like how you say that you don't specialize in one specific technique or trade or how you do things because you can't have that cookie cutter approach. You can't do that and just say, I'm going to do this and fit it in my box because everyone's different.

Exactly. But the best advice you can give to anybody is just do you authentically yourself the best you can do. Instead of trying to be the next best Gonstead or being the next best Don Harrison, you just got to be you and be authentic with that and the people are going to come.

Yeah, that's great advice. A little backstory here. We spoke with Dr. Nick about eight weeks ago.

We were back in the middle of the COVID right in the pet. I guess more of the beginning of the pandemic and quarantine stages. We had you on our webinar.

We had a two-part webinar series with you. People are interested in hearing the first part of our conversation. It was phenomenal.

He gave a ton of good information. You can go to chirotouch.com/resources if anybody wants to listen to any of our content that we've produced here over the past few months. Again, it's chirotouch.com/resources.

In the past, say, eight weeks, Nick, what has changed? You're in rural Nebraska. We've been speaking to people all over the nation.

We've been on both coasts trying to figure out, okay, what's going on in everyone's state, their area. I mean, being in rural America, what's the state of chiropractic? What's the state of the feeling of the pandemic?

How is everything around you there in the middle states?

Right. So, you know, the thing about being out in the middle of nowhere is that we're just a little bit more protected. And so things are opening up now.

Here in a couple of days, we're actually even opening up the lake and swimming on the beach and things like that. Things are slowly opening up. Here's the thing.

This is the great reset. This is the time when people are looking at, OK, now that we're getting through this crisis, or we see an end of this, which, you know, is debatable as well. What, where are we spending our money?

Where are our priorities really going to be at? And what do we need to do as we move forward? So again, there's still a lot of fear and unknown because again, that's just going to be common.

That's what's prevalent in media, you know, with the exception of what's been happening with the rioting. The conversation for the last few months has been fear, fear, fear. People get stuck in their brainstems, people start getting stressed out, people start freaking and sleeping less and being more distressed in general.

And in fact, if you even look at the way I'm talking to you, I purposely slow way down because again, we're living in our brainstems. If I start talking like my normal cadence like this, it further increases that. So even though like now things are even easing up, you're going to have more exposure to the people, you're going to have more exposure to your clientele.

Still, keep going as if, still slow down, still talk stress, still future pace of like, hey, what stress is going to be like? What if this comes back in the fall? What's our plan going to be?

How often would somebody want to get checked if we were going to try to take stress off their body? If you're stuck in front of a laptop when school comes back, how often should we take care of you during that? Or how often should somebody that has to work from home, 40 to 60 hours a week, what should their set up be ergonomically wise?

Do you need to take a picture of that, bring it back to me, so we can do some suggestions for that? Really any great service provider, our job is to just give, give, give, and to solve problems. If we can do that, if we can be that trusted advisor, if we can be that problem solver for people, even problems they know are going to be there, and that you future pace for them so they can make sure that those aren't real problems in the future, then you're going to be that trust advisor, then you're going to be that source that people are going to scramble towards.

And so that's how things are going right now. So we're seeing the transition. We're trying to future pace, and we're trying to stay on top of it all.

And so that's the best thing that anybody could be doing at this point.

I 100% agree with you. We are going in that, it seems like, right, we're opening back up. The nation is opening back up.

So it's education time still for our, you know, for our patient base.

All the time.

Making sure that they, exactly all the time. There's no reason to take your foot off that gas at all. So you want to make sure that you're continuing out there, you know, with your content when it comes to, for you, for instance, right?

You host a podcast.

Correct.

You have your own podcast, Super Parent Syndrome Podcast, which is awesome. Listen to a few of those episodes.

Thank you.

Why did you use that? Why did you come up with the idea of a podcast as a communication tool?

Again, it was just me, like, how can I solve more problems for my clients that I have? And so my, and I put that in terms of, first of all, who is my ideal client? Who do I want to see the most of and what are their problems?

And so for me, the people I love to serve are the people that my ideal client is going to be the moms that are kind of like the sandwich generation. They have aging parents that are, you know, maybe not of the best of health and they don't want to go down that route. So they're starting to have to take care of their needs.

But they also have kids of their own and developing needs for that. There's a lot of, you know, mom, dad guilt going on. You know, there's contradicting advice on every turn.

And then it just doesn't seem like we can do enough. And so then that guilt kind of sets in. And at the same time, not only are we supposed to deal with all that, we're also supposed to still be working, working out, you know, taking care of our home or taking care of our spouse.

And that whole leads a whole bunch of other issues of sex and relationships and all those values that you have there. And so that's what we call the super parent syndrome because we have this propensity where we want to do it all. Okay, we can't let anybody down.

We can't outsource. We can't let our kids just do their own thing. We want to make sure that we're involved with everything and we have to do it all.

And so that's the clientele and that's their mindset as they come see me, which again makes it really easy for me to talk about stress, okay? But also health and health of their children and what they could or could not be doing. So it was me entering the conversation in my ideal client's head about the stressors that they have, the problems they have, and then doing a podcast in a small format where it's just quick and easy episodes, where I can literally, you know, it was like, hey, Jan, you know, I remember this could be an email.

Well, hey, Jan, I remember our conversation today. I just want you to know that I had a podcast I did about three months ago on this episode. Here, take a listen, tell me what you think about it.

And so, you know, that can be after the visit, you know, during my lunch break, I can do one of those or I can do that on Facebook really easy, just kind of forwarding it onto those. And so, that's why for me, it was super easy to start coming up with these things. And, you know, there's, it doesn't have to be a podcast.

It could be Facebook lives. It could be YouTube videos. It could be even TikTok videos now.

But whatever you feel like your target demographic and your target market wants, meet them at their place. And it's way easier than what you think it's going to be. And so that's why I use podcasts for that.

Because again, people commuting or, you know, moms after drop off before they switch on their gangster music, you know, after dropping their kids off at school, they needed something to listen to. Now I can tell you this, that podcasts have completely changed because again, a lot of people are as commuting as often, but people are still using podcasts while they're working out or whether, you know, taking a break or they're walking around the community or even, you know, starting to go back to driving to work. So I think here in the next few weeks, you're going to see podcasts really explode back up, and it is a good opportunity for people to perhaps check out.

So in case you guys have questions on that, reach out to me. I've actually helped a few chiropractors launch podcasts.

Yeah, I think it's a great educational tool, right? Getting that message I've talked about before is trying to engage your patient base as much as possible. That's another avenue, right?

It's another tool that you have in your belt to be able to help educate patients and spread the word about chiropractic and who you are.

Absolutely.

One of the things that you talk about is…I like the episode about watching babies walk and how that correlates to goal setting. Can you elaborate that and kind of explain what you mean by watching babies walk and how that helps?

Yes. So, everybody should have this…I mean, it's so tough because we have this attitude that if we're not good at something right away, that it's not even worth trying. And it comes down to that.

If you were like literally just watching this baby learn how to walk and you have to think about the days and weeks this takes of this kid falling over and over and over again and just all the stress on that. In fact, that's a good point for chiropractors to talk about parent, you know, their kids and their toddlers. But at the same time, if you think about that, anything new that we're trying, it's going to be just a total mess.

And expect that and expect to fail a whole bunch before you actually get something good. And so, what I try to tell people is they're like, hey, I want you to just totally suck when you do this. Okay, just make it the worst thing.

So like if I'm challenging some of you, like, hey, I want you to just do a two-minute video about your thoughts on this, you know, especially if I'm working with another chiropractor. And else they'll be like, now make this video horrible. Now that gives them the permission to fail.

It gives them the permission to make sure it's not absolutely perfect, that they can have some fun with this, that they can feel like an idiot. And when they look at it the first time, they might not even like the sound of their voice or like this, how they're doing it. But at the same time, you're getting those reps and you're getting into there and you're breaking that mold to actually get something new started.

So when I say watch babies walk, it's just embrace the suck, embrace the failure. And that the fact that it's not going to be pretty and clean and right off the bat and perfect, that you're going to get there. And so it's better done than perfect.

It's okay to suck at first. It's okay to fail at first, but you're going to get there.

I love it. I love it. I love it so much because you're right.

It's like muscle memory with anything. You're not going to be a professional right away, right? So whether it's marketing your practice, whether it's running your business, right?

Things are going to try. People do things all the time in their business. They're like, maybe that wasn't a good idea.

You're not going to be, you know? So I love that idea. And that's what makes me think of this, watching babies walk.

That's so good. Remember and remind yourself, hey, it's not going to be amazing right away. Keep working at it.

Set those goals, but it also gets down to goal setting too, right? With your, how many patients do you want to see, right? Everyone has different goals and measures of success.

And so is it for you, amount of money you want to make, is it how many times you want to be at the office, is it how many patients you want to see? Everybody's different. But I think that correlates well to goal setting.

Again, that's why I love, I mean, for me personally, it comes back to ChiroTouch for me because I think ChiroTouch gets you to those goals. So for me personally, I like to utilize ChiroTouch when I talk to other chiropractors about this, about all right, let's figure out what you want with your practice and how ChiroTouch can make it work for you. Not that we need to make it all about ChiroTouch, but that's what I think about when it comes to the goal setting side of things.

One of the other things that I...

I mean, ChiroTouch is huge here because here's the thing, I don't have to worry about trying to focus on doing my notes and spending an enormous amount of time on my notes. I can do more on connection and that's what it really comes down to. Again, as a service provider, you have to focus on what problems are you solving with your folks.

You don't have to sit there and talk about the Mets or talk about baseball or COVID or anything like that. But what are you doing to connect with that client? Now, some people would say, you give the adjustment, you give a minute of table talk which is strictly educational.

Then some people are like, no, laissez faire, just be you and just chat with them. I've seen practices both ways. I can say that is that people are never going to really remember what you tell them, but they're going to remember how you make them feel.

I challenge you guys if you guys are on one school or the other, to try out the other school just for a little bit and see how it goes. Ideally, you're going to find this happy medium of whether it's going to be 80, 20, or 60, 40, or 50, 50 of that education, but also truly that connection. That's what I mean with ChiroTouch.

You can hit a few buttons, you get your notes down right, but you're not having to type everything out, you're not having to dictate it out and wait for it to be translated. It becomes instead of the focus of the visit, it's the background of the visit. That's why I like ChiroTouch, because you can create all these buttons, you have so much variability with it, that it's not the stressful part of it.

I want everybody making the main point of the visit is truly connection. Yeah, you're going to deliver a great adjustment. Yeah, you're going to change that nervous system, you're going to change the brain and the expression of life.

But really, no matter what, I want you to have that connection to change their life, to change their connection, to change that vibration too as well. And so get all this other stuff out of the way. So that's my shameless push for ChiroTouch, even though I don't get a dime from this.

You know what I mean? I'm not a representative, but that's why I like it so much.

No, I appreciate that. That's what I try to portray out there to our audience and to the market is, this can help you. It is a tool that is going to help you become a better chiropractor, become more efficient in your business.

That's why we do things. One thing you did mention there, just so we're clear, is you did mention talking about the Mets. This is a Yankees-only podcast, so we're clear.

We're not talking about the Mets here.

Fair enough. Wilson.

We have been in this COVID-19, so we're established Yankees-only. We've been in this COVID-19 climate for a while now. One of the things we talk about is monthly checkups.

Can you explain what you mean by a monthly checkup, why that's important, and really expand upon that?

Here's the thing. I've brought up monthly checkups before, but really, I want to oppose you guys is that we don't want to have a cookie cutter approach in our technique, and we don't want to have a cookie cutter approach in our wellness examples too. One of the things that you're going to want to talk about with your clients is that health is seasonal too and that can be debatable too.

But at the same time, look at demand on the person and say, okay, is this going to be a high demand time or low demand time? And I just will use some examples. So I'll say like, you know, I can tell you this, that between February and April, I'm seeing a lot of accountants and I'm seeing them on a every other week or sometimes weekly basis.

Why would that be? And then I just listen and they're like, well, yeah. And I was like, yeah, they're stuck in front of their laptop.

They're hunched over. They look like Quasimodo there as they're, you know, putting out all our taxes. I was like, okay, what about teachers?

When is their stressful times? You know, it's like, okay, beginning of the school year, end of the school year in the holiday season. Perfect.

You're starting to get it here. I was like, now farmers, ranchers, things like that. And I was like, okay, what about for you?

What is your stressful times? Okay. And then we just, I just listen.

So right then they admit when the demand on their body is the most. And again, like, because we're talking about stress now, one of the jobs of the nervous system is to take stress in the environment and have our body adapt to that. Because that conversation changes the stress, it's it really opens up.

And so here's the thing, during the traditional where I've heard chiropractic offices get a little quieter, we actually pick up because again, we see a little, traditionally we see a drop in patient numbers in August, right before school starts. Well, hey, everybody else is getting their everything else checked up. Stress of the new school year is going to happen.

This is a high stress point for kids and for moms and for teachers. Okay, great. This is something we got a plan for.

Oh, great. Wonderful. Also, between Thanksgiving and New Year's, I try to get everybody on a weekly basis because we talk about stress again, and when is the highest point of stress for everybody during the holidays?

You know, between Thanksgiving and New Year's. That's when most people get sick. That's when we're eating terrible.

That's when we're having family stress. It's just an easy conversation when we talk about stress. So yes, monthly is one of those easy things to go for, but if you can actually vary it up, you're going to have a better buy in because again, it's to them.

So, hey, my farmers, planting season, you got harvest. Those are the two hot points. And they're like, man, how am I going to make that happen?

I was like, hey, just like your equipment and taking care of that, we got to take care of you too as well. During, you know, it could be teachers. We talked about that.

We talked about accountants. We could talk about parents, you know, all parents. Again, it's always going to be during the holidays.

So again, those big things we address, and it's important for you to address and make it not cookie cutter, but personalized. And that makes it so much. I will tell you this, that even no matter what, let's say there's somebody who just wants to come and go, and we all know when they want to break up with us, is that I just talked to him about doing a six month checkup.

I was like, hey, you know, just like the dentist, how often are you supposed to be a dentist? Perfect. Twice a year.

Hey, that's what I go with here. If you just want to show up and we update your notes and maybe get an Insight nervous system scan, or I just do a range of motion, or we just do a small checkup, that's great. We'll just have a conversation.

I would love to do, and I put quote marks, quote unquote, spinal cleaning just like we do with our dental cleaning. That's a great way for us to stay connected. Just in case, worst case scenarios, your file always stays up to date.

So for even those that are leaving us, that's a great way to make sure that you get there. Because I can tell you this, my first chiropractor, I didn't get it. I came in for a few adjustments left.

My second chiropractor, same thing. It was my third chiropractor before I was like, oh my gosh, this stuff is amazing. Why didn't I think about that?

Well, same thing there. You got to make it a safe place to fail. You can do that with your wellness checkups too.

What are the things you brought up too earlier, just being a small town where you don't have a lot of new patients come to the door all the time. So to other small town rural practitioners, keeping patients for a long time is a very important part of their maintaining of a practice and livelihood. It's all relationships.

It's engaging. So as you come back to the small town topic here coming out of COVID, any other tips, tricks, anything else, how everything's progressing on the small town side of things, as opposed to most other people that might be in big cities.

Yeah, absolutely. So the biggest thing is, the best news is that even in big cities, anywhere you go, you have your community. You have the group of people you're going to draw from and the people that you're identifying with and the people that you're truly connecting with.

Again, get out there and serve and solve some problems. The people that coach me, it's with Black Diamond Club. One of the things that they had us do a couple months ago is they're like, hey, what are you doing for benevolence?

What are you doing to give back to your community? Is there any needs that are out there that you can go out and serve and be there for? One of the things that they suggested us do is go to a local restaurant, put $100, $200 down and say, hey, lunch is on me or breakfast is on me.

Or I would say I went to the meat market and said, hey, I got five pound packs of ground beef here. I know some of you guys are worried about where your next meal is coming from. It's on me.

Yes, there was exposure with that. But really, during the time of need, people look for the people that are helping. Again, as a service provider, you're providing, you're solving problems.

They have their own suggestions on how to talk to the local businesses now, especially as things are opening back up and saying like, hey, this chiropractor here, he's doing a promotion. He helped us out. If you're a big fan of our local eatery, make sure you check them out during this time or sign up for his podcast or whatever it might be.

Those cross relationships can happen as you're trying to form, again, relationships and connections. Again, you are solving problems. People want to help you too once you start solving their problems.

In fact, that's the weirdest thing is that sometimes with chiropractors, we feel bad asking for money, we feel bad for asking for referrals or even testimonials. But at the same time, if you're really truly solving problems, people are going to want to do solve your problems too. I'm telling you, you have that permission right now, is that as you're solving problems, allow people to help solve yours.

That's exactly it, man. You hit the nail on the head there. Well, Nick, we got to wrap things up here.

So just let me know and let the audience know where people can find out more about you. I think it's the Superparent Syndrome podcast, correct?

Yeah, I got that out on Apple and Google. If you want to connect, I'm totally happy to. Facebook is a great place to look me up.

Instagram, whatever it is, just message me. I'd love to be your friend, Facebook friend, or if you have questions on podcasting or any of this stuff. After the webinar, I had about 20 people reach out and it was really fun and easy and great to connect with people.

Gosh, I didn't make a single dime. It was fine, because again, like I said, I just want to help everybody out, so please reach out to me.

Really appreciate it. Thanks, Dr. Nick.

Thanks, Brian.

Thanks again, obviously, for taking the time. I know you're busy, so to help ground us in this new reality. Thank you to our listeners for catching up with ChiroTouch.

This is our fifth episode in the podcast series. We'd love to hear from you. We've set up an inbox, podcast at chirotouch.com.

Again, that's podcast at chirotouch.com. Send us questions, feedback, comments. Remember to tune in every week on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you consume your podcasts.

Thank you again for listening to Catch Up with ChiroTouch.

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