The Inside Out Practice Success Model Dr. McLaughlin & Dr. Wick

Welcome everybody to this week’s Empowering Women show, sponsored by ChiroSecure. My name is Dr. Julie McLaughlin and I want us all to thank and like and share and love to ChiroSecure for sponsoring the show because they really bring so much content to our profession and so many great docs. So as you know, I’m one of the hosts and I also am from Vital Health Protocols, and today my guest is Dr. Krysti Wick. I am so excited you’re here to share everything with us today. So let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Krysti. She is practicing not too far from me in Southwest Wisconsin. Well, maybe about an hour or so, and she’s been practicing for the last 12 years in a thriving family and pediatric practice and she has grown her practice to over 500% in the last like five years. And then she’s here to share her story. She also has a coaching program called The Illuminated Squad. And so we’re going to talk about your practice, how you can take your practice and grow it from the inside out. So welcome Dr. Krysti.

Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

So tell me a little bit about this idea of growing your practice from the inside out.

Yeah, so when I had to put to words what I did in my own practice, so my first years in practice were a struggle and then honestly, the last seven years of my practice have been like a rocket ship. And so if I could put that all into words, it was honestly because I started to work everything from the inside out. Just like you would approach a patient, how can we make sure that we’re looking at everything really astutely inside first before we go out and try to work on the outside stuff? And I had spent many years, honestly, not knowing what to do for marketing and I felt like a lot of the things that I would try just weren’t happening and that’s because I was constantly trying to pull from the outside when I hadn’t already really mastered what needed to happen inside with my systems and my procedures and my profitability and my understanding of myself and what I really wanted.

So that’s really center of my program is just how can I alleviate some of that stress for us as practitioners that we, a lot of us dread marketing, a lot of us get really burnt out with trying to find that next step and I really find that if you try to keep it simple and you look inside first, it can be a lot easier.

Oh, I agree. I agree. And a lot less expensive too, right?

Sure.

The external marketing can become really, really expensive. So what are some of the things that you’ve done that have been successful that some other docs could learn from?

Absolutely. So first and foremost, one of the biggest things inside but I had to figure out was my communication style. So I had to spend some time learning more about myself and what felt really authentic to me as I was communicating chiropractic, and then also making sure that I was investing in resources to help me communicate better inside. Because what I found, the beginning part of my really fast growth came from just me doing the work to actually practice and work hard on… I did a lot of role playing with myself and I would record things and I would spend time practicing all of the little pieces that make the communication inside the office work well. And so that was one of the very first things I did before I ever revisited marketing. I just really worked on that communication piece. So that’s one.

Another huge piece that I had to get clear on was my care plans. So this is something that I spend a lot of time talking about because it’s really near and dear to my heart because I had an epiphany when I started evolving my practice that I was doing something else for myself and my family as compared to what I was suggesting for patients. So I think a lot of practitioners, we have such big hearts and we can get really wrapped up in being concerned about how we’re going to be perceived or we’re worried if a patient is going to be able to commit the time and the money to getting themselves from point A to point B with their health.

And so with this inside out practice model, I had to start asking myself if I am getting checked and adjusted if needed at least weekly and sometimes biweekly over the course of my… Since I was 12, I started getting in just when I was 12, why am I telling patients that wellness care in my office is only once a month? And why am I recommending these short initial care plans because I’m so concerned about how that’s going to be perceived or what maybe happened at a former chiropractor? I think a lot of us can get stuck on that as well.

So really evolving my care plans and putting everything through the question of what would I tell my mom? What would I tell my husband? What would I hold him accountable to if this was his care? And so that inside out model, I think with communication and care plans, those were really the two big things that I started with that still to this day, are just non-negotiables in my practice and you’d be shocked at how quickly you can grow your practice if you focus on those two things.

Yeah, that’s awesome. I agree. I always say don’t judge somebody else’s pocket book. You have to give your best recommendation for what that patient presents with, whether it’s they present with something that you can’t help them at all. You still have to give your best recommendation or if it’s something that is chronic and ongoing for the rest of their life, you have to give your best recommendation. And so I absolutely think if you practice that way where you’re taking your skill set and you’re just basing it on what they need and you recommend that and you take all those other little thoughts that clutter up our head off the table and you know you’re giving your best recommendation so you feel like you’re giving the best care to them, they’ll feel that too. They’ll feel that love and that caring from you that you care about them. So I love that. What other things are you doing?

I think another inside out thing you can focus on is your profitability. So a lot of people forget that if you want to grow your income, you can honestly start with looking at what you’re doing financially within the confines of what’s already established. So making sure that you understand your overhead and how much it actually costs you to provide an adjustment and then moving forward with looking at your demographic and your median household income in your area. And are you actually charging in alignment with your expertise? I think as a profession, we have so many people, again, with huge hearts, but you can get yourself into trouble if that is the decision maker for your practice from a business side instead of really looking at the profitability.

So when we look at growing from the inside out, that profitability piece is something that you should spend some time dissecting and just understanding your numbers so that you can really get to a place where if it’s time to increase your prices or change your fee structure or whatever it may be, you might be seeing the exact same patient base and you might have 10% additional profit this year by just doing that work for yourself.

And again, all of these things are there because if you would address the foundation first, then when you decide to go out and pour some more into the bucket, well, it’s going to hold and it’s going to feel better to you because ultimately, this inside out practice model is about fun in practice and happiness and not feeling like it has to be so hard. I think that’s such a common thing in our profession. Obviously as a coach, I’m constantly talking to practitioners who are just, they feel stuck and they feel like they don’t know how to take it to the next level, and this is the easiest, most streamlined pieces of information that you can start with to make things feel better inside so that you have so much more fulfillment and joy when you go to practice and you don’t feel like you’re trying to gem a square peg in a round hole every time you’re trying to come up with that next quick I need 10 more new patients. Let’s instead focus on what’s happening inside.

I love that. I love that. And I know I’ve been practicing full time for 33 years, so things have changed and evolved. We didn’t have the internet and email and all of these things, but those basic things that you are talking about have stayed constant throughout time. So in my practice, those things have been solid from day one to day… I don’t know how many days there are in 33 years, but there a whole lot. And so all the way through that, we know those things have stayed constant. So many other things have changed that we had to keep up with.

So I agree if you stick to your basics and you stick to what you know, it will make you fall in love with practice. It will make you say that this is the best job in the world. No one has a better job than being a chiropractor. And maybe I’m a little biased, I think as a female chiropractor, but we have the best job, but because our patients just are so special to us and we’re so special to them that if they have that foundation… I had my patient from day one in practice still comes in. And so you create that growth. So I love this. So this is so exciting and thank you for sharing these tips with us. And so if docs wanted to get in contact with you and learn more about what you do and how you do it, how would they contact you?

Yeah, I would say social is always a great place. I’m very active on Instagram. So it’s @drkrysti, and my first name of course has a crazy spelling. So it’s K-R-Y-S-T-I. You can totally send me a DM. Otherwise, you can absolutely check out my website. It’s theilluminatedsquad.com and you can contact me there too. But yeah, keep it simple everybody. And I love, Julie, that you reinforced like these things have worked for a lot. Like we don’t have to reinvent things and it creates such less stress for us as practitioners when we remember. We can go back to the basics and we can look inside and we can fix those things or optimize them for such a fantastic result.

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. So thank you for joining us and thank of all of you for joining us on Empowering Women and let’s give a little bit of love to ChiroSecure. Everybody like and little hearts and in two weeks, we are going to be back again with our Empowering Women show and it’s twelve o’clock Central Time, one o’clock Eastern Time, and Dr. Nicole Lindsey will be our host and so I hope you all join us then. Thank you very much. Bye bye.

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