For practice owners

Working with practice owners

If you run a chiropractic practice, you already know the clinical part. The rest of it, the money, the team, the diary, the bit where the practice starts running you instead of the other way round, is the part nobody taught either of us. Jo and I worked it out the hard way in our own practice, and since 2011 a large part of what we do is teaching other owners what we learned. This page is what that involves and how to ask about it.

How it started

Sitting on the stairs

I remember sitting on the stairs with my head in my hands, wondering how I was going to pay the bills. We had a practice and a team and not enough coming in, and no one had taught us the business of any of it. So we worked it out, the hard way, in real time. What came out of those years became the Five V’s.

That is where all of this came from. Not a business background and not a theory: a practice that was not working and two people who had to fix it while it was open.

I say it plainly because most of the practice owners we talk to are somewhere in the same place and have not said so out loud. There is a particular kind of quiet in a clinic that is busy enough to look fine and not busy enough to pay properly.

What we actually did

Built and ran a practice

The Spinal Health Centre Limited was incorporated on 11 February 2004 and is on the public record at Companies House. It is still the trading entity today

Ran a membership model from 2004

We introduced a membership model in our own practice in 2004 and ran it for seven years before we taught it to anybody. That order matters: it was our own risk first

Trained our own team, then other people’s

Once it worked, practice owners started asking. That became the in-practice team training described on where I have spoken

Started teaching in 2011

Fifteen years of working with owners on the same set of problems

The rest of the history, including the clinical half, is about Steve Davison.

What working together involves

Working with the owner

Time with you on what you are actually trying to build, which is usually not what the practice is currently built to do. The diary, the numbers, what you personally are doing that only you can do and what you are doing that somebody else should be.

Team training in your clinic

Coming into the practice and working with the team on the learnable parts of the job: how the front desk actually works, how care is explained, what happens between the first appointment and the fourth.

The membership model

How a membership model works in a chiropractic practice, what it changes about the diary and the cash flow, and the parts of it that go wrong. This is the piece we ran ourselves for seven years before we taught it.

Ongoing mentoring

For owners who want somebody to think with over a period rather than a day. Regular sessions, and the work between them.

The framework

What came out of those years is a framework we call the Five V’s. It is a way of looking at a practice as a set of things that each have to work rather than as one number that has to go up, and it applies to any practice or small business rather than only to chiropractic.

I am not going to claim a number of practices for it. What I will say is what it is for: it is a diagnostic. It tells you which part of the thing is broken, which is usually not the part the owner thinks is broken.

Written down

Dream Practice Secrets

The first one. Practice building from the ground up

Fully Booked By Design

On building a diary that fills for reasons you can repeat

Beyond Your Practice Room

On the parts of a practice that happen when you are not in the room

The practice-building books.

Most owners who talk to me want to start with the same thing, which is where the new patients are supposed to come from. That is how I approach practice marketing.

The coaching work runs under Blue Cow Practice, the business Jo and I run together.

Common questions

Who is this for?

Chiropractic practice owners, mostly ones who are past the start-up stage and have a team, and who have hit the point where the practice is limited by how it is run rather than by clinical skill. Some of it applies to any small practice, chiropractic or not.

What does working with him actually involve?

Time with the owner on what they are building, team training in the clinic, and ongoing mentoring for those who want it over a period. The four ways it usually runs are set out above. There is no packaged programme description here because what it involves depends on what is broken.

Who does Steve Davison teach?

Chiropractors and their teams, and practitioners in related manual-medicine fields. The clinical teaching and the practice-building teaching are separate things: the practice-building work runs under Blue Cow Practice, which he and Jo run together.

What is the membership model he ran from 2004?

A model where patients hold an ongoing membership with the practice rather than paying appointment by appointment. Jo and I introduced one in our own practice in 2004 and ran it for seven years before teaching it to anyone else. The Spinal Health Centre Limited was incorporated on 11 February 2004, which puts the timing on the public record.