← Rocket Chiropractic Podcast for Chiropractors
Rocket Chiropractic Podcast for Chiropractors
446: Chiropractic Marketing Home Runs, IC Nightmare, & Plans For The New Year
00:38:55
This week’s chiropractic podcast is a bit of a chiropractic marketing mashup. I talk about the problems that chiropractors face when they keep trying to hit marketing home runs. I discuss the dangers of ignoring business basics. I talk about a...
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Dr. John Smith
Foreign hello. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Rocket Cairo Podcast, the business and marketing podcast for chiropractors. Glad to be back with you guys. You have no idea. The podcast has been a little bit sporadic over the last couple weeks. Part of that has been because I have not been feeling well at all, coughing and hacking. I got some water here in case I start coughing into the mic, but I think I will be fine today. So I'm just excited to get back on the podcast. We're going to do a little bit of a mash up today. Just talk about a couple different things, including a couple issues that I have seen come up with clients. This is stuff that I've seen before. It's stuff that I've touched on before, but it's just come up recently and I thought maybe a good idea to talk about both of these things on the podcast. We're also going to talk a little bit about just a little bit of structure and a little bit of planning going into the New Year. Also something that I have talked about before, but I wanted to touch on it. It's something that I do a lot at the end of the year when it comes to the podcast. So this is just going to be instead of one particular topic, we're going to talk about a couple things on the podcast today and I hope you guys really enjoy it and get a lot from it. Before I get too far into this, I do want to say a couple things. One, if you want help with your website and SEO looking for a better website, looking to get more new patients from the Internet, then go to Rocket Cairo and request a free practice assessment. If you are getting started with your practice or you've been out for a little while and you're feeling a little bit stuck, check out my Next Step program. It is an incredible resource and really, honestly, your practice isn't going to grow if you don't grow like the future you who is more successful, the future you that you want to be, knows things that you don't know and has habits that you don't have that starts with information. And Next Step is a great place to start getting that information. So you can find information about that at Rocket Cairo. It's a great resource, something to consider for the New year. For those of you who may not have heard, I don't post a lot of personal stuff on Instagram or Facebook or anything like that, but my wife and I did announce recently that we have a baby on the way, so I'm going to be joining the Old Dads Club. Resetting the clock a little bit in my life and very excited. We don't know if it's a boy or girl. We should find out here in about a month. But we are very excited about the new addition to the family. We've been keeping that a secret. We let our family know on Thanksgiving, and we were kind of keeping it under wraps just to make sure that we, you know, got through that first trimester, and everything seemed to be fine. Baby seems to be healthy. So so far everything's great. I'm excited about it. Looking forward to the opportunity to be a dad again. So thought I would say something about that on the podcast. Not that any of you guys care about my personal life. Hold on just one second. I got something flying in front of my face. Some fuzzies in the air. All right, got it. All right, so first thing I want to talk about is I had a client of mine, and I'm not going to mention names because I don't mention names on the podcast usually, but I had a client of mine that I believe he was an XSTEP member first. Then he sort of went away, and then he came back and he asked me several months ago to build him a website. So built a website for him. I don't do contracts when I do websites. And after literally the first month of doing the website, he called me and told me he wanted to cancel the website and he wanted to go back to what he was doing before. I thought it was very strange. I kind of got the impression from what he had said that it was really like a money savings thing, that perhaps he was in some sort of contract or something with his old website and he jumped on board with me, and then he was. Now he's paying me, and he's kind of stuck paying this other thing. So he was going to ride that out and. And ultimately come back to what I had built for him. I. I don't actually know that 100% sure. But few months go by, he reaches out to me and he says, hey, you know, I'm interested in doing the website again. I'm like, yeah, that's fine. It's perfectly fine. Like, the website I built for him, I actually kind of had it on hold. It's not a big deal. He doesn't have to do any initial setup or anything like that. We can get it switched over, no problem. And the conversation just seemed to stall a little bit. And there was this big concern about. He had made the comment that he's. That he's frustrated with wasting money. Now, I will say this, that your website is not wasting money. And I don't mean this because I build websites for chiropractors. I just mean that there are certain things in your practice that are essential things. So you need a phone, you need to have email, you need to have a website. You probably need some sort of software, you might need some sort of booking software. I mean, especially if you're a micro practice or smaller practice, you probably want people to be able to schedule online and kind of minimize some of those phone conversations. There are certain things that are essential. There are other things in practice that are not essential. You don't have to have Facebook ads, you don't have to have Google Ads. You don't have to pay someone to do your SEO for you. You don't. I mean, frankly, even the website, like, you don't have to have someone like me do the website. And this is one of the things that I told him is I said, listen, if you're just looking for the cheapest way, if that's the goal, if the goal isn't how the website performs, it's not SEO, it's not like patient conversion, it's not presentation, it's not anything like that, There's a lot of benefits to websites. But if the goal is just to have the cheapest website where you feel like, I have to have it, I'm gonna have something up, I'm gonna have the cheapest thing, there's no way getting around the cheapest thing to do is just do it yourself. Now, I don't know if the website will do what you want it to do. I have not seen many chiropractors do their own website very well. Can you? Sure, of course you can. I mean, the reason I know how to do the stuff that I know how to do is because I started doing my own website and I was committed to learning how to do it, improving it, et cetera, etc. Etc. So. But I nerd out on that stuff. Most chiropractors don't. And I would say most chiropractors that do their own website, it looks like a chiropractor that did their own website and it benefits them, like a chiropractor who did their own website. But if you're just looking to save money, that's the cheapest way to do it. Now, I say all that to say this, like, when someone expresses to me this sort of thing that they are frustrated, like they're, they're frustrated with, like, maybe Having to pay a little bit more for a website that's going to be better for them. And they're trying to kind of skimp there because they're frustrated about spending too much money. Usually what that means to me now, I could be wrong. And like I said, it doesn't matter because I'm not mentioning this person. And if they're listening to this podcast, they know who they are. But other than that, nobody knows who I'm talking about. What, what that usually tells me is that this person is frustrated with wasting money and this person is trying to hit home runs when they're. They haven't done some of the basic stuff. Correct. And they haven't committed to doing some of the basic stuff. Because if you were doing, let's say you're paying for a website or you're doing a website yourself, you're paying for your phone, you got your software, you got your basic stuff. Nobody who's doing the basic stuff, even if you're paying a little bit of extra for maybe like a software that you like or whatever, nobody that's doing the basic stuff says, I'm really frustrated with wasting money because those things are essential to practice. Now. Can you get some things cheaper? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can get into a whole conversation about how to save money and whether something necessary at a particular time. Do you need that elaborate of a software right now? Do you need that fancy of a website? Like there's all kinds of discussions about the wise or best way or maybe the right time to spend money on, on those essential things. But people don't generally complain about that. The people who generally are complaining about, man, I, I just, I'm wasting so much money. What they have done is they have spent thousands of dollars on Facebook ads and it has hasn't worked out. They paid someone to do Google Ads for them and it hasn't worked out. They paid someone to do lead generation for them and it hasn't worked out. They've paid for higher dollar marketing stuff because someone came along and said, we can get you 40 extra new patients per month. We can get you 20 extra new patients a month. We can get you, you know, this for only this amount of dollars. And listen, all of that stuff always sounds good because if you think to yourself, okay, maybe it's $3,000 a month, and maybe I don't really have $3,000 a month right now, but if I get 30 new patients or 40 new patients out of it, then that's going to way more, that's way more money in than the $3,000 that I'm spending. So I'll go ahead and take that risk. I understand that there are times in business where you have to do that. The problem is if you're doing that and you aren't doing the other things that you could be doing to generate new patients and to grow your practice, the stuff that takes time and takes energy but doesn't take money, you're focusing on the wrong thing. You're trying to hit a home run by doing something that's going to get you 30, 40 new patients a month instead of focusing on the thing that's going to get you one or two or three. And I know one or two or three is not great, but taking risks, spending your last dollars or spending dollars that you don't even have on the hope of getting some big kind of windfall return on investment is a very foolish way to spend money when you're starting. It's a very foolish way to spend money when you are struggling. It just is. Money is oxygen when it comes to business. And I am not opposed to spending more money on SEO and spending more money on Facebook ads and Google Ads and TV and radio and billboards and I don't care. I don't care. You could spend money on lots of things and have it be worth it from the standpoint of return on investment. For, from a chiropractic practice standpoint, there's lots of ways to advertise, but there's also the right time and wrong time to do those things. And I've told you guys this before in the podcast, like when I do high end SEO for chiropractors, like, I'll tell them people get ahold of me all the time and they'll be like, oh, I want you to do SEO for me. And I'll tell them if you don't have $1,000 a month to spend on SEO and not have to worry about whether it's going to benefit you in the next eight to 12 months if that's not where you're at. Like if you, if you can't take a thousand dollars and say, I'm going to put a thousand dollars toward SEO and if I don't really notice any significant difference in any new patient numbers for the next eight to 12 months, that's perfectly fine. I'm still going to spend that 8,000, $10,000 to, for something that's going to benefit me a year from now or something that's going to benefit me two years from now, because that's how SEO is. And when people tell you that it's different, they're just lying to you. They're, they're telling you that because they're trying to make a sale. But the reality is if you don't have at least, I would say at least six months of exposable, disposable. I said the wrong with disposable thousand dollars a month or whatever it is that you're spending on SEO, you should be able to throw that money away for the next six months to the, to a year and have it not come back to you in any way. And that's okay. Now I'm not saying it's not going to come back to you. I'm just saying that there's a, there's this time delay for SEO and if you're someone that. I got to have new patients in the next two months, otherwise my practice is going to go under or I'm going to go bankrupt or I'm going to start missing payments or whatever it is, whatever that drastic thing is that you're afraid of, don't pay, don't, don't start doing SEO in the same thing is true for these like 30, 40 extra new patients. Facebook ads, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Don't spend high dollar on marketing hoping that like if this doesn't hit, not only is it bad, but you found yourself in a much worse situation. You're just trying to hit home runs. And when you're in a situation where you have a little bit of room, you have a little bit of breathing room, you have a little bit of extra money to spend on marketing, you could spend that money on SEO for a year and do long term marketing. You could spend that money on Facebook ads and Google Ads. And you know what, if maybe they weren't entirely true, like maybe you got five or six people out of it instead of 30. It's not the end of the world because you didn't over leverage yourself. You didn't overspend on that marketing because you did it at the right time. So my advice to you would be, number one, get your foundation sorted out. So whatever the basic things that you need, your website, your software, your phone, like the basic stuff that you need, your utilities, get that stuff sorted out. Get whatever acceptable level is right now. And maybe right now the thing for you is just the cheapest thing possible, but get that sorted out first. You shouldn't be cutting back on that stuff. You shouldn't be like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm just not gonna Have a website for a while because I'm, I'm having trouble with money. It's like that shouldn't be ever the case because that's one of those essential things you, you wouldn't, you're not gonna go without your phone or without email like that. That's silly. Just don't, don't do that. So get that stuff sorted out first. Then start doing marketing that makes sense. And what I mean by marketing that makes sense is money wise, it has to make sense, and time wise, it needs to make sense. So if you need to have marketing that has a good return on investment right away, just, just make sure you're doing marketing that's going to generate a return on investment right away. You know, just don't do long term marketing when you need short term return on investment and don't do expensive marketing when you don't have any money. I talked to Jeff Langmaid on a podcast a couple podcasts ago and he had mentioned like printing up flyers and going like door to door like that. That's not expensive. It just isn't. And the return on investment is very, very high considering that you're not spending a lot of money to print off flyers. Most people don't do that stuff because it's not sexy. They'd rather sit in their office and have somebody else do their Facebook ads or have somebody else do their SEO or whatever. Like, sure, yeah, we would all love that. We would all love to just sit in the office, take care of patients and not have to worry about it. But that's not the reality of most chiropractors, especially when you're getting started. So there are opportunities within your community of, of that are low cost, high effort things. There are opportunities online, there, there are opportunities to do these things and you should be focusing heavily on that. You should be spending a lot of energy and effort into those things because those things are not going to financially put you in a situation where you're considering cutting out your website or your, you know, your phone, or stop putting food on your table or whatever. So that's my advice, like, stop trying to hit home runs when you're not in a position to be hitting home runs. It's, you're just making your life harder than it has to be. All right, next thing I'm gonna talk about is another issue that I had with a client of mine recently. This one drives me crazy. I have seen this pop up off and on over the last few years and I don't know what to call it. Other than the overbearing. I wouldn't even say boss. The overbearing independent contractor situation. So this is another client of mine. He had me build a website for him. When we first got started, when we first started talking, I had asked him, I said, are you an associate or are you an independent contractor? Because some of the things that he had said during our initial conversation just kind of made me go, I'm not 100% sure what your position is because it almost sounds like some sort of weird hybrid position. He said, no, I'm an independent contractor. He came to me, he's working out of this practice and he's doing a great job, seeing a lot of patients. He's getting some momentum for his practice, but he doesn't have a website. And at this point, all of his people that are, you know, they love him, they're doing, you know, they're happy with his care, whatever. They're leaving reviews on the practice that he works for. Like, that he works out of. Like, it doesn't work for them. He works out of it. And so they're going to. Let's say it's ABC Chiropractic is where he works and he's Dr. Smith. So Dr. Smith doesn't have a Google business profile. Dr. Smith doesn't have his own website. Dr. Smith works as an independent contractor out of ABC Chiropractic, which he does not own. And his patients are like, Dr. Smith is great. They go on ABC Chiropractic, Google business profile. They leave a review. It's great that people leave a review, but that doesn't help Dr. Smith at all. Like, this is a terrible situation because it's like, you're not. This is. This is just awful. It's just an awful situation. And I told him, I said, what you need to do is you just need to have your own website. You need to have your own Google business profile. If you don't have an actual practice name, because he was just sort of practicing by, you know, it was him, Dr. Smith, practicing out of ABC Chiropractic. I told him, I said, just, just get a website with your name, you know, drsmith.com and drsmithkiro or whatever. Like, get that. We'll build a website for you. You can start a Google business profile as a practitioner. You don't have to have a business name. You could just start a Google business profile as Dr. Smith, whatever, and start doing your thing. So that's what he does. And a few months later, he gets ahold of me and he says, hey, this the guy that I'm working, working out of his office, found my Google business profile, found my website, lost his mind. And my question was, and ultimately this ended badly for them in the sense that he just, the chiropractor was. He was kind of wanting to leave anyway. And this sort of ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back. And he just left, which I don't think is a great. And the reason I don't think it's great is because, you know, if you're just kind of out, if you just leave and he's like, screw you, and you, screw you, and you have a big fight with a guy that you're getting space out, working with, you know, what are you doing with your existing patients? You have patients, you have clientele, you have people scheduled, and now you don't have anywhere that you can see them. It's not great to kind of have that, you know, screw you moment. Like, sometimes it feels good to say screw you and just leave. And I would say this person has absolutely zero right. Unless this has been somehow negotiated, which if that's the case, then whoever agreed to this did not, should not have. And I guess that's the point of this podcast or the point of this part of this podcast. This is for a very specific, very narrow group of chiropractors. And I would just say this. If you are an employee, then the person that you're working for has the right to tell you what you can and can't do, should and shouldn't do. And so if you, as an employee, because technically, according to Google, as an employee, you could still have a Google business profile with your own name. Now, there's a lot of employers that wouldn't like that, but a massage therapist that works for a chiropractor technically can have their own Google business profile as a massage therapist. Now, like I said, your boss may not want you to, and they may say that you can't, but it's not a violation of Google's policy. So as an associate, you technically can have your own Google business profile, which if I was an associate with any thought that I was ever going to leave at any point in time, I would definitely want to do that because I could take that with me. So if I decide to start my practice or independent contract or work for somebody else, I can take that Google business profile with me and I can still build my online presence. People can find, start finding me online. So I would want to do that as an associate, but as an associate, it's entirely possible that you will work for someone who doesn't want you to do that. They, they obviously would want you to have your information on their website, which totally makes sense that you would not have your own website. It also, whether you have a Google business profile or not, they would pro. They might have some say in that. So I understand that. But as an independent contractor, you are independent contracting. You're just renting space within reason obviously. Now they may set parameters for when you can be there, when you can't, what you can and can't do. Like if you're working with another working independent contracting with a chiropractor, maybe they part of the deal is their staff answers the phone for you or their staff scheduled appointment. Like there, there are these sort of hybrid situations when you have a chiropractor independent contracting from a chiropractor. But what should not be part of that agreement is you're not allowed to have a website, you're not allowed to have a Google business profile, you're not allowed to have citations, you're not allowed to do your own SEO. Because this guy was upset about the fact that this guy had a website and had Google business profile with the same address. And that's going to potentially negatively affect his SEO. What I would say to that person is don't have independent contractors in your business if you don't like that potential because you're an idiot. Like if you don't want another chiropractor potentially interfering with your SEO, which is also sort of dumb anyway. Like it's. There's a whole secondary dumb discussion about why that's stupid. But if that's your concern, I don't want to have another chiropractor that is competing for SEO with my address. Then you don't get to have an independent contractor. You just don't. You get to have associates hire an associate. So if you're in a situation where you are independently contracting, you are not an employee, you are not getting a salary, nothing like that. And you are with someone who is saying you shouldn't have a website, can't have a website, can't have a Google business profile, that is a bad situation. You need to get out of that situation. Or you need to disregard what they're saying and do whatever you want until the crap hits the fan. Because what that person is doing, here's what that person is doing. When someone has an independent contractor come into their practice, but they want to put their thumb on that person. And this makes me so mad. Like you like, my blood boils when this happens because all that is happening in this situation is the doctor who's bringing in the independent contractor is being a control freak and they're creating a scenario where everything benefits them and they're completely putting their thumb on someone who's just getting started. I don't like it. It makes me furious. And what's happening in this situation is the independent contractor doesn't want to pay someone's salary. They don't want to have an employee, they don't want to have that risk, they don't want to have that financial commitment. They don't want to do that, but they want to. They want to make some money by someone using some of their space. So they want the benefit of someone coming in and like, oh, yeah, I can make some extra money per month because another chiropractor comes in. But they don't want that to negatively affect their SEO. They don't want somebody getting reviews, more reviews than them. They don't want another website that overlaps with their website in any sort of way. They want to tell that person what to do. I've seen it where, I've seen situations where independent contractors are put on the chiropractor's website. Like, like the chiropractor doesn't want them to have their own website. They'll put them on their website, be like, oh, yeah, we'll send you people and let's just, we'll put you on our website. It's like, are you an employee? Because why are you being treated like an employee? It's like these weird situations like this. What ends up happening is the chiropractor, the, the, the young chiropractor who's supposed to be the independent contractor is getting none of the benefits of being an independent contractor and none of the benefits of being an employee. It just sucks. So if you're listening to this, prior to agreeing to some sort of independent contracting thing, just make sure that this nonsense is not part of it. They should, they should be fully aware of the fact that you are independent. You're going to have your own practice name or you're going to practice under your own name. You're going to have your own Google business profile. You're going to start building citations, you're going to do the website, you're going to do the thing. You are independent of them. If they are not okay with that, tell them to go fly a kite and go find somebody else to work or work out of their building, work out of a gym. I mean, this stuff would never happen if you were getting independent contracting out of a gym, out of massage therapist, out of a medical doctor's office. I had a friend that independent contract out of a Chinese medical doctor's office for years. Like, those things never happen unless it's another chiropractor. And when you have another chiropractor, sometimes you get into the situations like this. These are absolutely terrible situations for the independent contractor, which is it. Just don't agree to that. I don't care how desperate you are, don't agree to it. Go find somewhere else. Work out of a gym or. Like I said, somewhere else. I feel like I'm gonna sneeze. All right, let me get a drink of water here. Okay. Last thing we'll talk about is this. Let's talk about planning for the new year. I've done similar podcasts for. For years now, kind of leading into the new year, and I didn't want to do a whole podcast about it. But I do want a couple talk about a couple things on. Number one is that structure is your friend. One of the things that it depends on someone's personality. If someone's very type a very structured person, then they already know structure is great. They love structure. They probably love structure a little bit too much. Someone who is more creative and someone who is less kind of rigid like that tends to feel like structure is a little bit confining and restricting. I do think a lot of chiropractors fall into that category. I don't know what the percentage would be, but there is a lot of chiropractors who fall more into the creative side of things and less into the analytical and structured side. And this is really for you guys just. Just to help you understand that when you think that structure is like your prison and it's confiding, what you're going to do is put yourself in a situation where you're going to have a quality control issue. You're going to have an issue with growth, you're going to have an issue with excellence. There's no standard. There's no standard to which you hold yourself. There's no standard to which you hold your staff. There's no standard to which you hold your patients. It's a really, really difficult situation to have growth within that environment. It's a really diff. It's difficult to excel within that environment. So what structure allows you to do is. Structure gives you the parameters which you can operate. And when you have parameters in which you can operate, then you can really, really master the thing that you're doing. It's sort of like a racetrack. It's like if you think about just driving a car randomly, like in a field or in a parking lot, it's like there's no rhyme or reason to it. There's no method to it. There's no how do you know that you're getting better when you're just driving around in a parking lot? Like, yeah, it might be fun, might be exciting, it might be interesting, but you're not, you're not developing any skill, any, anything in particular because you're just driving around in a parking lot. But if you were to take some cones and kind of mop mark off a track, now you can work on a particular turns, you can work on acceleration and braking, you can work on time. Like, you can get to where you're really, really good at that track. There are some skills and habits that you can develop because now you have structure. It's impossible to develop those skills and habits outside of structure. So just understand that it's important in general, it's important for your practice to have some sort of structure. Now what that looks like per person is very different. And if you're very, very analytical, you might be someone who. And the example that I often give when I do podcasts, like, I generally speak from an outline. I do have notes and it's, it's, you know, for me to get up and start talking and not have notes is not generally good because I can, I just ramble and sometimes I ramble even with notes. But generally I work with from an outline. If I showed you the notes here, I have three points and a couple sub points. And it's like a. There's like an outline that's here that I look at other people. Structure for them doesn't look like an outline. It looks like having it written out like, almost like, like a teleprompter type of a situation. I'm not that detailed of a person. So structure looks different from person to person. But one practice might be very, very like word for word kind of laid out exactly what you want someone to do. Another practice might be a checklist or an outline. So I'm not telling you how rigid you have to be with your structure. I'm just telling you that you have to have some sort of structure. Now, one of the things, one of my structures, one of my kind of versions of structures is when it comes to the end of the year or actually different points throughout the year, I am always asking the Question, do we keep it, do we tweak it or do we scrap it? Like, those are the three questions that I'm always asking about things that I'm doing from a marketing standpoint, outreach standpoint, just business growth, products, services, whatever. Keep it, tweak it, or scrap it. Like, that's the question now. If something's going great, it's, it's, it's killing it, it's doing exactly what I wanted to do. That's obviously a keep it. There's a lot of things that are like, well, maybe it's, maybe it could be doing better. Those are tweak it things. Or maybe it's not doing great at all, but I think there's still some potential there. Those are tweak it things, then there's scrap of things. There are things that it's like, hey, maybe it's run its course. Maybe it's never got off the ground. Maybe it hasn't worked the way I thought it was going to. Maybe it's a scrap it for now. I did that just this month with some marketing stuff that I've been doing. I was doing some extra stuff that I hadn't been doing, you know, in years past. I was looking at it and I just decided, you know what? It doesn't seem to be. I don't actually hate it. I don't hate the results that I'm getting from it. But it just, it's not exactly what I need to be focusing on right now. And so I'm going to scrap it now. It's actually a scrap it for now. It's not a scrap it forever. But those are the questions that you have to ask when you're looking at your marketing and looking at your business. You have to have, or at least I would recommend having points throughout your year where you sit down and say, do I keep it? Do I tweak it? Do I scrap it now? My pattern is this. And you could do whatever you want. You don't have to follow my pattern. My pattern is I make small changes on a monthly basis. So that may be adding blogs, changing blogs, doing different podcasts, whatever. I make small changes, SEO stuff, whatever website changes, whatever. I make small changes on a monthly basis. I make medium sized changes on a quarterly basis. So when we hit those quarter marks throughout the year, and I always use the calendar. So you have January, February, March. That's your first quarter. Obviously you guys know how this works. At the end of the first quarter, you kind of look at stuff. I'm more willing to make bigger changes at the quarter mark and then I make the biggest changes. And annually, so I get down to the end of the year. This is the time of year where I'm taking very, very serious looks. That's also why I told you, I said I kind of scrapped that particular marketing for now. That was an end of the year decision where it's like, hey, we've been doing this for a while. I looked at it, I decided maybe it's okay, but for long term. But right now I don't think that that's actually something I want to keep doing for the time being. So we went ahead and decided to scrap it. That was a big decision that was made because it's the end of the year and I'm looking at my stuff and I'm more willing to make big decisions. The reason I do it this way is because on a monthly basis, when you're doing marketing and you're, whether it's online marketing or you're going out networking or whatever, there's data that you can get right away. You don't want to wait three to six months before you look at something and say, oh, maybe I could have done that better. There's constantly information that you can be getting from the things that you were doing. Now that's, this could even be something as simple as changing your report of findings or changing your consultation or whatever. You, you can make those changes on the fly, day to day, like week to week, like you can make those changes. And, and so that's the sort of thing that, like you might go in and say, I'm going to ask these questions or I'm going to do this type of report of findings or whatever. And, and you kind of assess how that goes. You might make a change before the end of the month or before the end of the week. You got to be willing to do that. You don't want to just decide like, oh, I'm going to do this report of earnings and I'll reassess it at the end of the year. That's terrible because you have more than enough data early that you can make a decision on. Do I need to tweak it? Do I need to keep it? Do I need to scrap it? You can decide that. Make that decision early. With that said, there are some things, like I told you guys already with the SEO, like if you're going to do SEO, if, if you're going to say, I'll do SEO and at the end of the month I'll decide if I'M going to keep doing it. You're not thinking about it properly. This, at bare minimum, would fall into a medium decision. Realistically, it would be a big decision that would be made over a six month or a year period of time. It isn't a decision you would make on a month to month basis because you, you need a little bit more time to gather some of the information. You got to give something a chance. You know, if you were to say this in next year, and I don't recommend chiropractors doing podcasts, I don't think that podcasting is a local marketing thing. And in spite of what other people might say, which I think those people are wrong, I don't generally think that chiropractors should do podcasts unless you have a different plan in place besides practice. But if you were to decide next year, like I'm going to do a podcast, it would be incredibly ridiculous for you to say, I'm going to give this a month and see how it goes, or even say, I'm going to give this three months and see how it goes. That would be ridiculous. That, that is clearly a misunderstanding of what it means to podcast. How long it takes to actually see any sort of benefit from podcasting, how long it takes to build a community, it takes a long time. It isn't something that you would reevaluate at the end of the month. But that's generally my pattern. My pattern is going to be one of the things I do. I have different structures throughout my business and throughout my life and whatever, even throughout my week. Like, I have certain things I do on certain days and, and I always have that kind of written down. And that structure just sort of helps me make sure that I'm staying on track and doing the things that I should be doing. Uh, but one of the things I do at this time of year, from a marketing standpoint, is I take a look and I say, what is something? Do I need to keep this? Do I need to tweak this? Do I need to scrap it? And so I guess that's just my advice for you guys. Going into the new year is twofold. One, have structure. Have some sort of structure, some sort of method to your madness. Because if you have an established method to your madness, then you can properly evaluate whether your method is good or not. If you don't have a method to your madness. And I talk about this in my next step program. I talk about the importance of an operations manual. Now, that sounds super technical. And the operations manual might just be some check marks, you know, just some checklist. But you have to have some structure to what you're doing and you have to have some plan to what you're doing. Otherwise you can evaluate how you're. That question of should I keep it, should I tweak it, should I scrap it? You can't answer that question. If there's no structure, if there's no plan, if you're doing every single time you do a consult, it's different. If every single time you do a report of findings, it's different. If every single time you answer the phone, it's different. If every single time you're doing everything, it's different, there's no possible way you can evaluate whether that thing is working or not because there is no thing. So you need to have structure. And I would strongly recommend that you have time built in throughout your year where you reevaluate that structure and reevaluate what you're doing. My pattern is small changes monthly, or I would say small changes ongoing, medium changes quarterly. Where I stop at the end of the quarter, take a look at everything, take a little bit longer look. At the end of the year I take a very long look, a very deep look into my stuff to decide if I'm going to make some big changes heading into the new year. You could come up with a completely different way of doing it, but I think you should have something like that. Otherwise you're going to make your practice, the progress of your practice, the ability to grow, the ability excel. You're going to make that stuff harder than it has to be simply because you have not organized your business and organized your thoughts in a way that is helpful. So I hope that guy helps you guys out. I talked about always trying to hit home runs when you need to be focusing on the basics. I talk about independent contracting, nightmares and some things that you want to avoid. I also talked about planning for the new year and the important importance of structure. Hope you guys really benefited from that. Like I said, if you want help with your website and SEO, go to Rocket Cairo and request a free practice assessment. If you want help with just the business and marketing side of things, you're getting started or you're feeling a little bit stuck, check out my next step program. It is awesome and it is such a good help and it is such a no brainer for chiropractors who are in a situation where you're feeling a little bit stuck or overwhelmed with with the business side of being a chiropractor. I'M out of here. If you want to leave a review for Rocket Chiropractic Cairo, you can go to rocketchiro.com and hit the Review Us button in the main tab. I always appreciate that when you guys do that. I'm kind of bad about asking, and so I. Which is super hypocritical of me, but I'm asking now. If you want to leave a review, that's how you do it. I'll talk to you guys in the next episode.