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All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of the Rocket Chiro Podcast. This is the business and marketing podcast for chiropractors. We're going to talk about a couple things today. I want to talk about time as it relates to how much time we spend with patients and does more time equal, more better? I think sometimes chiropractors focus on the wrong thing. The other thing I want to talk about is how we greet patients and how we interact with patients and being conscious of how we make them feel. Because I think that that's. It's something I was actually reading recently. It's. I didn't even. It wasn't something I was intending to read. A book was recommended to me. I started reading it and I was like, wow, this is actually really applicable to chiropractic practice and dealing with patients. And this actually probably has a pretty big impact on patient retention. So we're going to talk a little bit about those two things in this podcast. I don't imagine this is going to be a terribly long podcast. I do want to do some housekeeping things in the beginning. I do want to say, I always tell you guys, if you want a better website, you want some help with your SEO, go to RocketKiro and reach out to me through there. I'd be glad to help you if you're a chiropractor that wants a little more help with business and marketing. If you're getting started or you're feeling a little stuck, check out my Next Step program. I will say this, as far as housekeeping goes, like, I'm going to be raising the prices on my website service at the end of the month. All of my existing clients, I intend on leaving them kind of at the point that they're at now. And so if you've been thinking about it, you're kind of on the fence. And this isn't me necessarily trying to make a couple sales by the end of the month. I'm just saying that if you've been thinking about it and you reach out to me before the end of the month, you'll get locked in at the current price, and the new price is going to be a decent percentage higher. And my plan for that is just because I want to focus more on quality and less on quantity when it comes to my websites and SEO service. And I'm getting to the point where I don't want the volume to get in the way of the quality, and so the price is going to have to go up. I'm going to work with fewer clients overall. But it'll end up being a better product. So that's sort of my plan going forward. So if you've been thinking about it and you're on the fence, like, reach out to me before the end of the month and we can talk about that. You can kind of get locked in at the existing price. Otherwise, like I said, it'll, I mean, the websites will still be available. If you're listening to this and you know, the end of the year, middle of year or whatever, like definitely still check out the websites. The plan is to provide the absolute best chiropractic websites that we can for chiropractors. So let's talk about this a little bit. I'm not even sure exactly when this thought came across my brain most recently, but I did have a chiropractor friend of mine who had showed me a clip about chiropractic guilt. And this chiropractor was being interviewed on a different chiropractic podcast. He was talking about the guilt of feeling guilty not spending more time with patients. And I told him, I said, I said, is that a thing? Like, I didn't, I don't know if that's a thing. Like, is that, is that something that chiropractors struggle with? And as I talked to him and I talked to some other people and I started investigating it, it seemed like that was kind of a thing. And I'll admit this isn't necessarily a thing that I've ever struggled with. Like, I was around high volume chiropractors when I was in school and I started getting in that mentality of, you know, 300, 400, 500 patient visits a week. So spending tons of time with patients was never, it was never in my brain as that's connected directly to my value as a chiropractor, how much value that I'm giving to them, what they're paying for. Like, I just never made that connection personally. But there are a lot of chiropractors who do that and there are even chiropractors who cash chiropractors who will pay. People pay for time. And I am not an advocate of that at all. I just, if you want to tell people about how long a visit will take, I think that that's fine. But locking yourself into a timeframe where you're just like, oh, you can pay for 15 minutes or 30 minutes and you're going to do a lot of soft tissue and muscle stuff, I don't think that that's wise. And the kind of conclusion of this thought and the Thing that I want to communicate to you guys is that more time does not automatically equal more better. And some people like more time is actually a detriment. And I would argue in your business, more time is a detriment. And what I'm saying by that is this. If you could get something done in less time, the people, what they should be paying for is they should be paying for a result. They should be paying for the value that you're offering. And that's sort of the. The punchline of this whole conversation is that what you should be focusing on in your brain and your goal and how you're communicating this to your patients, you should be focusing on value, you should be focusing on benefits. You don't want to focus on time because it just. You end up filling up time when you do this. When you say to yourself, if I don't spend 20 minutes or I don't spend 30 minutes with a patient, I'm not providing value, then what you end up doing is you, instead of having 10 or 15 minutes or 5 minutes of incredible interaction, and you just, you get it done, you get that result. It's awesome. It's amazing. It's wonderful. Do you end up having 30 minutes of just kind of. Yeah, you didn't need to take 30 minutes to do that. You just did. And people that are busy don't appreciate that. And there are going to be those patients who just want to talk, and there are going to be those patients who just want to spend time in your practice because they have nothing else to do. And they're going to like that. They're going to like that extra time. But I don't think that you should try to build a practice on those people. And if you start someone off with them understanding the amount of time that they have available to you, then you're not going to have as many of those problems going forward. And I know this, for my chiropractor, like, I'll go in. I got a buddy of mine, like me, my buddy, and I met this chiropractor who is my chiropractor. Like, he. We met him at the same time. And I still go to the chiropractor because I'm in the area. He obviously doesn't, because he's not or not as close. And sometimes he'll ask me, like, hey, did you talk to, you know, did you talk to so and so? Or when's the last time you saw him? And I'll tell him, like, yeah, I was just in there the other day and he's like, ah, did you talk to him about this or did you ask him about that? And I'm like, no. Like, we don't, I don't dawdle around in his office and just spend time and talk. Like it's. When I'm in his practice, I'm a patient just like everybody else. And I don't monopolize his time. He doesn't offer me, and he might talk to me a minute longer or two minutes longer than somebody else or something like that. But our relationship is not based on like, oh, I think he's going to spend 30 minutes with me. It's not that at all. I go to him because of the value and the benefit and because he's awesome at what he does. Now if what you do requires that you spend 10 minutes with someone, then do that. But I think that we can get caught into this. And there's two aspects of being a chiropractor that we get stuck into this. And it's the new patient visit and then the regular visit, which is basically all that we do, right? But the new patient visit, one of my clients recently, we were just talking about this where he said, hey, I cut my new patient visit down in half time wise. And I love it. It's allowing me the ability to see more patients. I can fit them in at different times. It's awesome. And I have one of my best friends, like, he told me the same thing the other day. He was like, you know what? I'm getting so efficient. And he's been practicing for a long time. He's like, I've been getting so efficient at this. He's like, I really need to like, readjust my own mind as how much time I'm gonna take with a new patient appointment. Because he said, I'm, I'm getting these people in and out. I'm setting aside X amount of time. He's like, I'm getting them out in half of that amount of time. And then I just kind of have this dead spot. Because he has a, he has a micro practice, so it's not like he's jumping into the other stuff he's doing. He's like setting off blocks of time. And that probably brings me to another point is if you're someone who is, especially if you're flying solo or you have a small practice and you have a limited amount of space, being inefficient with your time is an absolute killer. Like, it just puts a lid on what you can do as a business. Now I'M not telling you to skimp out, so please don't hear that if that's what you think I'm saying. Like, don't skip out on quality and don't skip out on care and provide the best possible care that you can, but make efficiency a priority. And you're going to have a hard time if you've, if you've gotten a bad habit of spending way too much time with patients and dawdling around and whatever because you're talking too much or whatever. Like you're going to have a hard time re educating and adjusting and resetting the expectations with your existing patients. That's much harder. But what you can do going forward is everybody this month and everybody going forward that's coming into your practice. Focus on quality, focus on the benefits. Those are the conversations that you should have. Focus on efficiency. You can even use those words. Don't talk about time. And if you're a chiropractor who is, who is selling time, I would encourage you to rethink that. Like maybe that's something this year that you could rethink and just come up with a different way of naming it or a different way of framing it, or a different way of talking about those visits so that it's not connected directly to time. Because I don't think that that's wise. I don't think you're helping yourself out and I don't think you're helping your patients out. Focus on quality. Quality. Focus on benefits. Focus on doing the best you can in the shortest amount of time as possible. Efficient. Next thing I want to talk about is this. So I was reading this book and it was, talking about, it gave an example and the word it used was identity. And I don't love that word because identity has become something different in our culture now. But the, the, what it was saying is that the idea that people have this kind of innate need to be seen and heard and sometimes what we do as human beings, like say like your kid falls down and you say to them like, you're fine, get back up, you know, or your kid comes in and it's like they got a bug bite or something. You're like, ah, you'll be fine. You know, the bugs will. The bugs old you can get a bit a bunch of times, like deal with it, it's fine. It's not a big deal. When we disregard a human being's experience and what they're saying and we sort of minimize that as opposed to just feeling it with them, like whatever they're feeling, we're feeling, whatever they're experiencing, we're experiencing when we don't mirror that person's emotions. And I'm not talking about coddling people, I'm just talking about allowing them to feel the way that they feel and acknowledging it. When someone is heard and when someone is seen, they're drawn to that person. There's a connection that happens, there's a disconnect that happens when you're not seen. And a simple example was they said, you know, even if you went over like your best friend's house, like if you wanted your best friend's house, they answered the door and they were just stoic. Like they didn't say anything bad, they didn't say anything good. Just kind of stone faced stoic. You walked into the house and it's like they don't say anything, they don't say anything that they're not, they're not unhappy, they're not mad, they're not happy, they're just stoic. How long is it going to take before you just start getting super uncomfortable? Like how long is it going to take before you leave? Like we naturally kind of push away from these situations like that that are disconnecting and we naturally draw toward people who are connecting. And so if you think about this within the context of your practice and one of the things that I wrote down a couple things and that is, I think it starts with awareness, like being aware of the fact that, you know, we just talked about time. If you're going to spend five minutes with this patient, spend five minutes with the patient. Things like eye contact, things like active listening, things like the acknowledgement of what they're saying. You know, even if like patients say bizarre things, patients think weird things, patients experience weird things, patients make mountains out of molehills. But there's something about acknowledging that, that you heard them, you understood that that's what they're going through, you understand that they feel that way and kind of asking them to like, you know, why do you think that? And what's, you know, what's going on there? Like that's, that is a way of connecting to a person. And it's something as simple as eye contact. It's something as simple as the attitude. I mean think about if you were to go to your chiropractor and they, you know, look you in the eye, shake your hand, smile at you and just say, hey, we're glad to have you, you know, welcome. Versus if someone just, you walk in and you know, the Staff doesn't pick their head up from the computer. The chiropractor, they tell you like, hey, go, go in the other room, you know, and the chiropractor comes in and he's. He's looking at his notes and checking his phone and doing all kinds of stuff as he's like doing different things and, you know, talking about something that's going on with him. But they're not asking you what's going on with you. It just feels very disconnecting. And so I think that one of the things that we could do as chiropractors is being present, being genuine eye contact, active listening, being present. I think this is just a moment to maybe say, for those of you who are listening to this, just to challenge you to do better at that. Because I think that it's something that's very, very easy to get sidetracked on something else or thinking about something else or doing else, and not being present with the person that you're present with. And this is a retention thing. Like, one of the things that. One of the things that we used to do, and this is obviously, I wasn't even aware of this sort of thought process. It was something I was taught to do is one of the things I used to tell my staff is that we had paperwork back in the day, you know, back in the dark ages when nobody had fun and you would give someone physical paperwork. And I used to tell my staff, like, I don't want you handing paperwork over the front desk. It was just something I didn't like. It was. And that wasn't what I was taught. It just was something that I did. I just didn't like. What I was taught is, I was taught that, you know, sitting down with someone, if you're going to give. If you're going to show them paperwork and how to read or whatever, you would. You would walk around the desk, sit down with them, kind of knee to knee and show them what you want them to fill out. And that was sort of a continuation of my thought, which is, like, don't hand it over the thing, you know, if you're on the phone, unless you absolutely are stuck. Like, if you're just stuck on the phone, like, as much as you can acknowledge that person, just be like, I will be with you. And then when you get off the phone, apologize to that person, because we do not want to be rude. And if you are talking to someone and the phone rings and you have to decide between being rude to the person who's calling or rude to the person you're talking to, be rude to the person on the phone because they're not eye to eye, face to face. There's a lot of reasons why you can't answer the phone. And that was sort of things that we were aware of when I was in practice. And there was a connection, I think, that happened there with my staff and with me and with the people that came in. That just, I think, was a good thing. And it ultimately helps with retention. So just something to think about. And obviously you could go into great detail on how to do these things. And some people do them better than others. I'm not even claiming that I'm an expert, because I'm not. I'm not. I'm a much better talker than I am listener. And so I struggle in this area. It's something I need to do better, which is partly why I'm reading a book, is I need to do better. And as far as acknowledging people listening to them and just being a better human being. But the good news is, as a chiropractor, if you become aware of these things and you start implementing them in your practice, it is actually going to help with your retention, which ultimately helps with your business. It helps you make more money, but it also helps people get the best results they can possibly get because they're not leaving care, because they just don't feel heard, they don't feel seen. All right, guys, that's it. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up. Like I said, if you want help with your website and SEO, reach out to me through RocketKiro. If you feel stuck or overwhelmed with business and marketing, check out my next step program. If you'd like to leave a review for the podcast, that's awesome. You could do it on Google as well. If you go to Rock Rocket Cairo, there's a review us button somewhere there that would take you to Google. I'm done. I'm out of here. I'll talk to you guys on the next episode. Thank you for listening. See you.