Hey, chiropractors. We're ready for another Modern Chiropractic Marketing Show with Dr. Kevin Christie, where we discuss the latest in marketing strategies, contact marketing, direct response marketing, and business development with some of the leading experts in the industry.
Alright. Welcome to another episode of The Modern Chiropractic Marketing Show. This is your host, Dr. Kevin Christie, and today I'm going to be bringing you a solo episode. I just back from my quarterly meeting at Strategic Coach, and the whole theme was cash confidence, and we're going to break that down and what it means to me and then what it could potentially mean to you and obviously how to start to define this for yourself. So we'll dive into that. Before we do that, I've got a couple things to mention. We do have a great Motion Palpation seminar coming up October 19th and 20th on gait. So this will be all kinds of gait assessments and training and how to fix it. [0:01:03.1]
This will be with Dr. Mark King. I took this way back in probably 2004. I know I was a student and it was in Cincinnati and it was really just huge for me because I was always interested in it and when I took that, it really helped me with understanding gait assessments and then throughout the years, I've done a lot of video assessments of walking and been able to take patients with lower extremity issues or even all the way up to the hip and back and evaluate their gait analysis and see what's going on, and be able to add that to my assessment tools. So, it's a great seminar. That's going to be in Auburn, New York, and again, that's with Dr. Mark King. You can check that out. Just go to www.MPICourses.org and then there's a seminars button there and you can check that out and register. I highly recommend this course. It's a great training for you DCs out there and students. I think being able to apply this to your practice efficiently - that's the one thing I love about the MPI seminars, is they teach you things and then how to do it efficiently in your practice so you're not spending 20 minutes doing a gait assessment on someone, unless you want to, and getting paid handsomely to do that, but how to really get to the point with these assessments and what to do with them quickly and efficiently, but also getting a lot of good information out of it. So check that out. Okay? [0:02:22.3]
Next, I'm really excited about the relaunch of the Chiropractic Success Academy. We have got the success path in there, so now when you do enter, you'll go through a delineated path and you'll have Module 1 all the way through 7, and it'll drip out over a couple of months, but it's going to really guide you and some people are going to fall into different aspects of the path, but there'll still be all of the other modules that have been in there for the last year and we'll be updating more modules as supplements to that. A few things that we have added that I'm really excited about that's frankly worth the price, the 99 a month, anyway is we're having a really good content repository in there that is blogs but then also we have got a copywriter, Dan Barrett, who is collaborating with us and he's taking each of the blogs and turning it into a deliverable. [0:03:16.9]
So now, not only do you have the blog to have as a template, you want to make some changes to it because we don’t want it to be canned content. It can impact your SEO. But you can just put your take on it, but you have the real meat and potatoes of the blog there, but then you're also going to get a deliverable of two emails. So the content will be breaking down into two emails you can send out to your patients, to some Facebook posts, so copy for that, copy for Instagram posts and some associated hashtags that you can then add to it as well. Because obviously you know if you're a Boca Raton chiropractor, you might have that as a hashtag. That's not going to be on the Instagram deliverable just because we can't put everybody's town and city there, and some of the other things like that. So that's the content repository now. It's going to be a lot more robust and each month, they'll be 1-3 blogs added to that with those copy deliverable that I mentioned, so it'll be really a good way to have content for you. It's one of those things where we talk about not only creating your own content and repurposing content, but curating others content and this is a way for you to do that. So that's number one. [0:04:23.0]
Number two is we have a pretty well developed, over, and I think it's 13 now, preferred providers that we recommend and these are people that are contributing modules to the Academy and they're doing different things for chiropractors, whether it's the Motion Palpation Institute, like I mentioned earlier, or ChiroUp or the Practice Mechanics or the copywriter or John Morrison - all these different people that help out and then a lot of them are actually offering CSA member discounts and so you'll have discounts that will be affiliated with that and really help you with that kind of you know, having a lot of different layers to your practice without necessarily breaking the bank. [0:05:10.7]
So we're really excited about that. We'll be adding some collaborators and contributors as well as we go along. We're building that out. We have been, we closed… if you recall, we closed this Academy back in July 1st. We have been working on these things. Like, you know, working on some of these collaborations, getting the Success Path all detailed out, getting the content together. There's a lot that went into this, so we're really excited about it. What we're going to be doing, we're going to have a new launch on that, okay - and so we're going to make sure that we really get this all done for you. It's going to launch on October 7, which is a Monday, and we'll keep you posted, but just look out for that, okay. [0:06:01.7]
Because the other third aspect that I'm excited about this Academy too is you know, I've got quite a relationship with Strategic Coach, and they are actually going to start contributing content to the Academy as well. They're doing this for other folks as well, other networks and things, but since we have such a strong group and a strong network, we'll be getting some module contributions from Strategic Coach as well. So, number 1 - we have got a copywriter with some blog deliverables; number 2 - provider network; 3 - Strategic Coach in conjunction with this new laid out Success Path. So I want you to check out the bit.ly link for this and that is going to be bit.ly/YourCSACircle. We're opening up the Academy on October 7, so that's a Monday. It'll be open for four days and we're closing it again so we can really focus on our members. [0:07:00.4]
That's one of the big reasons why we close and open, is we were kind of getting tired, honestly, of having to promote it a lot and focus on some of that. So now we really want to focus on our members and improving the Academy consistently and then we'll do probably two launches a year or so to where we kind of open it up again. So we'll let you know that. But check that out - that's bit.ly/YourCSACircle.
Alright. So, let's roll into cash confidence. Okay? Cash confidence is important. There's going to be two aspects of this, and what I want to really make sure that I get out of the gates early on is to understand that you could have a lack of cash confidence if you had $1,000,000 practice or a $200,000 practice. You could have cash confidence with a $200,000/year practice and have no cash confidence with $1,000,000. Okay? It's really just relative. Right? It's just you're adding zeros. There's bigger problems with bigger money and you could have cash flow issues with a $30,000,000/year revenue business. You could go bankrupt with that. Right? It's all relative to your circumstances and there's no cookie cutter approach. [0:08:11.8]
There's no dollar amount. There's none of that. So you got to get clear on it with your own and so what I wrote down when I was in my meeting a couple of days ago was the question they asked us was "What does cash confidence mean to you?" And I wrote these out, and these are for me, but I think they are good kind of ideas for you to follow and then you can come up with your own numbers. Right? So you know, for me, a big one that gives me confidence in the cash in the sense of just like where my financial situation is is having consistent and predictable cash flow. Right? My consistent and predictable cash flow is going to look a lot different than yours and so you've got to come up with what that looks like for you, obviously. That's why, you know, I've worked with Christine Odle a lot. She's contributed to the CSA. When I do one-on-one coaching, I mail you the book and the workbook she has for it because we got to get really clear on the cash flow. So, for me, it's consistent and predictable cash flow is one. [0:09:18.7]
Two is emergency funds in place. I've got a set number, and again, as I roll through these, I have accomplished most of these but not all of these. So this isn't a list of things I'm currently having - this is what I'm striving for. A few of them are going to be a little down the road. They're lofty or just I've got a plan in place where it's like, you know, for instance - an opportunity fund. I'll get to that in a minute. That's somewhere where I'm not at yet. Okay? Let's go back. So I want an emergency fund for my practice and my personal life. As a business owner, you know, I could probably keep the emergency fund just in my business and ultimately it's, you know, it's the same thing, for the most part other than obviously taxes. [0:10:04.4]
If I had something happen in my personal life where I needed $10,000 really quick, I could just move that $10,000, pay myself, and obviously take the tax burden from that. But, have an emergency fund for your practice, whatever that number is. I know we deal in South Florida with hurricanes and we just had another scare. Unfortunately, for the Bahamas, it was a reality. Fortunately for us, it was not. But that's one of those ones - if that hurricane would have wiped through here, you know, we would have been able to sustain it a lot better than the Bahamas, but I probably would have been out of business for a couple of weeks - week or two - and if it's bad enough, you could potentially go a month. Right? So you've got to have emergency funds. I like to have fully stocked sinking funds. I've mentioned that in the past. That's like for big things - you know, if I'm going on a vacation - we just got back from a 2-week vacation in Europe. That was planned for ahead of time and I put $1000/month away from January on until September for that, so that way it was paid for when we went versus putting it on a credit card. [0:11:05.5]
And so business and personal sinking funds - all the big expenses. I like to prepare that, have money set aside, pay cash with it. So for me, a sinking fund.
Next is, I like to have profits that allow for reinvestment in my business growth. So I like to, you know, each month, I like to have a certain amount of money that's profits that I can reinvest in my business growth. And it sometimes, that money is tough to weigh into a sinking fund for maybe something that's coming in the future that's a business investment. Okay?
Next, is profits that allow for reinvestment in my personal growth. I spend a fair amount of money on my personal development/business development. Strategic Coach costs me quite a bit. I've got another coach. I've got Christine is my business manager. Honestly, I probably spend about $25,000 a year in that. [0:12:00.0]
That's a lot more than many want to, but as I have grown and I couldn't imagine not spending that kind of money on it. For me, you know, I coach chiropractors now and one of the things I talk about is just not being on that island. Like I don’t want to be left on an island, and so I always want someone helping me, assisting me, thinking outside the box, holding me accountable, someone I can talk to about it because you know, being an entrepreneur is definitely a different animal. So I like to have the profits that allow for that.
Next is that opportunity fund, and really what this is is having an amount of money set aside that is earmarked for something that comes up that is an opportunity that you really don’t want to pass up on. I would say right now, I don’t have that because we are saving for our dream house in the next year or two, and so the extra kind of money that is being earmarked for that for sure. But I guess we could potentially call that an opportunity fund. But after, you know, we buy that house, I will definitely put money into an opportunity fund in case something really great, business opportunity or real estate investment or something like that pops up, which would be good. [0:13:10.9]
Next is enough personal income to enjoy and save. Right? So I definitely like to travel. We like to enjoy life and also be able to save and so that's been going good. Then lastly is have a recession plan in place. You can Google this. Don Miller of Story Brand actually wrote a nice little free .pdf. It's like five or six pages on how to recession proof your business. So Google that. I don’t have the exact link, but it's a nice read and it's just about thinking about how can you recession proof your business and that's a key thing to do that. So I've been thinking about that. You know, you hear a lot on the news. I'm going to start deciding to ignore that stuff. I'm just going to have my plan in place, but just plow through it if it happens and be confident that I can because I don’t want to sit there and dwell on that. So have a recession plan in place, which will be really helpful. [0:14:12.0]
The next little topic, which is an interesting dilemma as a business owner, especially a small business where essentially if there's an extra $5000, I could spend it on my business, an opportunity or I could spend it on a watch. Right? In my personal life. I say it because you have to make these decisions where if you just were a salary, I mean, some of you are a salaried employee - but if you're a salaried employee or you work for a company like that, you know what's coming in and it's pretty set. You get a raise; that's fine. But you have a set pay and as a business owner, you have to make those decisions and it can be difficult. You might have … like right now, I'm running into a situation where truth be told the money coming in is totally fine but just all these opportunities are coming about that I want to do, and you have to make hard decisions on like, well, probably, if I'm going to want to buy a house, I probably can't open up that other practice - right - or something like that. [0:15:12.5]
There's just all kinds of different things you have to weigh and there's a lot of opportunities that are coming my way, which is good, but you have to sift through that. So I had asked that question in my group on Friday, and one of the things I really enjoy about my Strategic Coach group is there's about 30 of us in there - me and probably a couple of other guys are the youngest, and it's anywhere from 40 to 70, I would say the age range. Probably the vast majority are folks in their 50s, all very successful. Pretty nice split of male/female. I'd probably say it's 70/30, no 65/35 male/female in this particular group, but overall, it's just a great group and a lot of good wisdom in that room. I had asked that question about you know, what do you guys do about this, you know, dilemma of all these opportunities but having to decide where you're going to put some of the cash, and I had one gentleman discuss the four pillars that he uses, which I really liked. It was really good. [0:16:13.6]
Pillar one was business investments. Right? Just in the sense of do you reinvest into your business; do you make that hire; do you open up that other location or whatever. So that was pillar one for him. Pillar two was real estate investments. So for me, I own my office space. I made that decision and big purchase back in 2013. So that would be pillar two is investment real estate, and it could be a second home or the office that you're practicing in, you own it. It's a great investment. So that's something to look into. Three was just your retirement, your traditional retirements and making sure that you have those in line as well. So you want to make sure that you're doing that, and when you have some money, that's where you're going to obviously put some of it and make sure that you've got that squared away. That was a big one. [0:17:08.2]
Then four was just, you know, basically the personal life stuff that you may want to do - family and experiences and things like that. So that's what his four pillars were and he makes sure that he has them all evenly - he knows where he wants to be in all four and he works towards them evenly and then makes sure that there's not one off kilter, and that's kind of his guiding light with that. Okay?
Alright, so the last part of this is Strategic Coach also has an acronym for cash confidence and it's spelled a little bit differently. It's KASH and it's the question I asked like what needs to be true for you to be cash confident. It was the K is Knowledge; the A is Attitudes; the S is Skills; the H is Habits. [0:18:01.5]
What they're getting at is basically to attain that cash confidence and have the right mentality towards it because the reality of it is a lot of what we feel about and think about in our relationship with money is just our attitudes towards it. Right? So that's a big one, like what's your attitude towards money. If you invest in your knowledge, which we did as chiropractors, you're going to have a longer term return on that investment. You know, no one can take away the knowledge you have and so you apply that and you invest in knowledge. It's going to go a long way. Here's an example for me that's a little bit outside of the chiropractic profession, but I've spent a lot of time and money in the knowledge of marketing and business for chiropractic. Over the last six years, just really hit it hard with that, really want to know everything, wanted to test run it with my practice, do all that. Now, I'm, you know, to be honest with you, reaping the benefits of it financially. So it was investing in that knowledge. Skills is the S and then habits. [0:19:03.8]
Obviously, financial habits, money habits are important and so you want to make sure you get clear on that. So my challenge to you is what does that look for you, that acronym KASH? What are those - the knowledge, the attitude, the skills and habits you need to have to start working towards having cash confidence? Right? And then, write down what that looks like for you. You may take some of the ones I have. I think they're good ones and then come up with the exact numbers. Like each one I gave you, I know exactly what that number is for me in a business standpoint and a personal life. You're going to have your own. So write that out. So that's my homework assignment for you. I want you to just start getting towards that. It's not going to be perfect. Some of you may have all of it. That's great. But a lot of us don’t and I want you to start looking at what it looks like for you and then what's the lowest hanging fruit? You know, pick that one and go from there with it and add that and then work towards the next one. [0:20:03.5]
Set a plan for yourself. Right? I'm a plan oriented guy, sometimes too much, but it really serves me well. I turn 40 January 9th and so I've got what I'm calling Plan 45. And so I'm looking at what does 45 years old look for me? So basically what are the next five years look? It's interesting - I always break down my life in decades and periods and stuff like that. The 20s were definitely getting obviously school. I was 26 when I graduated - associateship, kind of just learning - right - like I didn't know anything about anything and so my 20s were just learning how to be an effective chiropractor. I opened up, coincidentally enough, I opened my own practice at age 30. So exactly at age 30 and so I look at now that I'm, you know, I've got basically four more months left of my 30s - my 30s have been really building the foundation of my business of you know, I opened up my practice. [0:21:01.7]
I opened up a second practice. I bought my office space. I built up the practices, started the Modern Chiropractic Marketing Group and the CSA. So, really built the foundation. Had a setback with the divorce at 35 and that definitely is a setback financially too. But it's now like looking back four years now, things have been great. So I'm really looking to accelerate. I'm looking at this 40-45 as a big growth phase. So I kind of wrote out what 45 looks like for me, and I'm going to start picking that apart. A big one of that is having full cash confidence, getting close, not there yet, but I think I will be there in probably the next year or two. So, do all that. Think about it. Get clear on it. I hope this was helpful for you. I don’t want you to beat yourself up if you're not having cash confidence. It's not a big deal. Just work towards it. Have a plan. You will. Have a great week and practice. I'll talk to you soon.
Thanks for tuning in today. Please be sure to check our redesigned website at www.ModernChiropracticMarketing.com. Stay up-to-date with our blog, where content is regularly added by Kevin and guest contributors. You can also access our library of podcast episodes there. Go to www.ModernChiropracticMarketing.com and subscribe to the podcast today.
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
