Many chiropractors and other health practitioners are striving for an all-cash practice model that is not dependent on insurance.
There are three main reasons why:
Should this be your goal?
What you have a heavily insurance dependent practice now?
What needs to be in place for you to have a all cash practice?
Let's take a look at 3 steps to building or growing a cash practice.
The first step is knowing why it's important to you to build an all-cash practice. If your why is that insurance practices are a bigger hassle that may not be enough to be successful in an all-cash practice. If instead, you believe that your service is so valuable that people should want to pay out of pocket for it then you are moving in the right direction.
Your passion must be off the charts in order to have a successful cash practice. Many million-dollar practices are cash practices. In fact, according to a recent survey, 92% of the top practices are predominately cash practices.
But your why needs to be more than just that you think you can make more money in a cash model.
Having a clear mission, vision, and core values that connect to this type of practice model is crucial.
A mission is why you get up every day. It's your purpose. It's why you have a practice. You want to create one-sentence that your team can rally behind. You want to make sure that it’s something that you are all very passionate about and focuses on a bigger purpose.
Our mission at Hope and Healing Solutions for instance is:
“To Bring Hope and Healing to Sick and Suffering People for the Glory of God"
Again focus on a statement that is a crusade for your practice. A rallying cry that you can all get behind and say “yes I do that every day”.
At Hope and Healing Solutions we love seeing people get well. So this is a perfect mission for us. Over the past eight years, we’ve helped over 50,000 new patients find their way to chiropractors throughout the world.
So make sure your mission fires you up personally and fires your team up.
Now that you know your mission another part of clarifying your why for your practice is to establish your vision.
Here is some questions to ask yourself:
A good way to breakdown your vision is into 3 basic sections:
Core values are essentially what your practice is all about. This collection of characteristics outline what it means to be a team member of your practice.
The best way for you to determine what your core values should be for your practice is to first determine what is most important to you.
Determining 5 or 6 life goals will help you in laying out your core values for your company.
It is also good to get input from your team especially if they have been with you for a while about what is most important to them.
Once you have accumulated core values of you personally and your team you can then begin to translate those into core values that can be permeated throughout your culture of your practice.
Make sure that you are not overdoing it with values. Shoot for 3 to 5 core values (maximum of 10).
Once you have established your mission, vision, and values that are consistent with why you want to have a cash practice then you can move to the next step.
In order to be successful with an all-cash practice model, you have to be able to clearly articulate why you have a cash practice to your team, patients, and community. This is why it's so important to really know your why and have it clearly clarified in your mission, vision, and values.
Patients will ask if you take insurance. They will ask why you don't take insurance. You have to know how to answer these questions. But if you can communicate your why passionately you can easily help people understand why your practice doesn't take insurance. And how it's so important to their health that you don't take insurance so you can give them the highest quality care available.
Once you know your why and can communicate it effectively then you want to build systems that support your why. This can include payment plan systems, patient education systems, progress exam systems, and more.
A crucial aspect of a cash practice is the use of care plans. Patients want to know what they can expect from their care with you. A plan of care is essential if you want to build a successful chiropractic practice today. When you look at the top 20% of chiropractic practices 93% of doctors use care plans. It's time to stop going visit by visit Doc. It's not good for your patients and it's not good for your business.
Another crucial aspect of cash practice is having a consistent flow of new patients coming into your practice from a variety of different sources. This is where a marketing plan is absolutely essential. If you would like to talk with us about your practice and how you can build a marketing system that utilizes internal, external, and digital strategies to consistently generate dozens of high-quality new patients every month then contact us today.
