Don’t Do What I Did: The 3 Biggest Mistakes Chiropractors Make With Online Programs

This post is all about how you can take your hands-on practice online. No, that does not mean you’re going to be adjusting people through zoom or on FaceTime, not at all. What we’re talking about when taking your hands-on practice online is packaging the knowledge and the expertise that you have (yes! you do have, even if you don’t know that you have it!), and sharing it with people in your community.  Now these people may be people in your local community, but they could also be people who are in your global community, whether that global community exists yet or not.

Back in 2015 when I first got this idea of taking my practice online, it felt like kind of a crazy concept, but I just went with it.  Now here we are in the midst of a pandemic and the world has shifted.  It’s not just a crazy idea anymore but possibly a necessity.  I’ve talked with a lot of chiropractors lately who all have the same question of “what if this happens again?” or “what if something happens that limits my ability to see patients more than it already has?”.  The answer to both of those questions is to have something else driving revenue in your practice in case shit (or more shit) hits the fan.

So today we’re talking about the top three mistakes that chiropractors make when taking their hands on practice online. Before we dive into these top three mistakes, I want to let you know I’ve made all three of these mistakes myself, possibly more than once! So if what you hear today feels like I’m telling you you’re doing it all wrong…that’s okay. I’m not here to tell you that you should be doing things better, or that you’re not smart enough. That’s not what this is about at all.  What I want is to help you to be able to go through this endeavor and actually come out the other side making money and helping people with the thing that you’ve created instead of just creating something, getting it out there, and then hearing crickets and feeling really frustrated because nobody is buying the thing that you took all that time to create! (Trust me… that sucks. It basically feels like someone telling you your precious baby is ugly). 

These mistakes are easy to make.  So easy that despite the fact that I’ve spent seriously over $75,000 over the last four years in courses, training, education, coaching consulting for myself, I’ve had to learn these things the hard way by making the mistakes and then being able to look back and go, “Whoa… if only I had known!” If I had known, it would have saved me a lot of time and money, I would have been able to help more people more quickly and actually make this idea profitable a lot faster. So I’m passing this on to you, to save you that trouble, and to save you enrolling in expensive programs that still inevitably leave you with the same question of “how do I actually turn this into a business??” 

Ok. So are you ready? Here are the top three mistakes that chiropractors make in transitioning from hands-on to online.

Mistake Number One: You haven’t built an email list.

Building your email list has never been more important than it is right now because there’s so much censorship happening on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google.  There are even people out there like Amy Porterfield of Online Marketing Made Easy who actually teach list-building for a living, it’s that important.  There are a couple of reasons having a solid list is really important.

If you have an email list of your practice members, as well as potential new practice members, then you have a space where you are more able to share the information that you want to share with people without the censorship happening. And I know it’s easy to think that the censorship only happens to the big people with huge followings who are putting really controversial stuff out there, but lately in this new atmosphere, I have docs telling me all the time about trivial things they’ve posted getting scrapped. 

Secondly, (and probably more importantly if you don’t first build an audience of people who know, like, and trust you, who are used to hearing from you, who know what you’re about, who love what you do and who want to be on the journey with you…) you don’t have anyone to sell anything to. 

You could create a course and get it out there available for sale…but if nobody knows that you have this course available for sale, it doesn’t matter. Nobody buys it because they don’t even know it exists! So then what do you do? You have to build a platform for yourself of some kind. If you think about a structural platform, it’s something that you stand on, right? Like a stage. And in today’s era, you can build your own stage without any wood, without any hammers or nails, you can build your own stage virtually, and it doesn’t cost you any money. And it’s technically not very hard to do and not very hard to figure out. For example, you can do live videos from your personal or business page. You could build a Facebook community, or use live video on Instagram. Lots of people ask about blogs or podcasts.  You can certainly do these things if you feel like they’re really in your wheelhouse, but keep in mind that these things are off of social media, so they’re more difficult to get traffic to.

Whatever you do before you start putting together a course, before you start to film the videos for your membership program, or create the worksheets or the downloads, you’ve got to have an audience. And you’ve got to show up for that audience through your platform on a consistent basis, ideally every week, at the same day and the same time every single week.

Mistake Number Two: You don’t really know what your offer is. 

Knowing what to offer is a little bit tricky, but there is some science to this. What happens often is that you have an idea of something that you want to share, something that you want to teach that you’re really excited about. You put it out there and nobody buys it because it doesn’t feel relevant for them, and it’s really frustrating. In fact, it’s disheartening to spend all that time and energy to put together something, get it out there (and it can feel very vulnerable to do by the way), and then have no one actually buy it. 

So what’s the better way? You’ve got to slow down the process and not just think about the thing that you’re super excited to talk about, which by the way, is usually too broad, too general and no one really understands what they’re going to get out of it. You’ve got to shift to a much more focused, narrow, specific, concise topic. How you develop the concept of what that topic is, is by listening to your audience. See why building an audience is first???

If you really listen to your audience, they’ll tell you what their problems are. They’ll tell you, maybe not directly, but as your community grows you will start to hear from them the common problems and what they wish was different. That’s how I started aligned women. It wasn’t because I thought “I’m going to create a coaching program for other women in chiropractic”. My online business became that because I listened to my audience (women in chiropractic) and as I listened to what they were struggling with, it became clear that they struggled with many of the same things I had struggled with. Things like how to balance motherhood with a career and how to overcome the overwhelm of life and practice as a working mom. I had answers to their problems, so I started teaching them.

So you’ve got to slow down and make sure that your offer – your course, your book, your membership program – that it matches what people’s problems are and what they wish was different. You’ve got to do some market research first and hear from your audience or your community.

Mistake Number Three: You don’t make time to work on your course.

It’s a really delicate dance, when you are a hands-on practitioner and you give your time to one person at a time. I’m sure no one told you when you were in chiropractic school (just like no one told me) that it’s a really challenging business model. It’s pretty difficult to scale a chiropractic practice and really make the income that you need to be able to make to pay off your student loan debt without just working your life away and making yourself sick and never seeing your family. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but that’s what happens for a lot of people, and I’ve been there myself, constantly trading my time for money.

The traditional model of success for us as chiropractors is usually, “How many patients do you see?” which is really the wrong question to be asking if you’re considering quality of life. The question that you might want to ask yourself is, “How happy am I?” How healthy are you? Are you satisfied? Are you fulfilled? Are you still carrying a ton of student loan debt? Is your practice profitable? How many hours a week do you work? Those are really the signs of the health and the happiness and the freedom that the practice owner has. How many patients a week you see reflects perhaps the impact that you have, but it tells us nothing about the time freedom or the financial freedom that you have. 

So as you go into shifting your practice from hands-on only to hands-on plus online programs, courses, etc., you have to make time for working on that project. I’ve found there’s two ways to do this. 

One choice is that you’re going to slowly chip away at this new project bit by bit. That means if you know you can give two hours a week to working on creating your course and building your audience, then you give two hours a week and you get done what you can get done in those two hours. And you keep giving two hours a week to getting your course or program online until you’ve done it!

The second choice is to go fast and furious.  You could decide how many days you think it will take you to get the course content created, and then close your practice for that many days and use the hours you would normally see patients to get the content done.  That’s assuming that you’ve already started building your audience.   I know, closing your practice might seem scary, but you need to look at it as an investment into something that will give your practice leveraged income.

There’s no wrong way to get it done. The key is that you’re actually making time to do it!

So let’s recap here really quick the top three mistakes chiropractors make in trying to take their business online. One, not having a list/audience. Two, not knowing the right thing to offer. Three, not making the time to work on it and get it done.  These things sound so simple when they’re condensed like this, but trust me, it took me years of making my own mistakes and thousands of dollars of training and research to figure out these “simple” mistakes were the important ones.  

If you feel like you’ve been making one, two or all three of these mistakes, or if you never even considered taking your practice online but now you’re intrigued you’re probably wondering what to do next.  If you’re ready to work less and have more, join the wait list for my new program “Hands-On To Online”!