Creative Ways To Start Your Own Practice (Even When You Think You Can’t)! Part 2
Welcome to Part 2 of How To Start A Practice Even When You Think You Can’t. Last week, in Part 1, I shared with you my story. My story of how I started my first practice with a gift of $25,000 from a family member; and more importantly how I started my second practice in a brand new town with less than $2000. The extra crazy thing about that experience was that I was paying myself from my practice much more quickly than I did with my first practice. Also, I worked a lot fewer hours–only about 12-15 hours a week to be exact. AND, I was only seeing patients that I was excited to care for. And finally, I only utilized one thing–ONE THING–for marketing.
Now, I know what you might be thinking when you hear all of this: that’s great for you, but thats so unlikely to happen to me. How do I know that you’re thinking that? Well, because that’s what many women have told me when they’ve reached out to me sharing how desperate they felt to have more time with their kids, how burned out they’re feeling in practice, and asking for me to help them. In fact, one person accused me of lying! She said that I was just using this as a marketing ploy. No, please trust me when I tell you…. I wouldn’t be telling you this was a possibility if it truly wasn’t. My mission in life is to make healthy normal. And, I just happen to have a natural affinity for marketing. So one of the ways that I work to bring my mission to light is by growing AW and empowering more women in chiropractic to not just see more patients but to really lead by example and live healthy and happy lives themselves. So really, what good would it do for me to make all of this up???
You probably already know this, but just so we’re on the same page…. I think it’s important for us to get really clear about what the usual method of starting a practice is. And I’ll also share with you the reason that this usual method is a lot more risky than what people talk about. The usual method of starting a new practice looks like this:
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Decide where you want to practice and find a commercial real estate space.
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Secure a loan to provide start-up capital and operating expenses while the business is growing.
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Spend $50,000 to $100,000 on the build out of the office.
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Have operating expenses totaling 4, 5, 6 or even $7000 a month
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Struggle with marketing, thus struggle to bring in new patients, and thus struggle to make enough money
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The expenses outpace the revenue for months or even years.
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You pray that one day your practice will become profitable so that you can start taking home a paycheck and finally prove to your partner that starting your own practice WAS worth it and that it’s MORE than an expensive hobby.
Are you feeling me?
In addition to the long time period from startup to profitability, there’s another factor in this start-up model that no one really talks about. And that’s the risk of this type of start-up. Statistics say that roughly 95% of small businesses last 5 years or less. So we need to be really smart about the start-up model we choose for our practices. ESPECIALLY when you have a family to provide for!
Where we often go wrong in starting chiropractic practices is that we’ve not tested our business model in the marketplace. What I mean by that is that we just open a practice, design it all fancy, and hope that we figure out how to make it work. Instead, what if we started small, gained proof of concept and then grew as the business revenue allowed?
In approximately 2015, I read the book The $100 Start-Up. And in this book, the author Chris Gillebeau tells story after story of people who started businesses that grew to be very successful, but they started on $100 or less. That was mind-blowing to me! At the time that I read this book, I already owned the domain “lowcostchirostartup.com” and thought that I knew a thing or two. But thinking about how to start a practice on less than I’d ever imagined possible before was a turning point.
Having proof of concept was one of the unique things that I did when I started my second practice. It was having women in the area ask me “can you help with this?” and “can chiropractic help with that?” that really gave me the confidence to know that there was a need for my services in this new area.
As they asked more and more, I started to feel impatient. I knew it was going to be another year or longer before my home office was ready. So I just thought “well, I’ll go to them.” And I started offering house calls.
After about 3 weeks of doing house calls, and being pregnant, I knew that a house call practice wasn’t what I wanted forever. Especially in a rural area, there was a lot of non-billable time spent driving from one house to another.
For several months already at this point, I’d had my eye on a spot near our new home that appeared to be a holistic wellness center. I finally made the leap to reach out and meet with the owner, discovered that she’d been looking for a chiropractor to join her center for over a year, loved the space, and so I started the conversation of how much rent would be.
I could have two rooms for $500 a month or one for $300 a month. I knew that to get started, I wanted to keep my expenses as low as possible, so I decided to say yes to one room. And before I knew it, I was seeing 30 patient visits a week. I squeezed all of those appointments together as closely as I could because I at this time still lived an hour away from the center, and one of my kids was in school in the city. So I could only go to see patients after I dropped her off at school or after I had picked her up from school, which left me about a 3 hour window either way for appointments.
This, plus reaching out to other professionals in the area and getting to know them, and being active in moms’ groups on FB, was exactly how I started a practice on less than $2000, was profitable in less than 90 days, and did it all working less than 15 hours a week.
Just like I shared with you last week, I want you to hear this story because you need to know that if you’re feeling run down by practice, burned out from working so many long hours and weekends, and you’re tired of missing out on so much with your kids, OR you’re planning to start your family soon…. Then you have options!
Listen, I’m no special snowflake. If I can start a practice this way–a practice that allowed me both time freedom to be with my kids and financial freedom to provide for my kids–then you can do this too!
I know that it can be scary doing it all alone. But the good news is that you don’t have to. Aligned Women is an amazing option for support for you in this new adventure.
If you’re wondering, ok, what do I do next…. Head over to presentandprofitableaudio.com and get Aligned Women’s free 26-minute audio guide for more insights into how to start a practice even when you think you can’t.