Being a chiropractor means you are a medical professional. However, you also run a small business owning your chiropractic practice. Even though you are a healthcare specialist knowing the industry you work in, you may lack some skills that a CEO should have to run a successful business. And this may put you in a vulnerable position thanks to the high failure rate among businesses.
As stated by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), 67.6% of small businesses survived at least two years between 1994 and 2019. This five-year survival rate dropped to 25.7% after fifteen years. To put it simply, almost half of the small businesses will have failed after five years, regardless of their industry.
But you work in the medical sphere, which adds more complexity to the process. Regulations, digitalisation in healthcare, and people worrying about healthcare are only a few things that may make your business fail. However, you are not the only business in that space; some have already experienced those issues and were able to survive and grow.
This guide will show you 5 most common reasons for your business to fail based on world changes and how to prevent this failure with some tips.
Lack of Patient Awareness
If you want to achieve a successful chiropractic practice, you need to grow awareness about your industry and yourself as a doctor. Growing awareness can be done by promoting your services. This is essential for any business, but your industry needs more promotion than most. Start with developing a website and providing valuable content. Use SEO for chiropractors to make your business visible to Google users and rank higher in search results.
In fact, statistics show that 97% of your potential clients use local online searches and learn more about local companies online than anywhere else, while 88% of people book an appointment within 24 hours of finding it using Google search.
To grow patient awareness about your practice, you can also create social media accounts to expand your local audience. Share useful tips, film content and show the results of your clients. Take the time and invest in developing relationships to get more referrals from MDs to increase your revenue.
Lack of Delegation
Businesses will only be successful when different people take on different roles. As we mentioned, you are a doctor. Although you may have knowledge in marketing, coding or other skills, you should be responsible for performing sessions with clients. Delegating other tasks to your team can help you distribute task completion to trained people who know their work and what to do.
If you don’t have a team, don’t know how to delegate tasks or haven’t hired people with needed skills, you may struggle to handle the workload on your own. Trying to provide patient care combined with scheduling, running a marketing campaign, billing, and taking care of all regulations to be met is likely to lead to burnout and poor quality services you offer.
To avoid business failure, invest in hiring at least one or two people who can manage vital tasks while you help people feel better. You may hire either an SEO agency, a marketer specialising in your industry, a chiropractic assistant and a chiropractic biller to help you get your practice off the ground.
Not Maintaining a Business Plan
Like with any business, having and following a business plan is part of the key to success. A well-thought-out business plan can help you identify all areas of your practice and set the goal you need to achieve. This will not only help you achieve market success but also reduce unwanted stress and waste.
It is best to write a business plan before you open an office or start a marketing campaign. A business plan can be written only after market research, where you identify your competitors, outline areas for improvements and investment and find market issues that your practice can cover.
Lack of a business plan or lack of details in it will cause many issues. You won’t know how to run your practice, what goals you want to achieve, how to achieve them and how to measure results from marketing as well. This also usually leads to unwanted spending.
Lack of Organisation
A poor business organisation always leads to serious business problems. A lack of organisation leads to poor communication between you and your employees, causing a bad impression on patients who receive poor service due to long waiting times in line, late billing, or even poor-quality chiropractic care. Not having an organised business can also lead to a loss of revenue caused by low patient-retention rates and missed or cancelled appointments.
If you want to prevent this mistake before it causes problems, implement organised, consistent and trackable processes for your chiropractic practice. In addition, you can always use software to help ease the process for you and your staff. Using apps and web services grant access to online scheduling, allowing patients to quickly book an appointment or reschedule it. Modern practice management software is an excellent choice for your business.
Not Billing Correctly
If your business takes many patients yet you don’t get needed revenue, search for an issue in your software and billing system. The proper chiropractic practice management and billing software can resolve most issues related to payment failure.
Living in this highly digital world, you don’t need to hire people to enter data manually since it can cause mistakes. Payments and invoices should be posted and submitted automatically, and they can be placed on the blockchain for higher efficiency and safety of the data. In addition, if a patient’s insurance has expired, the software will tell you in advance.
