Chiropractic Marketing: What Richard Branson taught me about chiropractic

Chiropractic Marketing

Recently David, a friend of mine discussed a lesson that he got on a recent flight aboard Virgin Blue, Richard Branson's Australian airline. David runs a finance company in Melbourne, in an office with eight staff on his team.

As he settled into his seat on a Virgin Blue flight from Melbourne to Brisbane, David turned to his companion and commented, "Wouldn't it be funny if Richard Branson was our pilot today?"

His friend replied, "Richard Branson doesn't fly his own planes; he hires pilots for that."

As simple as that comment was, it led to David having an epiphany.  "Of course Richard Branson doesn't fly his own planes!  He hires pilots for that! He may have a pilot's license, and he may even fly better than his best pilots. But he outsources the flying to other pilots.”

On further reflection, David realised that he reason why is because by outsourcing the flying of planes, Richard Branson leverages his time. If he was working as a pilot, there's only one plane he could fly at a time. But by outsourcing, he can have hundreds of pilots flying his planes, which gives him time to focus on the more important roles of growing his business.

The same obviously goes for loading luggage and manning the help desk, as well as for similar roles in his mobile phone, broadband finance, credit card and other businesses. The more he outsources, the more he can focus on growing and expanding his empire.

So how does this relate to chiropractic?

My observation is that too many chiropractors spend time “flying the planes;” in other words, on "lower skill" or "lower return" activities. And as important as those tasks are, they take energy away from activities that would have the biggest effect on a practice’s success and fulfilment.

In many practices, the owner/manager or CA is doing a large chunk of the administrative tasks , report writing, account monitoring, banking, adjusting, follow-up…(deep breath)…spinal screening, meeting holding…and in some cases, book keeping! Where does that leave time for strategic thinking, networking or value adding?

Branson spends more of his time at the strategic and marketing/PR areas of his businesses, and leaves the “doing stuff” to his competent and passionate employees. To do that effectively, his businesses have comprehensive systems and procedures, and have hired the right staff.

How could you do the same in your practice?

So you might not have several billion dollars in your bank account; or thousands of employees to delegate to. But what can you do?
What areas of your practice would create the biggest return on your investment of time? And what would you need to do before you could delegate the “other stuff?”

In a future article we’ll discuss outsourcing in a bit more detail including some suggestions to make practice easier and more profitable. But if you think about these points for while, you’ll begin to notice the areas you should spend more time on and the areas you should consider outsourcing.

As a footnote, David returned home with renewed vigour and set about developing a functional organisation chart and a more concise procedures manual for his team. More about those in a future article also…