Choreographing Your Initial Visits with a Signature Program will Set You Free [Ep #170]

In this episode, I’m going to describe why it is so vitally important for you to have choreography for the first couple of visits with every single patient or client, online or offline. And if you don’t, I can promise that your business will fold like a house of cards before you know it. Stay tuned. 

Hey guys! Andrea here on another episode of the profitable practice podcast. In fact, this is episode 170. And I wanted to reinforce how important it is for you to be orchestrating and choreographing your first couple of visits, whether virtual or in the office with every single new patient or client. And this was glaringly obvious to me for what happened with the last couple of new patients that I’ve seen just over the past couple of days. And the more I talk to practitioners, and I ask ‘what’s the number one struggle that you have more than not; it’s I can’t find those people to even bring them into my business. But then the other part is retention’. And then, he continued to ask ‘can everyone want to create passive income?’ But when we think about passive income, we automatically think about online courses. Something that’s evergreen, something that we build and just set it and forget it. And I can tell you right now that turning something into evergreen is way harder than running launches every once in a while. That I can promise you, especially if you wanted to completely run on autopilot. But this was something that I implemented pretty much in the first year of my practice, and I still continue to use this signature program, and I have for the past ten years. And now our team members are doing it. And I am here to tell you, that because we have systemized and because we have choreographed what our initial patient visit looks like, what our second patient visit looks like, what our third patient visit looks like, and so on. We find that creating more streams of revenue; creating passive income, creating consistent revenue and bookings is really easy. And back in the day, we were launching our ‘Create your initial patient funnel program’ which is available on our website, it’s also inherent in our maximized practitioner program. But I just want to reinforce how quick you can implement something that will become passive revenue for you. But I find that a lot of our students, and a lot of practitioners I talked to; they think about it, they run the numbers, they hem and haw on it, they wait until the sale’s page is done, they wait until the marketing is all done. Their brochures are finished before they ever even launch the program. And we have had a ton of practitioner’s purchase the 7-day detox program which you can check out on the ‘work with me and resources’ section on www.maximizedbusiness.ca. And they don’t actually even implement it and run it until a few years later. And I’m telling you guys, that the speed to what you implement is always going to determine how successful you will be. If you’re constantly catching yourself hemming and hawing, and taking months if not years to execute on something. And you’re still wondering why your business is struggling? That is probably a huge personality character trait that needs to be improved. That needs to be worked on and acknowledge, and you need to figure out how you can break through those limiting beliefs that you have. Breakthrough those blockers that you have about your ability to succeed and just start implementing. 

But coming back to the original topic of the conversation. With regards to choreographing our initial patient visit, we always have it down to the minute. So the first 5-10 minutes is the intro, the next half an hour is usually patient intake, and then the last 5 minutes are the wrap-up, and then we have our final words. So summarizing what our treatment plan is going to be, thinking about what our future plan is going to be. Getting them ready with their new patient folders and off they go. And with our branded protocol, the gap protocol, we made this 7-day detox program; something that we talk about with every single new patient. Every single one, and guess how many jump on the idea of doing that 7-day detox? I would hazard a guess that it’s higher than 60%. I could even be low-bowling that. So as I’ve mentioned over the past couple of days, even virtually I will still go through the exact same choreography, I will still go through the gap protocol sheet that we created. And the 7-day detox always comes up, and it’s a beautiful way to just get people totally bought into you. Totally bought into how fast you can make them feel better.  Everybody loves a challenge, so it’s like a 7-day challenge, it’s only a week and it’s hyper hydrating them, hyper nourishing them. And at the very end they could figure out what their food sensitivities are. 

Repeatedly, every single year we would make easily $60,000 just on the powder alone. And more often than not, people will get their husbands or partners involved, they’ll get their friends involved. We’ll even run clinic-wide 7-day detoxes, once or twice a year to get the whole clinic involved in it. And that’s exactly what happened over the past couple of days. Is every new patient who embarked on the 7-day detox program with me, their husbands said that they were going to do it too. So now, not only did I sell 1 tub of the detox powder I sold without even having to ask, without even bringing it up, without even having to sell it. And isn’t that where we all want to be is where we are promoting what we want our patients to be doing we are giving them all the options. They take us up on those options and then they get their family members involved, that is word of mouth right there. 

So the reason why this is so powerful is because whenever we create something in our company it doesn’t ever go away. We don’t put the time and effort into creating an online program and not promote it. We don’t put the time and effort into creating a system or protocol and not following it. And that is another downfall that I find a lot of practitioners do and wonder why their business is so helter-skelter. They feel like they’re keeping it together with duct tape because they’re not continuing to implement all of the work that they put into creating something. Because usually to put together a program, it takes a bit of effort. You have to mentally prepare, you have to start to get patients enrolled in it. Or if you wanted to launch a new program or a protocol, again, you have to get people to try it. For us, when we create something it’s a done deal. It is now part of every conversation and as I mentioned our visits are choreographed. It doesn’t eliminate individuality, it doesn’t eliminate our ability to treat people how we feel that they need to. It’s not a recipe, but it does give us a lot more security to know ‘okay when I see a new patient, this is how the visit’s going to go.’ When they have their follow up, this is how the visit’s going to go. This is how frequently we’re going to be having those visits. And from a patient or client perspective, when they know and can feel they are in confident hands and you’ve got them. You are taking the reins, you are taking the wheel. And that’s exactly what they want from you, they are going to become lifelong patients, guaranteed. And if you don’t believe me, I would love for you to show me an example of a successful business or practice that didn’t have perfectly organized systems and processes and standard operating procedures. Because it just doesn’t exist. 

The most successful, long-standing clinics that exist, the most successful, long-careered, life practitioners are the ones that have given up with the ‘shoot from the hip, let’s figure this out as we go.’ And they have developed some system or strategy which they implement every single day. And yes, there are some practices that don’t, and they’re successful maybe for a little while. But if you don’t have those systems and structures in place, usually as the growth happens as the scaling starts to happen the business can’t handle it. There isn’t a strong foundation there, and without systems or strategies, it folds like a house of cards. And that is why pillar 2 of the maximized practitioner’s program is so vitally important where we are building those systems, and structures, and automation. Because our mission as a business is to make sure that every health and wellness practitioner can leave the office, close the laptop, be 100% present with your family and your friends, and your children, and get time-freedom back. And you don’t get time-freedom back when you’re just constantly figuring things out on the fly, doing everything from a brand new wheel. Recreating the wheel every single shift, it just is not going to work that way. And you’re going to wonder why that patient animosity is coming on so crazy. And if you don’t know what I mean by that, definitely go listen to the episode we recorded with Alek Charfen. Where he talks all about patient animosity and really describes what the mental journey is like for practitioners. 

So when you create that choreography and implement a signature program, something like the 7-day detox, it already starts to sell for you. And I can tell you from experience, again we’ve been doing this for a decade; you can implement this literally after this podcast episode. You can implement anything instantly. When I learned about this protocol at a conference, then adopted it on my own. I literally tested it on the very next patient that walked into my office. I was gone for a week, learned about all these things. On Monday, my very first patient said ‘hey I just happened to learn about this detox protocol, is that something that you’d want to try, this is what it’s going to do and this is how it’s going to go.’ And sure, everyone loves a challenge especially when it’s short term like 7-days only. And then it just sells itself, usually around the holidays we get a bunch of orders just to pick up the powder. As I said we will do 7-day detox clinic-wide programs, we always do that with our flash sales. We’ll offer some sort of a promo with our 7-day detox. And the revenues that we make from the powder don’t even include the consultations. Because we have people book in with us just because their friend did the 7-day detox. Or as I said their partner did it now they want to do it. 

Passive income doesn’t necessarily have to be something that you create and put online. It can absolutely be something that you implement in your program. And now going virtual, we use a full script all the time, just ship out our 7-day detox protocol and then it just gets delivered right to their home and they’re good to go. No different than when they came into the office. So rethink how your systems are actually going in your practice, rethink how your strategy is going in your practice. Rethink if you have a good choreography for your patient visits or not. This is all part of running a maximized practice, in fact, a profitable practice just like the show says. And it also makes things so much easier. Because as I mentioned, there is no successful practitioner, and there is no successful clinic that doesn’t have solid systems in place. 

And that’s exactly what I want for you. So what I want you to do now is I want you to download the maximized practitioner handbook where I go into our 3 pillars of the maximized practitioner program in much greater detail. And you can click that link in the show notes or go right to our home page maximizedbusiness.ca and download it right there. And of course, if you want to talk with me personally, I invite you to book a game plan call with me. It’s 30 minutes, it’s just you and me and we can hash out where the holes are in your systems and how we can plug them up really quickly. I am Andrea Maxim, your host of this podcast and I’m out.