The 4 Best Books for Chiropractic Business Owners

Key Points:

• Building a successful chiropractic practice means you must hire a great team around you — you can’t do it all yourself, even if you want to.
• Change your mindset from, “How can I get it all done?” to “Who can I hire to do this?”
• Make your practice a great place to work for your employees and you’ll retain great people for a long time.
• To be a successful practice owner, you must have an inherent, unshakeable drive to succeed. 

 As a chiropractic practice owner, you have a lot on your plate. Running a business is often overwhelming, and quite frankly, exhausting. 

But there’s good news — you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of smart minds out there who have thought of the essential strategies to improve and scale your business, whether you’ve just begun or you have a few years in business behind you. Today, I’m sharing the four best books for chiropractic business owners to grow and scale a successful practice.

Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan

Dan Sullivan is a business coach and entrepreneurship expert who wrote this book to challenge a mindset common to all business owners: the idea that you have to do everything yourself (and that you’re the only one who does it well enough). 

Here’s the simple truth: you’re probably right. Whatever the “thing” is — marketing, collections, scheduling — you probably can do it better than someone else. But as the business owner and practicing chiropractor, it’s not worth your time to do all of the tasks that keep your business running every day. And at some point, you’ll burn out if you try to keep doing it all yourself. 

You must change your mindset from thinking, “How am I going to get this all done?” to “Who can I hire to do this?”

You have to prioritize the tasks only you can do during your work hours. So for example, only you (and your associate chiropractors, if you have them) can adjust patients. Only you can create the vision for where your business is going in the next 5 years. Only you can serve as the leader of your team and set the tone for everyone else around you. Those are your big responsibilities as a chiropractic practice owner. 

Everything else can and should be delegated to a responsible team member. Even if they can only do the task 80% as well as you could, it’ll still get done, and your business will move forward. 

Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell

Next up we have Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time. This book takes the foundation of Who Not How and digs deeper into the specific hires you need to grow your business. 

Here are the essential people you need: 

1. An executive assistant to help you (the owner) with daily, weekly, and monthly business tasks, and some personal tasks as well
2. Someone involved in the delivery of your product, so in our case, an associate chiropractor (or multiple)
3. A marketing manager, someone who’s helping you get the word out about your business and finding the right customers
4. Someone to help with sales. For our clinic, this means an intake person to answer calls and handle scheduling and payments over the phone, so that our front desk staff is free to address patients in the clinic.

 Another important point: once you start getting these hires in place, you must have an organizational structure. Know how everyone feeds into the function of the overall team, who reports to who, and how you oversee everyone as the CEO of your practice. 

Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention by Joey Coleman

By far, the hardest part of being a chiropractic business owner is staff management. There’s two key parts to this: finding great talent, and keeping great talent. 

This is what Joey Coleman talks about in Never Lose an Employee Again. If you can find good employees and they buy in to your practice and what you stand for as a chiropractor, they’re a lot easier to keep for the long term. 

Here’s the short version: you have 100 days as an employer to get your new employee to buy in to the business. As soon as you hire your new employee, you have to think about how to make the experience special for them. You may want them to jump into work right away and start giving 110%, but from their perspective, that’s going to be very overwhelming. 

So make their first day special. Have the whole staff welcome them and treat them well. Give them company swag. Celebrate them. The hiring paperwork can wait until day two. 

From there on out, you need to keep reengaging your employees to participate in the company culture. For chiro practice employees, it’s absolutely essential that they and their families receive free care as part of their employee benefits.  

Make sure you’re celebrating holidays and hosting fun events with your team. As a chiropractic office, you can have a great mission to support people’s health, but that alone isn’t going to keep your employees engaged and happy. You have to create a community among your staff. It takes work, but you won’t have to work nearly as hard to find new hires or have to constantly replace your staff. 

You Can’t Teach Hungry by John Morgan

I’ve saved the best for last: You Can’t Teach Hungry by John Morgan. This book changed my life and my business for the better. John Morgan is an attorney and has scaled the biggest law firm in the United States with branches in multiple states. In the chiro world, not many practices have scaled like this, but we can learn a lot from other service based industries, including law firms. 

John’s thesis is that in order to grow a successful practice, you have to figure out if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. His criteria is as follows: you don’t need an alarm clock, you bring work home, and you work on Saturdays. Essentially, you need to have a passion for building your business that supercedes just about everything else in your life. From my experience, this is absolutely true. 

And if you don’t have that passion, that’s okay! You can still be a successful chiropractor and make a good living. But it’s the passion (and strategy after that) that turns chiropractors into successful business owners. Here are the four main characteristics for a successful practice owner: 

1. A healthy fear of failure: Business owners are actually quite risk averse. You need that fear to make careful decisions and move your business forward at a slow and steady pace
2. An obsession-based work ethic: You have to be obsessed with your business. Eat, breathe, and sleep it, full stop.
3. Professional competence: Of course, you have to be good at what you do (and so do your associate chiros). 
4. A plan to survive: Finally, you need to know where you’re going and how you’ll get there, or you’re going nowhere fast. Don’t waste all of that passion by not having strategy to back it up!  

If there’s one book I recommend above all in this list, it’s this one. Read it, reread it, keep it on your nightstand. I promise you’ll go back to it again and again. 

Add These Books to Your Reading List 

These four books have been serious gamechangers in growing and scaling my business (not to mention making my life way easier!). 

I’ll end by saying this: if you want to be a successful business owner, you cannot do it all yourself. You must accept help from others. You have to build a solid team of people around you that can support you in the areas that aren’t your specialty. You don’t need to learn every task, every skill that makes a business thrive. You just need to find the right people that can support you and make up the areas where you lack.  

Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t feel guilty about needing help on the personal or professional side of things. You worked too hard to get where you are to lose it all because you don’t have enough hours in the day to do it all yourself.

And if you want the guidance of someone who’s done it all before, I’m here for you! Let’s see how we can create a roadmap that grows your business in a sustainable way for you.  

Want to get started? Here are two ways you can work with me:

• Six or twelve-month one-on-one coaching packages: If you’re a chiropractor looking to grow your business and aiming to reach seven-figure revenues or more, then consider applying for private one-on-one coaching with me.
• Owning a Chiropractic Practice online course: Not quite ready for one-on-one support? Learn all about the business side of running and owning a chiropractic practice in my online course.