Before we get started, you need to understand that effective spinal screenings are just one of over 100 new patient acquisition tools and procedures that AMC has available.

When someone joins AMC, they do not have to take a blood oath to do spinal screenings or they are banned from the tribe. No, we coaches always encourage and guide in proven directions, but the final decision is yours.

Usually, when I first tell one of my doctors that they may want to seek out some screening opportunities in their area, they start getting nervous. I can understand that. Many of them have tried screenings in the past with less than favorable results. After a few bad experiences, it is a lot easier to say “I believe it is demeaning and beneath my professionalism to do something like a spinal screening.” Have you ever said that to yourself or to someone else?

What I have found, is that once my doctors learn how to do a screening the way AMC recommends, it is a different story. When screening participants actually sign up, come in the office, become new patients, and have their lives changed because of chiropractic, it then becomes unprofessional NOT to use a tool with so much potential.

I will tell a story from one of my Family Members which illustrates this point. Dr. S had signed up to do a screening 30 minutes from his office to a group of teachers (good starting point.) He was excited about the event, because I had recommended a new way for him to use his EMG with the regular AMC screening protocol. He had owned an EMG for several years, but it had spent the last 18 months in a closet.

The day before the event, he went to fire it up and discovered that it was not working. Instead of bailing out, he decided to go anyway. Wouldn’t you know it – when he got there he saw 4 other chiropractors – and they ALL had (working) EMGs!

So what could he do? What did he do? Well, he simply proceeded to use the standard AMC screening protocols and came home with 30 appointments! What else could AMC help you with in your practice? Stay tuned.

We need a steady supply of good new patients to maintain and grow our practices. The things is, that practicing up here in the NE (Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont & New Hampshire) is a different game that requires a different game plan, compared to practicing in the south, the central US or the west.

I know of what I speak, because as NorthEast Director of AMC, I have not only observed what works up here, but in the last nine years, I have personally coached over 200 practices, from Florida to Hawaii, and from Wisconsin to Texas. At last count, I believe I have had AMC Family members as coaching clients from all but 1 or 2 states.

What does it take up here to get new patients? As many of you have found, the conventional market approaches never did work that well in the past, and are quickly not working at all. Back in the good old days, you could put an ad in the newspaper and depend on getting more than a few calls. Not any more.

I will sum up what I and AMC have identified as crucial to attracting new patients up here. First, you need to get out of your office and meet the public. And no, I am NOT talking about going around handing out your cards and telling people to come see you.

The key up north is to develop a “one on one” personalized connection with your prospects, in a very scientific and effective way.

AMC has developed very up to date ways of accomplishing that, which includes outside talks, screenings, websites and blogs. You may have already tried some or all of these, or seen your colleagues doing them, but there is a very specific way to go about them in order to make them effective in getting new patients into your office. My follow up articles will get into more detail on each of these.

It seems as though it will never stop. Of course it always does. The first year I moved here was the winter of 1977. We were living in a small apartment with 3 small, but growing children. Using AMC practice management principles from Dr. Owen, I had gotten off to a great start, even though the practice had been set up just a few months ago.

We were seeing 70-80 patient visits a week by that time. Then the snows started in January. Have you ever noticed how snow storms, the really bad ones, seem to come in weekly “waves”? That is exactly how it happened that year. Just when the practice was up and running smoothly – WHAM!

It would have been easy to get very negative at that time, and I did for a while. The feeling was that God, or the elements, or someone, had it in for me and wanted to make sure my practice and my family suffered. Then I remembered something that Dr. Owen had taught me. He said that, in life, there is a universal principle of balance. When it is raining (or snowing,) in one part of the country, it is sunny in another. In general, things always seem to achieve a balance and equilibrium.

Yes, the snow did hurt my practice…temporarily. If I had gotten negative, and stayed that way, I could have made the situation even worse. I got to thinking about what Dr. Owen had said, and I figured out how that principle could apply to my practice in a positive way, and how it can apply to your practice too.

With an attitude of balance, I realized that the number of office visits I lost due to the snow could be replaced by extra visits which were a direct result of the bad weather. My patients, and potential patients, were out straining their backs removing snow. They were slipping, falling, and getting into car accidents. Without the snow, not nearly as much of this boost to my chiropractic practice would be happening. Armed with the tools I have learned from AMC, these seemingly negative events in my practice were transformed into strong positives.

This is just one example of literally thousands of attitude and success principles I have learned from Dr. Owen and AMC. Stay tuned for more.

As a result of that one question, I went to Logan college in St. Louis in the fall of 1964. By going straight through winter and summer, I was able to graduate in 3 years. I had finished 3rd in my class. The 2 ahead of me had 4 year undergrad degrees. I had come straight out of high school, so I was just barely old enough to get a license at age 21. I had even gotten an A+ in the one management class that was given in my senior year.

My wife, who was 5 months pregnant when I graduated, and I immediately moved to Florida to open our first office. The old joke told is that, in that first office, my entire practice totaled just ½ of one new patient. That is a new patient who never comes back for their report.

Now what do I do… pregnant wife, no practice and lots of bills. In addition I did not have the foggiest idea how to turn things around.

I wasn’t a very religious person then, but obviously the good Lord was looking out for me, because I heard about an upperclassman from Logan who had sought the help of a chiropractor from Jacksonville after he got out of school. He was making $4600 a month with this man’s help! I know that may not sound like a lot, but you need to understand that gas was 25 cents a gallon and groceries were only $8-$10 a week for both my wife and me.

The doctor from Jacksonville was named Tom Owen. I first met him in 1968 and I can honestly say that Dr. Tom has had a greater and more positive impact on my life than anyone I have ever known before, or since. He helped me to start my first successful practice in Lancaster Ohio in 1969. With his help, and the success principles that he taught me 40 years ago, I was able to develop close to a million dollar a year practice during my active practice years. I am retired now. However, the main purpose of this blog will be to share what I have learned in my forty years of practice, and to open up some discussions which will hopefully make your practice full of golden years, as mine was.

I had always had an innate interest in “natural” things like diet and exercise. The problem I had as a high school junior is that I did not have a clue what I wanted to do for a career, which made it very hard to decide which college to attend.

In those days, you could wait until you graduated. Today, with the so-called “helicopter parents”, panic starts to set in if little Johnny or Suzy’s parents can’t get them in to the right preschool as the first stepping stone toward admission into Harvard or Yale. Actually, one of my sons is a double graduate of Harvard Dental School, which was a complete surprise to his mother and me! In another article, I will prove my earlier statement that with the right attitude and tools, you can accomplish anything in Chiropractic, and your life. I will describe to you how my son might have never amounted to much without that attitude and tools.

Back to my chiropractic story…I will offer a small apology for all this painful detail; however, I do have a definite purpose. I want to prove that your practice success is attainable – even in the northeast United States – with proper guidance. I will share this with you, once the foundation of my failures and successes has been established.

OK, diet exercise and things natural.

One day, I noticed an ad in the paper for a new gym opening in our little town, so I was one of the first to get a membership. I had been religiously using a new form of muscle building called “isometrics” which is simply muscle exertion without motion. The manager of this gym was a guy who had just graduated from chiropractic college and was running the gym until he could take his boards, which he never took.

I proudly announced to him how great I thought the isometrics were that I had been using. He wasted no time in proving to me that I had not accomplished much with that approach.

We got to be best of friends. One day he asked what I was going to do with my life career wise, and I answered that I was not really sure – and that was far from the whole truth. I didn’t have the foggiest notion what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The next question he asked changed my life forever.

We will get to that in the next article. Stay tuned to learn how powerful the question principle can be.

There are some in the profession and the political arena that would have us believe that life as we knew it will never be the same. If you accept those pronouncements and beliefs then it will most definitely be true for you.

I have been around long enough to know that if you have the right attitude, and the right tools, any negative situation can be turned around. When I say that I have been in the profession for awhile, perhaps I should clarify that just a bit. You might learn something from someone, like me, who has been an active participant in our beloved profession for over 40 years.

I was 17 years old before I ever heard the word “Chiropractic” – can you imagine that? No, I was not raised in a cave by wolves. I am originally from the great state of Tennessee and back at the time that I was in high school, back in the sixties, there were probably less than 50 Chiropractors in the entire state. I met my first DC in a slightly unusual way.

My “field doctor,” which is what we used to call the person who referred us to chiropractic, or the particular college we attended, was not in practice at the time. In fact, strange as it may sound, he never did take a board, become licensed or, open an office.

He was one of 3 brothers who all attended Chiropractic college on the GI Bill which was a kind of precursor to today’s loans with one small exception – you didn’t have pay them back. All you needed to do was serve in the military. These brothers served in Korea in the 50s.

If you would like to know the circumstance under which we met, and how I went from no understanding of chiropractic to ending up at Chiropractic College… check the next installment!