Stop Wasting Training: The Exact System to Implement Fast and Grow Your Practice

 Welcome to the Chiropractic Deep Dive. This is our segment inside the Successful Chiro Podcast where we, uh, really focus on turning chaos into organized, profitable systems for your practice. Exactly. And you’re not just here for a summary, you’re here for a blueprint. Mm-hmm. And that’s what we’re laying out today.

Taken straight from a really powerful zoom call about implementation. And this deep dive is, I think, so important because it tackles the single biggest frustration for every DC and CA out there who invests in training. It really does. And before we jump in a quick word, this deep dive is brought to you by Five Star Management, a chiropractic consulting company.

We’re all about helping your practice. Stop chasing ideas and actually start building systems. Systems that help you see more patients have more fun and you know, achieve that financial success you’re working for. So today our focus is all about pulling the gold from those notes you took at say, Win-Win or New Patient Edge.

Mm-hmm. And the source material for this is a fantastic masterclass led by Dr. Noel Lloyd. He just zeroed in on the gap between, you know, inspiration and real implementation. Right, and that gap is where everyone gets stuck. You know the feel, it’s the fire hose effect. You leave a seminar totally buzzing.

You have pages of notes, oh yeah, you’re on fire. But you get back to the office on Monday and that momentum just fizzles. You’ve got 40 great ideas and absolutely no idea where to even start. It’s just paralysis. It’s a super common cycle. You have this huge excitement, tons of notes, and then what? Five days later.

That energy is completely gone. Dr. Lloyd was so clear on this. What did he say? He said, if you fail to turn those notes into action, all you really get is a warm, fuzzy feeling for about 12 hours, and that is a very, very expensive feeling. It is. I wanna stick with this analogy for a second about the cost of doing nothing.

Because it really hits home. He did not mince words at all. Yeah. He basically said, not implementing is like driving down the street with all your money in the back of the truck and you’re just blowing your money out. It’s not just the seminar fee you lose, it’s the uh, the massive opportunity cost.

The new patients you could have seen the retention, you could have systemized. It all just slips away. Okay. So the goal is to stop that bleeding, to turn the best ideas into actual standard operating procedures or SOPs that grow the practice. Mm. What was the framework Dr. Lloyd gave for that? He laid out a really simple five point structure.

It forces you to get clear right from the start. For every single idea you have to answer. Five questions are. Okay. First name it. Give it a clear title. Don’t call it that patient thing. Call it, you know, Pie Day. Right? The referrals workshop something concrete. Exactly. Two is why are we doing it? What’s the point?

Yeah. Three, what are we doing like the actual task. Four, how are we gonna do it? The step by step. The step by step. And number five, and this one’s key, what would happen if we do it well? That’s your success metric. That’s the motivation. Let’s use that example. You mentioned Pie Day because it’s. Pretty famous in these circles.

Mm-hmm. But not everyone gets what it is. It’s a brilliant, simple, systemized, patient appreciation day. You run it around March 14th, you have actual pie, and you use the event to generate a huge number of referrals and reactivations. So it’s an idea that when it becomes a system can bring in hundreds of patients over time.

Easily. That makes a lot of sense. But here’s what I found surprising about the framework. Dr. Lloyd starts by collecting mistakes first, not successes. Why would you start with what went wrong? It’s a really smart move for the team. Participants said it did two things. First. It’s comforting. You realize, okay, I’m not the only one struggling with this.

You’re not an outlier. And the second reason is more of an organizational advantage, isn’t it? It’s a huge advantage. It’s about leveraging the whole group’s wisdom. Your practice’s weakness might be another practice’s biggest strength. So you can get immediate help immediately. You’re basically crowdsourcing solutions.

It’s shortcuts the learning curve like nothing else. Okay, so we’ve got the cost of inaction. And the framework for clarity now. Yeah. How do we physically get from scribble notes to refined gold? Cool. We heard from one participant who had this, uh, really meticulous manual process, right? That was a great share.

His process starts the minute he gets back that first Monday. Step one. Yeah. Type out all the notes. Every single point, but here’s the kicker. What’s that? You have to include your tangent thoughts, what makes those little side notes so important? Well, the speaker at the seminar is giving you the ideal advice, right?

The tangent is where your brain connects that advice to a specific problem in your practice. Ah, I see. So maybe the speaker talks about scheduling and your tangent is, oh man, our front desk is still handwriting referrals, and we lose half of them. That tangent is your most urgent action item. That’s the real goal.

Ah, so once it’s all typed out, then what? Then you review it and you highlight only the specific obvious action steps. After that comes the hard part. Prioritization. He sorts them into buckets. Easy wins. First things you can do today, like calling a school about an ad. Second things you can delegate. Third, the longer term stuff, the procedural changes that might take a month or two to really build out.

And he sets a deadline for himself, right? He does the deadline for implementation is the date of the next seminar. That pressure keeps the ideas from just, you know, dying on a to-do list. That manual process is so solid for getting grounded. But I mean, we live in a world with so much tech now. How are people using modern tools for this?

Yeah. That’s where the conversation turned to AI and specifically chat GPT . We heard some really cool applications. One participant completely streamlined her SOP creation. How did she do it? She literally just dumps her messy raw seminar notes straight into chat. GPT really just copies and pastes. Yep.

And the prompt is simple. Something like analyze these notes and create an SOP for my cas on how to run a successful pie day event. Wow, that takes hours of admin work and just shrinks it down to minutes. But what if the output is, you know, too robotic or dry? She just refines it. She’ll give it another prompt.

Okay, now make this into bullet points. Use a humorous tone and add a setup checklist. That instant iteration is where the real time saving is, and another participant shared a different use for ai. Right. Not just for documentation, but for, uh, for training. Yes. For objection handling. Instead of just practicing the five objections everyone already knows, she has chat

GPT generate new surprising scenarios. So it keeps the team on their toes. Exactly. It forces everyone, even the trainer, to think critically. It makes the training much closer to the real world. That’s a great way to use technology to build resilience. Now, before any of these SOPs get rolled out, Dr. Lloyd talked with another participant about the need for, uh, executive distillation.

Yes, this part is critical for getting anything done successfully. While he is traveling home, he ruthlessly distills his pages of notes down to just the few best ideas, maybe three or four max. Okay, but hold on. If he only brings back the few ideas he likes, doesn’t that risk making the staff who came up with other ideas feel

I don’t know, ignored. How do you manage that? That’s a great question, and it’s about the nuance of leadership. He doesn’t ignore them. He takes those few ideas to his leadership team first. Ah, so it’s a smaller group, right? They fine tune the ideas, they iron out the glitches, and they get buy-in at the top.

This way when it’s rolled out to the whole team, it’s a solid supported plan, not just another idea from the doctor. So you’re not dismissing staff ideas, you’re just using the executive team to pick the order of battle. Essentially. Exactly. And as he pointed out, if your leadership team isn’t genuinely on board, the rollout will always feel like an uphill battle.

This step ensures everyone’s pulling in the same direction, which brings us perfectly into systemic training and real team ownership. You need more than just a list of ideas. For that, you need a tool, and that tool is the project sheet. These are not just notes, they’re actual management documents. I mean, the really successful multi-site practices, we’re talking 10 clinics, 70 associates.

They live and die by these things. So what’s on a project sheet that makes it so different from just a page of notes? It has to have a name. A due date, A rollout expectations, specific action steps, and this is the most important part, an assigned owner. Somebody owns the sheet. Somebody owns the sheet, whether it’s a CA or a co-pilot, someone is responsible.

Without ownership, there is zero accountability, and these sheets are useless unless you have dedicated time to work on them. That’s where that protected training time comes in, right? It can’t just be squeezed in between patients. Training has to be a protected workshop space. On the calendar for one practice, it’s every Thursday at lunchtime.

It’s non-negotiable. And what does that training look like? Is it just random topics? No, it’s a structured curriculum. They have 12 recurring topics that cycle through the entire patient journey. You know, day one procedures, report of findings, the COA, even graduation day. And it’s not just a doctor lecturing, right?

Not at all. It’s preparation based. Team members might have homework or have to give a presentation, and the best part is the delegation. How does it work? Leadership makes sure the training happens, but they delegate the teaching. If a CA just mastered the new financial program. Guess what? She trains the rest of the team on it.

That builds so much confidence and ownership. It’s the ultimate transfer of expertise. It reinforces their own learning and takes the burden off the doctor. But even with all that structure, it falls apart if the team isn’t bought into the mission. Dr. Lloyd, had some great advice on that. Yeah, he said it starts with the prerequisites.

You have to have your mission, vision, and goals written down and visible, but the real magic is linking every single task back to the emotional why. Gimme an example of that. So you don’t just ask a ca to spend an hour on filing. You frame it as helping ensure the best outcome for, say, Chad and Carol’s daughter Petra, who is eight weeks old.

You connect the task on the project sheet to a patient’s story. That’s the fuel. That’s the fuel. That’s what makes the work meaningful. So how can you tell if you’ve actually succeeded? How do you know the team is truly bought in? Dr. Lloyd had a great visual for this. He said, you know, you’ve won when you feel their hot breath on your neck, because they’re so eager to move forward, not when you’re dragging them along, kicking and screaming.

That’s a powerful image. That internal urgency is the sign of true alignment. Okay, let’s wrap this up with the final critical piece. The post seminar debrief. Another participant shared a fantastic structure for this. Yeah, his process is all about fighting that fire hose effect. From the very start. He asks his staff to come to the debrief meeting with only their top two favorite ideas.

That’s it, just two that immediately forces focus What happens next? First, they have to explain why they love the idea, connecting it to the mission. Second, they have to propose five specific action steps to implement it, and third, they have to identify what resources they’ll need. Money, help, whatever.

And that ties right back to the project sheet ownership, doesn’t it? It does perfectly. The staff member who brought the idea is immediately put in charge of those action steps. They own the sheet. The person with a passion is driving the project. Okay. But a potential problem. If you delegate a whole project sheet to a ca, how do you avoid burnout or you know, a drop in quality control if they’re already busy.

That’s why that protected Thursday workshop time is so crucial. The quality control happens systematically during that training block. With leadership support, it’s not the doctor micromanaging them during patient hours. The system itself maintains the standard. That makes so much sense. And there’s an emotional value to this whole process, right?

Absolutely. Another participant pointed out that when the doctor actually takes the time to listen and structure the implementation, this way, the team feels more involved and they feel like their opinions matter, so then they wanna do it. That buy-in is everything. It’s the whole game. So to synthesize this for you, the listener,

to move from that paralysis of notes to real action, it’s about a few key things you have to prioritize. Ruthlessly use tools like project sheets that assign ownership and, uh, protect that calendar space for systematic team led training. And when you do that consistently, the capacity you unlock is just enormous.

Think about an idea like Pie Day. It started as one takeaway, but it became a perfected SOP. We heard one story of a practice managing over 600 patients in just two days with almost no hiccups. 600 patients, all because the team was trained, they were bought in and they were running perfected systems.

That’s the power of this. So the question for you is. What single idea from your last seminar are you going to name, fund and give ownership to this week? That is the question that drives real growth. And for help implementing these strategies in your own practice, you know, to move from that idea chaos to a structured system, we really encourage you to book a free call with Dr.

George Birnbach. You can find the booking link right in the show notes. And if you want more of these deep dives, more actionable strategies to make your practice truly successful, make sure you subscribe to the Successful Chiro Podcast wherever you listen. We’ll be back soon.