Why the Old Associate Chiropractor Model Fails (And the Win Win Associate System Replaces It)

 Welcome to the Chiropractic Deep Dive. We are so glad you’re here. This Deep Dive is part of the Successful Chiro podcast series, and it’s proudly brought to you by Five Star Management. That’s right. We’re a chiropractic consulting company and we’re dedicated to helping practice owners just like you really scale and thrive.

Today we’re tackling, uh, probably one of the biggest, most frustrating problems in our entire field, the Associate Chiropractor launch. It’s a huge one. It is. We’ve been digging into the insights from a really intensive zoom call that was led by Dr. Noel Lloyd, and on this call you had successful practice owners just laying it all out, all the failures of the old associate model, and more importantly, a real structural plan to fix it.

So our mission today. Is to walk you through that material. The goal is for you to stop losing good people and actually put a plan in place for what they called instant profit and sprinting to bonus. And the best place to start is, you know, just defining the problem, right? There’s that idea. Kidlin’s Law, if you write a problem down.

Clearly, and specifically, you’ve already solved half of it, so we need that clarity. Absolutely. Ambiguity is just the enemy of success, and the problem as Dr. Lloyd and all the participants defined it is that the old associate model is just. Well, it’s fundamentally broken. Broken, how? It lacks structure, it lacks accountability, and there’s no real mutual financial benefit.

Yeah, I mean, we’ve all heard the old pitch, right? It’s something like, come and work for me. Here’s your paycheck. These are my goals Now. Uh, get at it and that creates this really destructive environment. We heard story after story where associates are, and I’m quoting here, treated like dogs. Yeah. They get the scraps, the worst hours, the least desirable patients.

They never grow, they never bonus. And the owner is just constantly frustrated. It’s dead end deal. Nobody wins. And the culture around that can get so toxic. There was one anecdote, one story shared by a participant that was. It was genuinely shocking. Oh, the garage story? Yes. He said early in his career because clinic volume was slow.

His clinic director yeah? Made him do personal labor. He had to paint the director’s garage in over a hundred degree heat uhhuh. I mean, can you imagine your choices either do free manual labor or get fired and the worst part of it all, he painted the whole garage. The entire thing shows up for his shift the next day and he still got fired.

Mm-hmm. If that doesn’t just perfectly illustrate the problem, that complete lack of any vested interest in the associate success, I don’t know what does. It’s a system built on exploitation, not replication. And when you build on that kind of shaky foundation, the symptoms are completely predictable. Low volume, which leads to low money, which leads to low morale and zero motivation.

It’s a downward spiral for the whole practice, and that’s why associate launch has become, you know, synonymous with failure for so many owners. Okay, so that’s the problem written down, if that is the symptom. The cure has to be a system built on mutual respect and just intense structural support. Exactly.

And Dr. Lloyd proposed a two-part solution, two structural goals. What was the first one? Goal number one. Is launching associates into instant profit. Instant profit. What does that mean exactly? It’s a critical training step. It means from day one, the associate has to learn to produce at least as much collected revenue as they cost the clinic.

Okay, so they have to cover their own costs, right? If they can hit that break even point, they’ve proven they have the basic skills that they need to move onto a bonus track and start winning what he calls the big money game. Let’s get into the numbers on that ’cause that’s where this really becomes real.

Let’s use, say a $6,000 a month. Base salary. Sure. And we know that varies a lot, right? Manhattan is not Joplin, Missouri, of course. But using that $6,000 base, and let’s assume the clinic collects on average $60 a visit. Mm-hmm. We can do the math pretty quick. That associate needs to generate 100 collected visits a month just to cover their cost.

So that’s about, uh, 23 and a quarter visits a week. That seems doable. Yeah. But how do you get those visits a new associate? Their patient visit average, their PVA is gonna be pretty low at the start. See, that’s the key difference in this model, because of the requirement for structured external marketing, which we’ll get into, we assume an initial PVA of five five.

Why so high? Because the patients coming from these organized outreach events are already educated on care. They’re committed. You’re not dealing with, you know, low quality cold traffic. Okay? So five PVA. What’s the hard target for that associate in their first 30 days to hit instant profit? The goal is five new patients each at that five PVA.

That gets you to 25 collected visits in the first 30 days, and that’s the measure of success. That’s it. If they hit that, the clinic is profitable on that associate, and more importantly, the associate is trained. They know how to produce. So that’s goal one. Instant profit, which leads right into goal two, a supported bonus track.

That word supported is everything. This isn’t the old way of just pointing to the door and saying, well, your new patients are out there somewhere. No supported means the owner provides the systems, the people, the marketing calendar, every resource they need to not just break even, but to immediately start what Dr.

Lloyd called the sprint to bonus. The owner becomes a collaborator, an active collaborator, not just a landlord. And the benchmark for that sprint is fantastic. It’s so clear. 100 visits in 100 days, that’s the initial target. Once they hit that, they’ve proven they can build. And from there, the financial upside is just.

It’s transformational. How so? Because the long-term goal is to sustain 100 visits a week. Right? And that can produce upwards of $25,000 a month for the clinic. So if that associate is on, say, a 25% bonus, their pay goes way beyond that $6,000 base. Okay. But a hundred visits in a hundred days. That sounds incredibly ambitious for someone who’s brand new.

Is that really realistic? It is because of the massive support and because it’s focused on external community-based marketing, not just waiting for referrals. It’s an immersive high intensity launch, and the origin story of that metric really drives the point home. It didn’t even start as an associate program.

That’s right. It was a personal goal. He was opening his second office starting from scratch. So he set that goal for himself. For himself. He was out there putting up signs, marketing to every single business, and because of that focus, he covered all his overhead and hired a CA in just two weeks.

Wow. It was pure entrepreneurial hustle. That’s the proof point, isn’t it? Yeah. You can’t ask an associate to do something you haven’t done yourself. Exactly. So he formalized that personal success into his launch template, and he told this great story about hiring a new associate. Dr. Tim. Mm-hmm. Dr. Tim stopped him and asked, what is a launch?

What do you consider a successful launch? Which is such a great question. It is. And it forced the owner to codify everything. They worked side by side on the marketing calendar. They did the events together. It was a true collaboration. And the result, Dr. Tim crushed the goal, a hundred visits in a hundred days, and six years later he’s still with the practice and that big compensation number we heard.

His best annual earnings hit the $200,000 mark. That’s the result of that sustained bonus track. It is. And that success gives the associate what one person called a million dollar education, a million dollar education. I like that they’re learning how to build a practice from scratch, but with the owner’s support and frankly the owner’s money and risk.

So even if they leave one day. They have the blueprint. Okay? So if the sprint is the goal, the preparation is the platform what Dr. Lloyd called the launch platform or the W framework, right? The essentials that have to be in place before you even think about hiring. Let’s break it down. WIN starts with W, which is scripted procedures.

You have to have documented ready to train scripts for day one, day two care plans, and especially for handling the money conversation. The owner has to be able to replicate their success through a system, not just instinct. Exactly. Now I can hear the pushback already. I don’t wanna sound like a robot. I wanna be authentic.

And the counter to that is scripts build confidence. They don’t kill authenticity, they ensure consistency when things get tough, you can’t be authentic if you’re stumbling over how to talk about money. The script is the foundation for professionalism. That’s a great point. Okay. Onto the I in WN. That’s the marketing plan and support.

And you cannot launch without a robust marketing plan that the owner is actively supporting, and who’s the most critical person for that support? The community outreach assistant, the COA, it is non-negotiable. Mm-hmm. One of the most successful guys on the call, he just said it flat out, I wouldn’t launch an associate without a COA.

And what’s their role specifically? Purely logistics. The COA sets up the events, gets the permits, books, the venues, they handle all the grunt work so the associate can just show up and focus on one thing. Getting new patients. So you’re removing the number one barrier to marketing. You’re removing the excuse, the event is set, go execute.

Okay? That leaves the end, the relationship and mentoring. This has to be intense. Not a weekly check-in. Oh no. Daily, daily check-ins, mentoring them through tough cases, clearing any and all roadblocks out of their way. This is how you keep the goals aligned, perfectly aligned. The owner wants freedom and money.

The associate wants great money and great training. This system makes those goals one and the same. Okay, let’s flip it. Let’s talk about the traps. What ruins a launch, the number one killer is just a lack of operational structure. You can’t do the 100 hundred sprint without a COA or without having events pre-scheduled.

I mean, the standard should be four external events a week minimum. We talk about standard operating procedures, SOPs all the time. Yeah. But what are the say top three things that have to be in that job book that owners forget? Well, first, if you don’t have it written down, you have no right to expect it.

Right. The three essentials are. One, a script for financial plans. Consistency there prevents so much stress. Two, the exact flow for the morning huddle. And three, the complete non-negotiable protocol for new patient intake. One owner had a great idea for this. Yeah, he gives the associate the entire

scripted binder when they sign the contract. So they show up on day one, ready to role play and execute. That sets the expectation immediately. What about the mindset issue? The associate who says, I just wanna learn how to adjust. Look, as one participant put it, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Huh, that’s good. The road to success involves discipline, memorizing scripts, doing the external marketing. That’s the tough stuff. Your adjusting skill is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Okay, here’s a huge practical one. The consensus on the call was that excessive shadowing is a major mistake. A huge hurdle.

The analogy was perfect. I’ve watched Tiger once hit the ball. They didn’t invite me to the Masters. Watching is not doing and shadowing is usually a sign that the owner doesn’t have a real plan for immersion. So what’s the solution? You throw them in the deep end of the pool right away. One owner talked about throwing a new associate right into back to back fairs, doing screenings with the team before the guy even knew where the bathroom was in the clinic.

That’s intensity. That intensity forces learning. It forces productivity. And on a final practical note. That schedule for all those events. The calendar, digital calendars don’t work for this. It has to be a massive physical wall calendar. We’re talking six feet by three and a half feet somewhere. They cannot possibly ignore it.

Why physical? Because it creates transparency and accountability. If that calendar’s empty, everyone in the clinic knows it. It keeps new patient generation right where it needs to be front and center. So wrapping this all up. What does this mean for you, the listener, the practice owner? It means launching an associate requires high support and robust systems.

You need the scripting, the COA, the marketing calendar, and a culture built on external marketing. The chiropractors who can produce new patients are the ones who win. They are, you know, you can’t have a transformational relationship with patients if they don’t know you exist. Marketing is the foundation of it all, and your associates have to master it.

So here’s the final thought we wanna leave you with. One participant said. Your comfort zone wants you dead. So if you’re plateauing right now, if you’re struggling with associates, ask yourself how much of that is just resisting the tough stuff. The discipline it takes to build these systems. That tough stuff is what works.

Mm-hmm. It’s about implementing proven templated systems that take all the guesswork out of it, and that is exactly what we do at Five Star Management. We provide those proven systems. So for anyone listening who wants to apply these strategies in their own practice and build that million dollar education for your team, we really encourage you to book a free call with Dr.

George Birnbach. The link to schedule that complimentary consultation is right there in the show notes. Please take action on this today and start building the success you know is possible. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to the Successful Chiro Podcast for more deep dives, more tips, and more actionable systems for your practice growth.

We’ll see you next time.