092 - How to Hire Ahead of Growth Without Blowing Up Your Payroll

So such a critical framework, guys, of understanding, well, how do I add people? When can I add people? How do I comfortably add people? Because what you're then able to do, and again, so often the conversation comes back to vision, is if you know where you're going, part of the next little risk in business is hiring ahead of the curve.

Hello and welcome to Build your Remarkable Practice podcast. This podcast is dedicated to chiropractors who are in the seasons of launching and building their practice. Join myself, Dr. Lona and my co host, Dr. Bobbi as we have conversations each week as it relates to building the practice of your dreams. And remember, you can have a remarkable practice as part of a remarkable life, not instead of one. We are here to lead you on the way.

Welcome back, teams, to the Build your remarkable Practice podcast with the amazing Dr. Lona Cook and myself. And we're here live today. Guys, you get the two of us together, which is exciting. We're here at our CEO summit, which has been full of learnings and excitement from driving fast cars to hanging out with a lot of high level chiropractors, which has been phenomenal. So we wanted to try and get you guys behind the scenes and talk about things that are fresh in our mind right now that high level chiropractors are learning and are really digging deep into. So today's episode. Lena, what are we going to talk about? Why don't you introduce this idea that we literally just finished, but I know we've been thinking about this for a while. What is the idea? What are we going to talk about? And then we're going to unpack as we all can use it in their own practices.

Yeah, we're going to talk about the concept around breakpoints in a practice where you get stuck, you get stuck because you're either not aware that you're even stuck or you're, you're stuck and you're not sure what to do about it many times because you're actually not hiring in advance of growth. So we're going to hopefully help you learn from what we've learned. I wish I would have learned this 10 years earlier about investing in people before you get to the place that you're stuck at one of these breakpoints.

Yeah. So I think that last line there is really critical. We're talking, this is a conversation now. So if you're in business, if you own a business, you're. You're going to have people in your business if you want to grow and scale. So what I think is important to understand Is that what you're doing in business, we spoke about this last episode, is that you're continually taking risks in advance in hope that you're going to get a better ROI of what you've put in compared to what you get back, right? And business is continually taking these small little risks. Now one of the best investments that you can make, we hear this all the time, is in your people. So adding people, adding skill sets and adding different people to your team. I love this idea about, and when I understood this idea, it really helped me a lot to get the whole people equation and that is that in life there's these different resources, right? We talk about goals and natural resource, we talk about oil as a natural resource, right? But then humans, HR is a human resource. So you've, you're, when you're getting somebody, you're getting that person's nervous system, you're getting that person's experience, you're getting that person's skill set and you are acquiring that person onto your team. So as you look at your office right now, some of you are going to be listening to this and maybe you're below 7 figures, some of you will be at 7 figures, some of you will Be in multi 7 figures. How do we have a framework so that we know, okay, are we ready to hire the next person knowing that we're growing and going in the right direction? So do you want to talk to us about this idea? Revenue per employee, how do we use that as a framework so we know, well, how many team members should we be having in our business based on the size of the business and then the back of that, then we can unpack more about, well, how do we know when do we need to hire the next people so we get ready for the next level of growth?

Yep. So it's a, it's a loose equation, but in a chiropractic practice, if it's you, the owner, operator, plus one ca, there'll be a natural point at around 250, 300,000 somewhere in there where it's critical that you add likely the next ca. And then when you add that next employee, you're going to grow another 250,000. So again, you'll be up around 500,000, another point. So eat with each hire. As long as you've made the right hire, a full time equivalent employee should bring the potential for you to add another 250,000 in top line revenue to the practice. As long as you've made the right position and the right hire there.

Yes. So Just to repeat that. So basically you can assess your office, then you can work out what your yearly collections, yearly revenue is. Right now then what we're saying is in the business, like chiropractic small business, you want to have one full time equivalent for every $250,000 of income. For example, if you have a practice that's a million dollar office, that means that you should have four full time employee equivalents. So you might have, oh, guess What, I've got three CAs that are part time hours. They do 16 hours each. Cool. Those three part timers make up one full time equivalent. Then you might say, well, I've got one full time DC to do that as well as myself and I've got one full time office manager that runs that. So it's a framework where you can take what collections you're on right now, divide that by 250,000 and it shows you how many full time equivalents you should have inside of your company. Is that right? Yep, yep.

And that can be hard to look at sometimes because you might realize, oh my gosh, I have more employees for sure. And if, and if you feel like you're already stuck, then it, it begs the question to look at. Where's the capacity blocks in the team? Or do we have wrong people in wrong roles?

Yes, exactly. So when you first do this, you're either going to work out that A, you overhyde, so you're going to work out and go, okay, let's just work off a million dollars in revenue. Million dollars in revenue. I should have four full time equivalents. I've actually got six. Right. I've got these three full timers and I've got these five part timers and I've got this role as well. And so what that A, you either have the capacity to grow, so you don't need to expand the team more. Okay. You need to get the team more efficient and you need to realize that capacity. Or B, if you think that you're like hitting the wall everywhere, it usually means that you're not utilizing your team properly. And that's either a systems thing. Maybe you're running anti credit systems that serves you at 500,000 bucks a year, but are not serving you at a million dollars a year or beyond, or you've got a heart or a people problem. You've got people on your team that aren't performing and bringing the revenue up to the level that should be to warrant that. Is that right?

Yep, definitely. You know, and it could be that where you're over hired it also I think many times in chiropractic we, we do the when then game, oh, I'll hire this next employee when I'm at. And you actually, in order to get to that need to make the hire first. So we might, you know, be at the 500,000 thinking, well, I'm not going to hire another until I get to 600,000. It's like you just capped yourself because you're not willing to do what needs to do to blast into the next layer of growth.

Yeah. So such a critical framework guys of understanding, well, how do I add people? When can I add people? How do I comfortably add people? Because what you're then able to do, and again, so often the conversation comes back to vision is if you know where you're going, part of the next little risk in business is hiring ahead of the curve. Right. So looking at that and going, well, we are here right now, let's say we're a million dollars in collection revenue a year and we want to buy the end of Q2 in the following year. So let's say you listen to this at the end of 2025, you listen to this in December this year and you go next year, by the middle of the year, we want to be an equivalent of $1.5 million in collections. So that would be roughly 120,000 bucks a month. 128 I think it is specifically thousand dollars a month. You would look at that and go, okay, well over the next two quarters I'm going to increase my revenue by 500 grand. So I've got to the capacity to hire two full time equivalents. Now you might say we're going to hire this one person part time or two people part time and then one full time equivalent. And so then you look at that and you've got to hire ahead of the curve and you've got to say, all right, well what skill sets are we currently missing that's going to help us go from a million to 1.5 million? And then you go to the market and you look for that skill set to help you to go to 1.5 million quicker.

That's so good, Bobby. When you see into practices, where do you think people mess this up, where they're either trying to get something without investing in a full time employee or where do you think mostly we get this wrong.

So here's where they get it or where people get it wrong. We inadvertently, one way or another always end up as the owner becoming the bottleneck because we're not taught how to do business. So in the early days, what happens is any issue that presents itself, we try and solve that issue. What that inadvertently means is, let's say, take an example of a practice, maybe it's stuck at a million dollars revenue a year. And that practice maybe has an associate, the primary principal, as the chiropractor, it might have an office manager and it might have, you know, two or three part time CAs in there. And we're kind of stuck on a million dollars and we want to move up, we're not really sure why. And then you have a look and you audit the time of what the owner is doing. And rather than the owner focusing on the number one bottleneck, they're focused on the. They're like, oh, we need a CRM. And then what do they do? Well, they try and figure out what CRM. They start putting the messages out to different people. What CRM are you using? They get a name, a few CRMs, then they go and purchase that, Then they try and figure it out, they do the onboarding for that CRM, they try and like set it up, and then they lose all this time, sometimes months and years, trying to figure out this one task, which basically means they're the bottleneck for the business. Whereas instead, what I always want to do is when I run into an issue, I always ask myself the question, what expert do I need in my team to solve this issue that already has previous experience and expertise in this area? And so then I use that equation of RPA to go and add someone on my team that solves that problem. So in answer to your question, I find that owners often get in their own way. They become the bottleneck inadvertently, one way or another. And a lot of the time they end up resenting their business because they're like, well, I'm doing more, maybe I'm making more, but the profits aren't more. And it's because they just keep putting themselves in positions that they shouldn't be in and they start their growth as.

A result of it.

That's so good. And for those of you thinking like, well, am I doing that? It's like, what do you know the most about chiropractic? Right? So either you're still in there doing the production of chiropractic, okay, fine, maybe you don't have the number of associates you need at this point. What else do you know? Oh, I know how to run systems and I know how to train the team. Okay, are you doing that? Maybe you don't need to be the one pivoting to learn how to run your own Facebook ads. At this moment, maybe you don't need to be the one. You know, I'll use the example. We have a nonprofit we run with one of our practices and I don't know anything about nonprofits. I needed to hire someone who knows everything about nonprofits so that I don't have to try and bone up on nonprofits.

Yes, yep, spot on. And I use a CRM example because I don't speak from a place of I. I don't make any mistakes. I made that mistake years ago. I was like, CRM, download it, figure it out. Went on a two hour onboarding call with these guys. At the end of the two hours, I was none the wiser as to what the hell the CRM does. I was still clicking around endlessly everywhere. And then when I learned these principles, it struck me. I was like, just go and hire an expert at this CRM. In that particular example, I could put them on my team fractionally. So like, you know, there were contractor that would come onto my team and they set up the whole CRM within two hours. I think I paid them a few hundred bucks and now they're like a part time member of my team. So we have them as part of the team on a, on a retainer fee monthly that they run and orchestrate the whole CRM. And so all these things we talk about, it's because we've made the mistakes and you don't have to make them if you just see ahead of the curve. Right. Really, really key. So on that, Lena, if you look at, all right, revenue per employee, what do you find that a lot of officers just are clueless around this. What do you find some common mistakes people make?

Yeah, I think most of us don't know to even look at that to begin with. We've never been given that standard to measure. And so when we are, then the next question is like, okay, what if I am? Well, if I'm over producing, okay, great. You've got employees that probably are a players and are able to hold it down at this level, but they can't probably for the next level. Right. So you're hiring. Right. So the action step then is figure out what's the next role that you're looking for and well, define that so that you actually know what you're looking for when you go out and start to, you know, advertise the position and start to take interviews. And if you're the opposite of that, where you've got too many people not producing and you realize that then it begs that question too. Of like, okay, well clearly I haven't known how to squeeze the juice from my team or get them in the right role so that we can be more productive. That probably is where you look for something like TRP to help you as a leader get that skill set of leading your team in a stronger way so you can squeeze more production out of the team and align people with their God given talents so that they can actually be more productive for the team. So I think we just have to ask ourselves that question and most of us have never been taught to look at that.

Yeah, no, spot on. It's exactly what it is. A lot of the time you're either in one of two scenarios, you're overstretched because you're doing too much. And so then you know you're ever in. Your pro employee is actually way higher than that. But you're the bottleneck because you're capping yourself out. You're adjusting. You're also leading. You're also trying to figure out marketing, figuring out CRMs, figure out, you know, how to set up a non profit organization. You're doing all this stuff and you only have a certain amount of hours in the day or sometimes on the flip side of that, you work this out and you find out, wow, the reason my profits are so low is because I'm way over hired. So my team is leaking efficiencies in errors. Your job then becomes to discover where are those areas of efficiency being leaked and then start making the changes. And I've heard the saying, which I think is spot on the mark, when you grow, growing is painful. Shrinking is even more painful. When you grow exactly 100% when you grow, the team that you have with you right now is probably not going to be the same team that's there when you double the size. All right? Some people are there for a season and that's cool. And some people do stay and evolve and grow with you. But it is important to understand that right now what's stopping you from going to the next level is that there's certain skill sets that you don't possess on your team and you need to go and get those skill sets. For me, I'm a sports guy learner, so I always put this together in like a sports analogy. It's like if you look at most sporting teams in the world, they have a salary cap, right? They have a certain amount of money they can spend to put together a what's hopefully a Premiership winning team. A team that's going to win the title, are going to win the cup, right. And you've often got 10, 15, 20 other teams trying to do the same thing. So then my, my sport of choice is football or soccer or European football. So you need a goalkeeper, you need someone in goals. So if you use a larger, large amount of the money on an attacker and you get all these strikers and you stack, but your goalkeeper, you actually didn't buy one. So then you've got to get a player and put a goalkeeping jersey on him and put him in goal is you're going to have massive problems. Right. You need to then create this well balanced team where we spend on certain positions, we invest in others and sometimes you have a team that you know what is so stacked and well done, but they lack the goalie. They've got a goalie there, but they're not the goal that's going to take them to the Premiership willing level. So then the next hire becomes what we've got to make sure now that we find a resource is to get a goalie that can actually match the standard of the team team. And then that's how we start to go and take our titles. So sport does this every day. If you need examples of it, you.

Know, even great example.

Yeah. Even if you have unlimited budget, some of the biggest sporting clubs in the world, they're usually governed by rules of like either salary cap or how much money they're allowed to spend. And so that's what makes it a more even playing field. You're allowed to spend so much money to put together a team that can actually hit the goals of the organization which if you're a top level team, you're trying to win the Premiership. If you're a bottom level team, you're trying to stop being relegated. Right? Same thing right in front of you every single day. It's happening.

I love that analogy. That's great for all of us to just chew on too because there really there needs to be that overthought on where is that cap for certain positions at this stage based on my revenues and what could that look like as more positions are added? Or maybe this person ascends again thinking about growth and we want to hire people who want growth and they want to see themselves in the growth. Maybe that's growth in the same position. Maybe that's them moving into. You know, if it's a checkout ca, maybe they become an om eventually. This is all the work that Needs to happen between your two ears to think about where we're headed and how does my ability to put my team together. Like just like Bobby said, the soccer team. And how can I work with the resources I have? Better.

Yep, exactly. So here's the big takeaway, guys. You don't need to think of this stuff on your own. This is complex. We're trying to simplify it here. Here's the wrong thing to do now. Be the bottleneck and go. I'm going to try and figure this all out my own. All right, got you. I'm going to go make these changes. You're doing the same thing. You're doing the same patterns of behaviors. Right. Number one thing you got do really simple. Invest in yourself. Get proper training and coaching. We've got this worked out. TP has got this mastered. Show you exactly how to do it step by step. What you got to do. Reach out, connect guys to either myself or Dr. Loner. Our socials. Instagram is usually the easiest way and. And we'll get you the formula for that. Loner. Any final questions? Any final thoughts? I should say no.

I just love that we're having this conversation. This is good for chiropractic because there are so many opportunities for us to build our team. Whether that's adding more associates or adding key players from even other, you know, geniuses and professional fields that could help assist us in our business. This is how all of us need to be thinking about, how do I find those people that are going to help me build out and how do I measure that they're actually doing the production levels that should be coming with them being hired.

Yep, exactly. So there you go, guys. Revenue per employee. A great framework to use to work out. You over hired or you under hired. If you're over hired, your team isn't producing to the level that needs to be. If you're under hired, you're strangling your next level of growth. So make sure you invest in your team.

You're missing your goalie.

Exactly. Maybe you're missing your goalkeeper. Go out and buy them. Or maybe you've got one there, but they're not performing. And we're going to have a conversation with them or we're going to change them.

Yes.

Cool.

Awesome. All right. Very cool. Thanks, guys. See you next time.

Hey, everyone, please listen in for this next bonus interview of one of our remarkable success partners. They all help us help more people find the benefits of chiropractic. So listen on.

Hey, Remarkables, it's Dr. Kahl here today. I am super stoked to be online with doctors Andrew Wells and Chad Wolner from Simplified Functional Medicine. I'm super stoked to talk to you today, guys. It's an honor to have you here. We've got an amazing CEO audience here with us today, and some of them may not know who you are. I know a lot of the people that are listening are going to be familiar with you, but some of them may not. Could you please just maybe introduce yourselves, give us a sense of who the experts in the room are. Tell us a bit about your story and what has led us ultimately to being here today together.

Awesome.

Well, thanks for having us on. We really appreciate it.

Love the.

Love the TRP group. And we are chiropractors. So we developed Simplified Functional Medicine, which is a group that serves chiropractors in helping bolt on a functional medicine practice to their office. And one of the reasons that we exist is because we recognize as doctors of root cause. A lot of people say DC stands for Dr. Of Cause. We recognize that a lot of our patients are dealing with issues outside of the classic musculoskeletal problem. Now, I recognize that chiropractors listening to this will probably say, well, chiropractic is not just about musculoskeletal. I totally get that. But we also, based on our research, we found that 70% of your active patient base, our active patient bases as chiropractors. These patients also have other things like hormone imbalances, immune system problems, metabolic issues that sometimes don't fully respond to chiropractic care. And Chad and I got into functional medicine first and foremost out of personal necessity. And I'll let Chad share his story, but I'll make mine really brief. Back in 2018, we were hit head on in a car accident, almost died, broke my neck in three places, had a traumatic brain injury, and thankfully still alive. But it was through functional medicine and a lot of the protocols that we use that I was able to get my life back. And so after that traumatic brain injury, I had really severe brain fog, massive fatigue issues, autoimmune problems that popped up and just really wasn't responding to kind of traditional chiropractic care. And so I got into functional medicine number one to help with my own issues, but also recognizing that we got into our profession because we really want to solve our patients health issues. So that's kind of the, the genesis of all this. And I'll let Chad share his story briefly.

Yeah, fairly similar. Mine starts with me and my wife My wife was struggling with a variety of different chronic health issues over the years. We had taken her to specialist after specialist after specialist. No real answers. And out of just sheer frustration and desperation, I went back to school for functional medicine. Because I'm like, I need to find answers for my wife. She was eventually diagnosed with thyroid cancer and dealt with all the fallout of a full thyroidect to me and all those things. And I went into school, learned functional medicine, got excited, started using a lot of the protocols to help her, and made a significant impact for the better for her. And immediately I got the brilliant idea that this will be perfect for bolting into my practice. Not realizing that helping your wife is one thing for free, working with patients and figuring out some sort of a business model associated with that is a completely different skill set and set of tools and set of problems that needed solving. And so, needless to say, it did not work very well. And so I shelved it. But those years that I shelved it during that period of time created a massive amount of friction and frustration for me because I saw patients who would come in, who would express frustration with the current health situation that they were in, knowing full well that I. I knew I had the clinical acumen and the clinical skills and the academic, but I didn't have the actual solution from a business standpoint to deliver it without it completely derailing and disrupting the practice. Practice. This is where I started to see from a CEO lens, the last thing the world CEOs need is yet again, another job. But they need to have solutions in place for their patients and for their team that can be deployed. And so Andrew and I, around this time met. He flew out to where I'm at here in Meridian, and we became very fast friends. And I kind of knew about his business, he knew about mine. One day, out of the blue, I called him up and said, hey, I've got an idea for a functional medicine program. He said, that's a dumb idea. I said, hear me out for 45 minutes. I said, just give me 45 minutes. Let me pitch you via zoom, just like we're doing here. And 45 minutes later, I'm like, if it's a dumb idea, we can scrap it. And he's like, okay, fair enough. He's like, I'll give you an open mind. And so I presented it to him, what was kind of the genesis of simplified functional medicine. At the end of that Zoom call, he's like, this is a great idea. And really what we had done was we had solved For a lot of the common constraints that CEOs run into in their practices with regard to not just functional medicine, but just in practice in general. That I think will resonate with a lot of the TRP docs. And so I'll hand it back over to Andrew and he can kind of explain a little bit about how we've solved what, number one, what the big constraints are and how we've solved those constraints.

I think most CEOs and most chiropractors understand the benefit of functional medicine and what it does for the patient. But the friction comes here. As chiropractors like, it sounds complex, I've heard it's like, involves a lot of lab testing and complex protocols and all stuff I don't understand. Or they're concerned that they're going to get stuck in a consultation room with a patient for an hour, overwhelm their staff, have to go back to school. And what I want the CEOs listening to this to understand is that that's why we created sfm. And I get a lot of flack for saying this, but it's true. And we've seen this. We have the evidence data to prove it. Getting sick people well is not difficult. It's really, really easy. Now, you can overcomplicate it if you want to, but having now worked with hundreds of chiropractors, thousands of patients, the clinical stuff is actually pretty darn easy now. And we make it easy. And what we also do is we make the delivery of functional medicine also very easy. We feel very strongly that chiropractic should always be the main thing in your practice. But by bolting on a really very streamlined, organized and simple system that delivers the benefits of functional medicine can help not only on the patient outcome side, but also help on the revenue side, as functional medicine is an extremely profitable bolt on or add on addition to the practice. And so for any doc thinking like, oh man, that would be so cool to have functional medicine, but it sounds really complex. That's why simplified functional medicine exists, is to cut through the complexity and the chaos so that we can make things really simple.

That's like music to my ears. You know, as a coach, a TRP coach, I know that our CEOs need less jobs, not more jobs. They need to simplify, not create more complexity. So what you guys are saying is just awesome for me and for all of us coaches to hear and for our clients too. So as CEOs, we make business decisions, obviously, right? And our CEOs always want to know. And you mentioned the returns, the return on investment. They always want to know what is it they're going to get in return for their investment. So could you just share maybe some specific details about that for us and for our team here?

Absolutely. And when we think of roi, I want to think of it in two different aspects. The financial roi, which I'll talk about in a minute, and also the time roi. So the time one is often the one that nobody ever discusses. And so if it takes you a ton of man hours to deliver something that's profitable and it may not make sense for your business. And so we've designed simplified functional medicine to be team driven so that a CA or a health coach or somebody in your office that really has a passion for helping people can run all of this. So it doesn't require any of the CEOs bandwidth and time to run. And I think of all things time and money, I would say that that is the most valuable thing that we give in return is less bandwidth from the CEO.

Can I add one important detail too? Real quick? I want to make this distinction because some might be thinking, okay, great, I've heard this before from other. And what the deployment looks like is here's a bunch of crap for your team to do, go figure it out. And that's not, and that's not an effective strategy. That's a recipe for mutiny. Right. Where all of a sudden your team's like, thanks, Dr. So and so, you're an idiot. Now we have to do this. We have also done this in such a way that we're right there in the trenches supporting the team. So we'll train the team right along with them. This is not a here you go, you invest money with us and then you're off to the races or your team is off to the races to figure it out for the document. Right. We support, we train every step of the way ensuring that they get the support that they need. So I think that's a really important distinction too to add in there, Andrew, that we want to make sure is, yes, the CEO isn't going to have a whole laundry list of things to do, but also it's not just going to be handed off to the team and let them figure it out. We're right there to support them.

Yeah, absolutely. And then financial ROI from a money investment, if we can help docs find six people this year to help that have a chronic health issue, that's like the break even point on our program and services and coaching. So it's a pretty low bar that we've set. Most CEOs I talk to say, I can think of six people off the top of my head that have hormone issues and metabolic and digestive problems. And so it's a pretty quick ROI. The average is about 178k in additional revenue to a chiropractic practice. Now, average is average, right? What we found from TRP docs is that they're usually a bit above the average because they're striving for excellence in all different areas in practice. And so a lot of the docs we work with make more than that. And we have some offices that are doing six figures a month just in functional medicine on top of their chiropractic collection. So you can really make it as profitable as you want. And it's, it's a low volume game that we're playing. It's not like you have to add 400 patient visits a week. You can hit those numbers in a very, very low volume way. Because the plans that our docs are offering are quite profitable and they're easy to manage.

Awesome. Sounds like a very well thought out system. I'm curious about the onboarding component of that system, just timeframe wise, like where someone signs up, what's that on ramp look like?

Yeah, I'll handle that. And I'll speak because Andrew's typically involved in that process, along with our head of coaching, Dr. Waddier, who's amazing. Our goal is to get the practitioner up and running within 30 days, and that's on. We ran the numbers early on and what we found was 27.2 days was the average timeframe it took to get a practitioner up and running in the process. And so from a mile up, the onboarding process is intended to be built around keeping momentum going. If the process took six months to a year to get a doc up and running, you might as well kiss a goodbye because docs busy, docs lose momentum. And so we need to get this up and running as quick as possible and patients are waiting. So anything you want to add to that, Andrew? Sorry, I didn't mean to commandeer.

No, you said it better than I was going to say it. Thank you.

Yeah, I like that. It's. That's efficient. That's great.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm also curious, you know, if you look forward, considering what's important next, like for the profession as a whole, as you look into the challenges that we're facing as a profession and as you assess the needs of the profession going forward in the future, how Is it that simplified functional medicine is preparing docs for that? How are you preparing people for the future?

Yeah, I love that question. It's a smart question. And I want to use some statistics here. So if you look at our profession as chiropractors over the last 125 years, roughly, we have about 62,000 chiropractic practices in operation in the U.S. now, when you look at functional medicine, if you go back 15 years ago to 2010, there were about 10,000 practices that were operational in the U.S. fast forward till today, we're recording this. In 2025, there are 52,000 functional medicine practices, which means functional medicine grows at 940% per year, year over year, compared to about roughly 5% growth industry wide for chiropractic. And the reason this matters is as the whole reason for businesses to exist is to solve problems. And the functional medicine problem is a huge. Let me back up. Chronic health is a massive epidemic. Medicine isn't fixing it, pharmaceuticals aren't fixing it. Medical doctors aren't fixing it. And so chiropractors have and will continue to lead the revolution in health. We're just giving patients what they're asking for and what they're needing to get to the next level of health. And so when it comes to an opportunity, I don't know any other niches within chiropractic that offer that kind of explosive growth industry wide. And we feel strongly that that trend is going to continue at least for the next foreseeable future.

I want to add to that too, real quick as well. You know, the obvious elephant in the room is AI. And so for a lot of practitioners, they're wondering what that's going to look like in terms of the future. We have invested a substantial amount of time and money in trying to stay current and relevant with our finger on the pulse of what that means to us and specifically to functional medicine. And here's what we have. If you are practicing or plan on practicing kind of the conventional method and approach to functional medicine, which we define as no offense, but largely dysfunctional, because most of that is lots of expensive lab tests and lots of expensive supplements that is, quote, unquote, conventional functional medicine. There's just one major problem with that and AI is swallowing that up right now. Reason being is consumers can go straight to ChatGPT or Grok or whatever model and they can complain about their symptoms. It's going to list off exactly what labs they need to run, and then they go and they get the labs. Well, okay, what do I do with these labs? I don't know anything. I'm not a doctor. Again, patients are figuring out right now as we speak how to upload those into AI. AI is basically going to replace that functional medicine practitioner and then it's going to list off. Here's where you get all the supplements. Lab companies and supplement companies are cutting practitioners out because of tools like this. So that, so the thing is, is I don't want to sound completely pessimistic, but what we have done and what we have realized is where the rubber hits the road is where the value is. Meaning we could list off all the things, quote unquote, that patients need to do to get better, the lab tests, the supplements and everything. But one thing we know for certain is you're never going to supplement your way out of a chronic health issue. And so what that means is lifestyle change, habit formation, motivation, connection and community accountability, all of those kind of intangible things that AI is not going to do, that the practitioner and their team and the community that they create, that they can channel that patient into, that's what happens. What SFM has done is we have created all of that in a turnkey system so that there's more meat on the bone, so to speak. Not just expensive lab tests and supplements, but there's an actual curriculum, there's actual science behind motivation and change and habit formation and all that stuff. That, that is really the long term, that's the good stuff. And then a community that patients and practitioners can plug into with what we've created. And so all signs tell us that that is what the future of kind of AI proofing your practice is going to look like and is doing. And that's where we've gone all in on.

Awesome. I love the heart, I love the forward thinking that you guys have done in that regard. That's awesome. So you guys, some incredible pearls here with us. I know that everyone on here is going to appreciate hearing them. I just want to make sure that our crew knows how to get in touch with you. What the, what is the best way for listeners to reach out, get in contact or taking the next step with you guys if they're interested?

Yeah, I would say to look at our website, it's www.simplifiedfunctionalmedicine.com and if you're, if this is something that you've considered adding, plugging in or want help with, that would be the kind of, the first kind of direct path to reach out to us. And you can find all of our contact information and you can set up a discovery call with me, Dr. Wells. Or if you're just curious to learn more about our approach and philosophy, we have an awesome podcast. So if you're listening to this podcast trp, we have a podcast called the Simplified Functional Medicine Podcast and you can listen. We have 70 some episodes there and kind of a deeper dive into all the things we teach and the why behind what we do for docs that are interested.

Awesome. Cool. I know there's going to be a lot of people reaching out, so the phones will be burning up, I'm sure. And thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Our listeners do too. See you next time.

Have a remarkable day.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Build you'd Remarkable Practice Podcast. Remember, what the world needs now is chiropractic. And what chiropractic needs now is more successful chiropractors. If you if you like the podcast, please subscribe, share with your friends and leave us a review. And if you'd like to connect with us personally, please click the links in the show notes to schedule a call.