303- How to Generate Recurring Revenue in Your Chiropractic Practice

Welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor where each week we deliver the latest chiropractic research and marketing strategies all in the time it takes to get to your office. Now, here's your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid.

Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On this week's episode, we are talking all about recurring revenue in E commerce and why this is so critically important for your practice. Moving forward, we're gonna break down the three steps that you can take to create recurring revenue with E commerce. We're gonna break it down, talk about the why, talk about the how, and give you some action steps to take with you all on today's episode. Before we get started, I wanna say a few words about novopulse. This is, this is a tool where recovery meets performance. You can learn more about this new technology that reduces pain and inflammation, improves function and gets your patients back to the activities they enjoy@novopulse.com Again, that's Novo Pulse.com. this is a technology I came upon within the last month and a half, two months. There is nothing like it on the market. So if you have an active care rehab based practice, you definitely wanna check this out. I'm gonna drop the links down in the show notes, but as I said at the top on today's episode, we're talking all about recurring revenue and E commerce. Now, as a chiropractor, you might be thinking, I don't know if that really applies to me and hopefully over the course of this episode you're going to understand why it does. The opportunity that's in front of you and also those steps that you can take to get things going in the right direction. Now this is the topic of the second season of the Smart Chiropractor podcast. We're breaking down in eight episodes every single aspect of this process. So if you want to dive deep, I'd encourage you to check out season two of the Smart Chiropractor podcast. But I wanted to touch on it on the Evidence Based Chiropractor podcast so that you have a better understanding of what we're talking about, where we're going and again, the opportunity, in my opinion, that presents itself in your practice. So this started about a year ago when I was looking at some of really the largest brands in the healthcare space. You might have heard of some of these athletic greens, RIT, HIMS, HERS, Roman, all of these direct to consumer D2C direct to consumer brands with healthcare products that came onto market and went from like 0 to 250 million, 0 to 500 million, 0 to $1 billion valuations in the course of 12 to 24 months. And you know, clearly we've seen over the last couple years additionally the role that E Commerce has played. I don't think there's anybody on planet earth that hasn't bought something off of Amazon or bough something off a website. And when we say E Commerce, we basically mean an online store. Pretty simple. So when we looked at the brands, we saw that they were generating a lot of recurring revenue. Most of those companies I mentioned have products that are consumable, meaning every 30 days or so. Those pro, you know, you use the greens and then after 30 days you repurchase the greens. But the subscribe and Save model is what really pulls a lot of this together. And the subscribe and save model is that you don't have to repurchase every month. It gets delivered to your door and billed automatically. So the lack of inventory, that started to get me very interested. I know all of us as chiropractors have, you know, the closet full of seminars passed where you thought you were going to sell something at the front desk in your practice. And it's brutally hard when you know you didn't have the product when you needed it. You had the product when you didn't need it. That's just no way to go about it. This is where E Commerce solves. No inventory. Huge. Also, selling. Selling sucks. No chiropractor out there, I feel like, loves the act of feeling like they're selling. And if you even start to feel that way, there's going to be just those negative feelings. You're not going to do it very well and it shouldn't be that way. So why is that happening? As I started to look deeper, I said, it's probably because you're trying to insert sort of that round peg in the square hole kind of thing, meaning, you know, it's trying to sell something at that moment in time. When a patient's in your practice, that's a good opportunity, but it probably isn't the best way to go about it. It doesn't feel right. So how can we automate the promotions of what you have in your E Commerce store? And how can we create a product set that's recurring in nature? Okay, now this started, hopefully this is coming together for you. How this started to really percolate with me about a year ago saying, wow, there is a huge opportunity within our space, within the chiropractic space, to help Patients get what they want. Help ourselves really have our patients get what we'd recommend and then generate some recurring revenue which can reduce your stress, can improve your revenue position, and can make your practice less vulnerable. I know us as chiropractors, we love delivering care with our hands and that's great. But that's a fee for service model. And I think we've all seen the challenges that that can impose over the past couple. If you had reduced volume or you were unable to get into your practice at all, you could see your revenue dry up just like that. That's super scary and it's unnecessary. That's a super vulnerable practice. Imagine if you had a couple thousand dollars of recurring revenue mailbox money coming in each and every month that's dramatically changes the stability of your practice. It's gonna say dramatically reduces your stress level. And, and it's great. If you're providing great services and there's none of those challenges going on, you can get into your practice. Well, all of that's additional revenue. If for whatever reason your volume's down, you're unable to get into your practice, that can come in. To say handy would be a dramatic understatement. And I know all of us have been asked questions about products and things, myself included, from patients. And you spend 10 minutes trying to poorly describe something on Amazon and. And the patient goes and doesn't buy the right thing anyway. And you sit there saying, was that all for not? And the answer is yes, that is why? Having your own e commerce store loaded with products that you believe in, that you don't need to keep an inventory is so important now when a patient comes and asks, hey, that's a great question. I actually have my favorite product of XYZ available in my online store right now. We'll give you that URL and you can scan the QR code at the front desk to get right to it and order that becomes a way easier conversation than trying to vaguely describe something on Amazon where that your patient becomes Amazon's customer and they probably don't buy the right thing, it's lower quality, it's not exactly what you wanted. Curating a product selection of your own, having it available in your own E commerce store, keeping your patients, your patients not handing them off to somebody else and generating revenue from it are all things that get me excited. And I think, and I hope that that they get you excited as well. So what are the challenges with this? Well, historically there hasn't been a great solution. The technology has been super hard and quite frankly, it's taken us a year. We've devoted a ton of time over the last year to building a complete e commerce solution that'll sit on the back of the smart chiropractor. Because with the smart chiropractor we power marketing and communications, as you probably know, we get out there and power Facebook posting, Instagram posting, Google my business posting, YouTube posting, email, email marketing for new patients, for reactivations, for retention, video streaming, patient handouts. All of that's included in the smart chiropractor. So it was a natural progression to say, wow, if we can add on an e commerce platform, an E commerce solution to the back end of that, it is going to help a ton of docs have less stress, create more revenue and serve their patients at a higher level by actually having the products and things that you'd recommend available to your patients, not having any of the inventory, and ultimately ensuring that you have some recurring money coming in each month. We call that having a payday practice. We're launching a book about this. We're really diving deep into it because when we look again at all of those big platforms, those big companies that have come upon in the last 24 months, to me that those are chiropractic patients. We know 70 to 80% of chiropractic patients, for instance, are buying supplements. We know that chiropractic patients need other physical goods. Maybe it's a traction unit, whatever it might be. Those are items that need to be purchased from you to generate revenue to help your patients and to ultimately again create systems and processes that diversify the way that you generate revenue in your practice. So I took it to heart when I saw these companies coming in and really serving what I'm gonna call chiropractic patients and blowing up. And you know, that's an opportunity for all of us to really step back and say, well, how can we serve our patients at a higher level? How can we build upon the trust that we have? That's the other thing with all of this that I think is so, so important is building upon the trust that you have. You are, if you're a newer doc, maybe it's in the tens or hundreds. If you're a more experienced doc, it might be thousands of people in your community who you have patient records on, right? Past patients, people who know trust and like you already and have probably asked you about these things. So doing them the best you can ultimately is ease. Ease is important and half baked explanations of products that they can't find or buy. The wrong thing is not easy. It's not a great solution. So with Smart Care stores by the smart chiropractor, we really have solved this issue. The three big steps that I want to dive into in the, in the final third of the podcast today is having the right store, creating a good product selection, and then automating your promotions. So all of these could be independent topics. I'll probably come back to this in future episodes, but I just wanted to give you a high level understanding of exactly what we're gonna do. So the first step to getting recurring revenue via E Commerce in your practice is getting a store set up, right? So there are a couple different options out there, but they all have pretty significant limitations. There are options like full script store, however your patients become their clients. There are options like a shopify store and that's a great solution. However, there's no inventory. You got to create all of the inventory and it becomes a challenge. So all of those things are what we looked at when we were developing Smart Care, our Smart Care store system, and said, okay, how do we create stores? And we did. How do we create stores? That this is the store of that practice. It's not our store. It also is a store that has the inventory built in. We're going to build in the recurring revenue products that we personally endorse and love and then we're going to have a few things. Thousand additional SKUs if you want to add in other things to your store. It's taken us a year to do it. A lot of brands that you'd recognize there some new ones as well. And we've built a system that allows you to have absolutely no inventory, that everything is drop shipped to your patients. That is a subscribe and save model first. And that is the key to creating recurring revenue via E commerce. And that dives into step number two. Once you have that store set up, that's where you want to get the product selection set up. So in our Smart Care stores, we've done all this work for our docs. However, your product selection is key. Ultimately the store is there to help your patients to generate better outcomes, but it also is there to create revenue. And if you have a product where you're taking a loss or making 50 cents on a sale, it's probably just not going to be sustainable long term. So understanding what are those products that my patients ask for that can benefit their lifestyle, that also then on the third, not first, but third, create revenue for my practice. And specifically recurring revenue is super, super important. So we look at it through the lens of having everyday everybody type things. So with our basis health supplements that we've launched, that's a multivitamin, a vitamin D, a probiotic, a sleep, those are everyday everybody non therapeutic. They're not specific. You don't have to be a functional medicine doctor to do it. These are the foundational elements that people are utilizing each and every day that also are recurring by nature on 30 day cycles. Those are the products that you really want to think about in your E commerce store that apply to the most people give you the biggest opportunity to assist and help and also create recurring revenue. So I know we're diving into a lot of details. I'm packing it in on this episode. I just want you to have a good understanding. And the third part about it is once you get that product selection up and running it's how am I going to promote this? Selling it at the front desk is probably not gonna be the most efficient way to go about it. Should you have items, patient handouts in your practice? Absolutely. Should you have good conversations with your patients if they're asking that are very easy to understand? Hey, great question. Scan that QR code that you see, you know, right here or at the front desk that'll lead you to our store. You're gonna see all my favorite products there. Making it easy for people to come on board and say yes is critically important. And, and the, the real deep component of that is email marketing. Many of the companies that I mentioned earlier ritual hims hers, you know, athletic greens. These companies have been built on the back of email marketing. Now thankfully with the smart chiropractor we have chiro emails built in. We do all the email marketing for you. So we have built out an array of solutions to get out there and provide email marketing on your behalf based upon whatever you want to sell. So we have a, you know again under that product selection you have a couple different options at what we have already custom created promotions for you in your practice. So I know this is a lot to take in on one episode as I'm thinking back here over the last 14, 15 minutes or so. But recurring revenue through E commerce, it's not the future. It is happening right now and businesses are really, really ramping up with it. Me, in my opinion, I don't believe there's any reason why you, we as chiropractors shouldn't also, you know, take advantage of that opportunity in a positive way. We know our patients are out there looking for solutions that are natural to benefit their lifestyle to live a healthier life. We know that 70% of people that walk through our front door are taking everyday everybody supplements and we also know that many of them are taking poor quality stuff. Many of these individuals are. They don't know one thing from the other, so they're just going with whatever is cheapest and, and it's not doing them any favors. It certainly isn't doing your practice any favors. And I believe there's an opportunity to serve everybody, to have this truly be a win, win, win across the board. And we spent the last year diving deep into this stuff and developing it. So if you want to dive deep under the topics, I'm going to encourage you to check out the Smart Chiropractor Podcast. Season two is going on right now where every single episode is devoted to a different aspect of E commerce. If you want to learn more about how this works practically, Visit the Smart Chiropractor.com, click that book a demo button in top right corner, hop on and have a conversation. Our Smart Care stores are launching exclusively in October to our Smart Chiropractor members, so they're going to have the first crack at all of the stores. We're going to get all of our Smart Chiropractor members up and running before we go external. So how do you get in on that? Check out the Smart Chiropractor. It's a key component of this because we power the marketing, sales and communications. So you don't need to worry about it. That is really the key component. And as we've been talking about for years with the Smart Chiropractor, hey, why should I build a health tribe? Why does it matter if I have people following me on Facebook, on Instagram, or on my email list? This is why. It's not only about the services you can provide in your practice, but when you expand into E commerce, you can help people that go far beyond the four walls of your practice and far beyond the circle of practice. Docs who have spent time, effort and energy really building a tribe throughout the years. And today is not too late to start. Today's actually the right day to start. Tomorrow is second best. But getting out there and curating a tribe of individuals across your social channels, through email, et cetera, give you an opportunity to showcase this at the highest level. Because now you start to extend who you're influencing beyond just your circle of practice. Circle of Practice is a great place to start. However, I think you can get the our opinion on all this right now. I think there's unlimited upside. Unlimited opportunity to reduce your stress, increase your revenue, improve your patient care. All with E Commerce. It never takes away from the fact of what you do in your practice, but it certainly can extend the benefits you can provide. If you have any questions about this, hit me up jeff@the evidencebasedchiropractor.com if you'd love to hop on a demo, see what we're all about, visit the smart chiropractor.com and before we wrap up, I want to see a few say a few words about E Chiro Ehr. Every EHR sells features. If you have Ecairo's expertise, they'll help you create a better lifestyle and improve your practice health. Check them out@echiro ehr.com and again, you've heard me talk before. Scott Monsterman is a absolute master at compliance and documentation and that is what Echiro EHR is built on. So I'll drop that link down in the show notes. I hope you have a fantastic week in practice and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit theevidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.

Sam.