Empowering Women in Chiropractic - Building Your Referral Networks

Click here to download the transcript.

Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  We suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Empowering Women in Chiropractic. I'm your host, Dr. Cathy, and this week I'm super excited for you to join me because we're gonna talk about building your referral networks. And I say networks with an S because that's the name of the game right now. And if you've ever met me before, you know that I love to talk about you getting involved in your community.

I love to teach people how to do community events, how to do screenings, how to do lunch and learns, how to talk to people in your community and sponsor community events because making your foundation in your community and being known. As a leader in healthcare in your community is of the utmost importance, and I think it will help establish you as the go-to doctor in your community.

But in addition to community involvement, now is the time, if you haven't already, to really start building the right networks that are going to help you reach the people that you really wanna attract into your office. And I say networks with an S because you cannot rely on just one group of people, and here's why.

The more contacts you have from different opportunities and different areas and different backgrounds, the more people you have sharing your information and filtering potential patients to you. If you wanna be involved in kids and kids sports, sponsoring kids sports events in your community is huge, and it works really well to get your name out there.

But you also need an advocate, a third party endorsement that's going to say, Hey, I've been to see Dr. Cathy and my family's doing great under their care, or I've been to that office and the results we had were phenomenal. I think you should go to, when you have those third party endorsements, that builds so much credibility, and right now your community is looking for someone they can trust.

Right now, your community wants someone that they know is tried and tested. By someone they know. They want a referral. They want to go to someone that they know has had great results, right? They don't just wanna go to the new restaurant in town because it's new and they put up a bunch of signs. They want to hear from other people that the food was good.

They wanna see their pictures on social media and say, oh my gosh, that food looks delicious. I wanna go there. And the same thing holds true. For their healthcare. So if you wanna attract kids and you want to sponsor sports teams, then it would benefit you to get involved with the local athletic centers.

Those performance centers that pop up all around high school sports teams and middle school sports teams. The ones where kids go and train during the off season, get involved with them. Build a referral network with those athletic trainers, with those sports performance centers, with the physical therapists who are seeing the student athletes and are sponsoring the school athletics.

Get involved with the other people who are also sponsoring those sports teams and build your network that way. And then you have multiple sources sending you qualified referrals who. Are now looking at you as the answer to their problem. Because after all, someone they already know and trust is referring them to you.

And so as you start to build these referral networks, what'll happen is initially, You might not see a lot of new patients coming in. There might not be a big influx, but it might build some credibility for you. And over time, as you start working with these different people in your community, what you'll see is as you have patients that you can send to them and they're getting benefits from both of your offices or facilities, those other people will start sending patients back to you.

And so it's a give and take, but it works. And. I will tell you this, as many of Chiro Secure is a big sponsor of the League of Chiropractic Women. We thank you so much for that, and I am on the board of the League of Chiropractic Women, and recently we had an event down in Florida.

On Clearwater Beach, absolutely beautiful, stunning event. It's called The Gathering, and I will just tell you if you missed it, mark your calendars to come next year. But one of our speakers was the wonderfully funny, beautiful, loving, most amazing person, Dr. Pam Jarbo. And one of the things she talked about is how patients who come off the street are less likely to stay, whereas someone who comes as a direct referral from another professional.

Is so much more likely to not only stay under care, but to respect your recommendations. And I took this to heart and came back with my team and we really started looking at our numbers. And while we love doing our concert series and we love doing our community events and we love doing the Kids' Healthy Race healthy Kids Race series, we love doing those type of events because it gives back to our community and we get the opportunity to meet so many people.

the new patients that come from those events are not always the ones who are going to stay for a year, two years, five years, lifetime care. Some of them are absolutely and some of them are not. And we looked at our numbers and we said, some of the people who come from screenings stay long-term, some don't.

Some of the people who are walk-ins off the street stay long-term. Some don't. Some who come from a patient referral stay long term and a few don't. And then some who come from the recommendation of a healthcare professional, they may not stay long term, but they honor the recommendation for care that we give them.

So when you look at the whole mix of patients, where they come from, who comes from advertising, who comes from community events and sponsorships in the community. Who comes from word of mouth and patient referrals, who comes as a walk in off the street and who comes as an endorsed third party recommended referral.

When you look at all those patients, if you are building different networks and different streams of new patients, now you have people coming from different avenues and you have the opportunity to not only. Get them under care, but educate them about what it is that we do. And one of the things I talk about is we have to be able to attract new patients.

We have to be able to educate and keep them engaged, and we have to be able to retain them, right? We need to do all three of those because if all we do is attract them at an event, but we never actually get the opportunity to educate them and get them engaged in our office, then they may come in once or twice and we may never see them again.

They may not stay long enough to actually educate them, so make sure that your education is. Lined up and ready to go so that you can educate these new patients. But also I really want you to look at the type of referral networks that you've been building, or perhaps you were just relying on referrals from patients in office referrals.

Let's look at the ones outside of your office and how we can do that a little bit better. So I'd like to give you a few ideas of some referral networks that work for our office and work for some of the doctors that I have the privilege of coaching. And maybe you can pick and choose from some of these, or you can add some of your own.

There are birth networks in most communities get involved with those. If you wanna attract more pregnant women and newborn babies get involved with the doulas, the lactation consultants, the midwives, and perhaps even with the obs or the pediatricians. If you wanna attract more of those pregnant women and those new babies.

Okay, get involved with the pediatricians and the pediatric physical therapists and the speech pathologist as well as the occupational therapist. If you want to attract those toddlers and special needs young children who might be a perfect fit for your office. Now you can also get in touch with the pediatric dentists and people who deal with tongue ties in your community so that you can attract more of those children and babies into your office.

Now, if you wanna deal more with sports and athletics, then you would want to start building your referral networks around the physical therapists. The personal trainers, the sports performance centers, the athletic trainers, the coaches. You might have lots of coaches in your community and some of the coaches in your community actually own other businesses.

For example, some of the coaches that we deal with own dog babysitting places or own hair salons. And so we work with those coaches, but those coaches also do other things outside of coaching. And now they're talking to their clients about our offices as well. If you wanna attract more of the personal injury, then it's essential that you start building a referral network that includes attorneys.

Orthopedic surgeons, neurologists, physical therapists, medical doctors, you if you wanna build more of a pi, personal injury type of network, then you've gotta get involved with people who are already handling those patients. So you can have so many different networks and you don't have to pigeon your hole yourself to one.

You don't have to just decide on just one, and you don't have to use any of the recommendations that I've just given you. You can build your own referral networks. I have a client who absolutely loves dealing with elderly women. That's her target market, so you know who her referral networks are, knitting.

Yoga the craft companies in her community, the people who put on they call 'em sexy singles. I don't know. It's like the older club the silver sneakers type mentality. She works with those people who set up the events for the older groups. And if you start thinking about who are the people I wanna attract into my office?

Who are the families or the patients or the community members that would really fit well in our office? Go after the people who are already serving them. Get to know them. Build a network with them. Be a referral source. Be a source of information, and be a source that can help their already existing customers and clients with challenges that maybe they can't meet.

For example, if you build a referral network and it includes one of the sports performance places, oftentimes they'll find, we have a cheerleading school right across the street. Perfect example. They'll find that some of their flyers. Can't maintain their balance when they're up in a certain position and they keep falling to one side, and if they keep falling to one side, we're able to discuss with them and help them understand there is an imbalance going on that is causing them to fall to one side, not be able to maintain their balance.

So what are we doing? We're helping that cheer school to have their cheerleaders, their flyers, perform better. by having them checked and adjusted when necessary. So now it's an advantage to them to fix a problem that they see in their business with their customers by sending them here knowing that we are a trusted resource that's going to detect and correct the problem and send them back to the cheerleading school so they can continue to perform at their best CAPA capacity.

So think of it in that terms. Your referral network is not just about people giving to you. It's a network. It's about a give and take. And how do you and your services benefit those businesses and their clients or customers challenges? So when you start thinking in that way, look at the people who you wanna attract into your office.

Look at what they're engaged in. Look at what they're involved with. Look at where they spend their time and their money and start building a referral network with the people. Your people are already doing business with. Hopefully that helps you. If you have any questions, please reach out to me. I'm always easily accessible.

You can send me a message on Facebook. You can send me a message through Instagram. You can reach out through me through my website at Women's Voices matter.com. I'm always here to help. I love to be a resource for people. It's always a privilege to help somebody do better. Do greater things, become a better person, and have a more exciting and wonderful experience in their life and in their business.

So listen, I love to help entrepreneurs, women professionals, and of course chiropractors to. Achieve their goals, to exceed what their expectations are and to be able to have the life that they desire. And for me, building networks has been one of the best things that has really helped, not just my practice, but my coaching practice as well.

And it has helped me with my kids so that they're able to participate in all the sports that they want, because the network that I've developed the various different networks have helped me get my kids to and from all the events that they need to do and stay completely engaged in all the sports that they want.

So your networks are gonna serve you on so many levels. But you have to be willing to put the work in to help build them in the first place and to keep those networks going. So hopefully that helped. I hope that you have a wonderful week. I hope that you enjoy your Memorial Day weekend and this coming summer, that it's filled with all the happiness, all the joy, all the great memories that you could.

Possibly imagine and that your practice and your life are a reflection of how happy and free you are and that you continue to go and serve this great profession by serving the people in your community. Have a great day, everybody. I'll see you next time right here on Empowering Women in Chiropractic.

Join us each week as we bring you the best in business growth, practice management, social media, marketing, networking, leadership, and lots more. If it's about women in practice and business, you'll hear it here.

We hope you enjoyed this week's Facebook Live event. Please like us on Facebook, comment and share. We look for. Forward to seeing all of you next week for another episode of Empowering Women in Chiropractic. Now go ahead and hit the share button and tell your friends and colleagues about the show. Thank you for watching.

Have a beautiful day. This has been a ChiroSecure production.