The time has come to accomplish your goal of starting your own chiropractic practice. It’s a thrilling, hectic, and even scary time. Here are our tips to help reduce risk and protect your practice as you work toward success.
Start Small
You probably already know that most startups fail. While each business fails for its own unique reasons, many try to do too much too soon. When it comes to starting your chiropractic practice, remember that you don’t have to feel like you have to grow too much or too fast. Most chiropractic practices have an average of just 1-2 employees. A key component here is to know your market and to have a plan for how you will realistically serve it in the years to come.
Maintain Great Records
As a healthcare provider, keeping great records is just a part of the job, and that includes maintaining great records for both your patients and your practice.
Patient Medical Records
Keeping accurate and secure medical records for your patients is a huge responsibility. Whether you process paper records, electronic medical records, or electronic health records, you cannot afford the risk of unmanaged medical records. Not only will patients lose trust in you if you are unable to efficiently retrieve and process records, but you could cost yourself time and money due to billing errors and duplication of effort. Additionally, unstandardized records can be difficult to migrate to a new system when the time comes.
Business Financial Records
The importance of staying up to date and accurate in your accounting cannot be stressed enough. If you let your accounting practices slip to the wayside, it can create serious problems in operating your business and even legal trouble. One slip-up can snowball into another, so make a goal of having all your finances reconciled with proper documentation at least once per week.
Keep An Eye on Cash Burn
The cash burn rate of your practice refers to how quickly the business spends cash. Controlling and monitoring your net-negative cash flow is key to keeping your head over water. Start by looking at your current burn rate. Then you can take educated measures toward lowering your burn rate. This is especially important for new businesses, but should be continued to ensure your practice’s success.
Hire the Right Team
Take the time to get to know and hire the right employees. In a small business, each employee contributes immensely and makes up a giant portion of the business.
The right employee will need more than skills and experience – they’ll need to be the right fit for your objectives and cultures. Otherwise, conflict and toxicity will leave your business with a negative work environment. Plus, hiring the right employees and keeping them on board reduces costs and helps keep your practice alive.
To learn more tips to help your chiropractic practice thrive, click here to schedule a free practice analysis!