and rude to our patients who are living in an increasingly busy society. Last, I can’t tell you enough, how important it is to have the right person sitting at your front desk who is friendly, well-trained and happy with their career. KEY TO SELF-EVALUATING TO IMPROVE YOUR PRACTICE: Being a good leader means you need to step back from your practice and look at the big picture. Action Step 1: Run a focus group or do a self-evalu-ation of your practice. Action Step 2: Brainstorm some ways you can make patients feel special in your office. Action Step 3: Reconnect with your staff by having regular huddles, meetings and professional devel-opment days. QUESTION 2 What three extraordinary things could we do to make doing business with us not all about price? Start with being a great listener! It may sound silly, but if done properly, this will make the patient feel validated and sometimes is worth more to them than the adjustment. Secondly, go the extra mile and give them something above and beyond a treatment, possibly some at-home ex-ercises or the latest research article that is pertinent to them. If you are going to do this be sure to follow up with them. There is nothing worse than giving something to someone and then not caring enough to ask if they are doing the ex-ercises or if they reviewed the article. Last, remembering and celebrating patients’ important days and events can go a real long way to making their ex-perience with you not all about price! Acknowledging things like birthdays, anniversaries, births and new jobs, just to name a few, can really bring the patient’s experience to a level well beyond a “business transaction.” The easiest way to determine what your patients’ concerns are is to hold a focus group. It is always hard to hear negative feedback, but this information is valuable to growing your practice. together as a team. I hope these simple questions will allow you to take a step back from your practice and give you some great ideas to work on in the future. As I have mentioned before, it is important that once you have some ideas on paper, you turn them into action steps with the appropriate deadlines. Remember, when it comes to your practice, work from Ì iÊÃ`iÊÕÌtÊU QUESTION 3 What are the three things we can do to sharpen inter-nal communication aimed at improving clarity about our commitments to patients, to our staff and to the bottom line? Three of the best ways to improve communication with our staff is to have regular huddles, weekly meetings and professional development days. A huddle can be performed easily at the end of the morning shift and again at the end of the day to discuss anything that did not work, and more importantly the things that worked really well. In addition, you should be having at least one meeting a week (an hour will do) where ideas, tasks, and patients’ care can be dis-cussed in more detail. Last, professional development days can be done as often as bi-monthly. Shut the office down and spend the day working on bigger projects. Here is where you can share bigger visions and goals that will guide the office in taking better care of your patients. You may even choose to do something fun, as well, on these days. Get out of the office and go bowling or rock climbing, and end it with a nice dinner. This is a great time to have fun and bond www.canadianchiropractor.ca CANADIAN CHIROPRACTOR \*5,9�f;!5'534 s 
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