owner an opportunity to discover how they can do things without you. 2. Go the extra mile It is key to do things like work late, work weekends, see acute patients in need, help out with paperwork, and ask to shadow your mentor when you are not seeing patients. In order to maximize your experience you have to sacrifice. If you are just starting out, no one is really interested in helping you unless you demonstrate you are willing to sacrifice for them. 3. Take minimal vacation See number one. You just finished three to four years of undergraduate work and then four years of chiroprac-tic college. That was the easy part. Now please get to work -no clinic owner is interested in hearing you need a vacation. 4. Aim to improve your skills to match your lead chiropractor/ clinic owner/mentor Your skills need to continually grow and develop to match the time you are with the clinic as an associate. A good clinic owner will train you and set a timeline for your development. If you do not follow that timeline or lag in your development, they may become less interested in spending time to do this for you. 5. Learn every clerical procedure You need to become indispensable. So, learn every aspect of the clerical proce-dures and offer to help when the clinic is stuck due to illness or bad weather. At times, you may be working late and need to cash out a patient and rebook them. Make sure you know how and as soon as possible. I had to do all of the above to build my practice into one that produces hundreds of new patients per year. There are no gimmicks, no tricks; it’s all hard work coupled with the imple-mentation of a simple clinical and business practice system. The key to being a good associate is to learn, but the bigger picture is to take it as an opportunity to build your own practice. Many will read this and say I am “too hard” or my recommendations are “unrealistic.” However, we live in a time where expenses (housing, fuel prices, groceries etc) at are an all-time high. These expenses are just as elevated for clinic owners, and just because they are established does not mean they will be giving you any handouts. If you would like an opportunity at success, you need to demonstrate you are willing to work for it. By work I mean sacrifice and do the things that seem difficult. If you make it a priority to make yourself needed and be a valuable part of wherever you are, then you will be able to build yourself a solid, prosper-ous future. 8 Canadian Chiropractor June 2019 Untitled-2 1 www.canadianchiropractor.ca 2019-05-10 11:17 AM
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