This is where we market / invest our time / invest our money in the following proportions. 60% of our energies goes into looking after the patients we already have – and getting them to get us more! 15% of our time goes on getting new patients and reactivating our inactive patients and 10% is left over for emergencies.

You will have noticed we are going to spend FOUR times as much energy on our existing patients as we do on the new or inactive ones – and you may be wondering why?

So let me tell you then…

It works a lot more effectively and is easy to put into practice.

And let me show you how and why…

If you have 10 existing patients and each of those refers a new patient to you will get another 10 patients and you will double your practice. If these then refer one person to you your practice has grown to 30 or tripled, and so on. Do that 5 times and you now have 60 patients – easy isn’t it

But what happens if you can get two referrals from each patient?

You would end up with 630 patients after five rounds of referrals

And if each referred 3 patients you would end up with 3650!

And remember those figures are if you started off with only 10 existing patients – and you and I know you already have a lot more than that!

Now, you may feel it is going to be difficult to get those sorts of referrals but what I am going to show you will make it very possible. It is a well-known business fact that…

The greatest asset any business can ever possess is a known list of satisfied, loyal customers.

So, in this article let’s start going by breaking down each portion and discussing them briefly before going headlong in to them and covering them in detail… Let’s make your dream clinic a reality!

60 percent is the percentage of all practice building activities and resources you should devote to retaining current patients. Think about it, it is so much easier to keep a current patient than it is to go out and try to get a new one – and there are several reasons for this:

1.We are creatures of habit. It is much easier to continue to do what we have been doing than it is to do something different and the same is true of your patients. If they are already coming to you, then it is easier and more predictable for them to keep on coming to you than it is for them to do something different and go somewhere else.

2.You already have an established relationship. One of the biggest barriers in getting new patients is prospective patients don’t have a relationship with you. They don’t know you from Adam, they don’t know what you do and they most probably don’t trust you – either with their bodies or their money! It takes a long time to build a relationship with new patients, so instead of throwing all your energies at these new patients and trying to start all over again with each one from scratch, you should focus on strengthening the relationships you have with your existing ones.

3.Lack of marketing costs. You’ve already paid the initial investment in getting the new patients to become existing patients. It now costs you a lot less to keep marketing to those existing patients than it is to start all over and market to new ones.

So, what should you do?

The answer is to take care of the patients you already have rather than spending most of your marketing money and resources on soliciting new ones – you must therefore focus the majority of your “Marketing” efforts in-house. You must have clear, unique systems in your area of practice that constantly spread the word about you and encourage patient loyalty and referrals.

For example, create in house educational tools that serve to educate your patients on every visit, talk with your clients about what you are doing and why – this does not mean conversations about the weather, politics, religion, sports, your favourite pastimes etc. it means you talk about your therapy, your care, Innate Intelligence, fixations and blockages, Chi, stretches nutrition, testimonials, your educational DVDs, tips for the day, thoughts for the day, your in-house lectures, your brochures, etc.

15 percent is the percentage of resources I recommend you invest in getting new patients. This includes advertising, screenings, giving talks etc.

I would suggest you spend 15% of your time, money and resources on reviving inactive patients

Those of you who haven’t realised the most expensive part of growing a practice is getting new patients are most probably not doing any advertising and are instead just relying referrals and word of mouth – both of these methods are good. Whilst building a practice based solely on referrals is good due to the fact that when you get a patient as a referral, they are much more likely to trust you and to accept your recommendations. This is because although the new patient doesn’t have a relationship with you yet, they do have a relationship with the person who referred them. Therefore, through the referrer, a little bit of trust automatically trickles down to you.

There are always times when that special advertising feature comes along. The health fair you wanted to go to, the seminar that is too good to miss etc. This is where you can use your 10 percent emergency fund. This is 10 percent of your marketing budget that you save for something unexpected and unbudgeted for. It is not there for you to spend how you want to at the end of the year if it is left over. Instead, it should be left to accumulate in an account untouched and, if not needed, added to again at the start of the next year to build an impressive fund.