This month has been a fun month of showing our appreciation to you, our patients! As the month winds down though, I think back to when we first opened our doors. I remember being nervous. How are you going to make it? Isn’t it true that most small businesses fail in the first few years? Where are you going to get new patients? Isn’t there a chiropractor on every corner already? These were questions I was asked by others or was asking myself. Every one of those questions were real concerns that we needed to face. How were we going to make it?
But I had a plan! A plan that made me feel a lot less nervous. A plan that would allow us to succeed. Well we started that plan back in 2004. It is now 2021 and we are still around. Not that it was easy and everything ran smoothly. It did not! There were many times when we thought maybe we should just shut it the doors. But here we are. We are still helping people and still letting God be in control.
How are you going to make it?
A huge part of our success has been the great patients we have been blessed to help. Zig Ziglar used to say “If you help enough people get what they want, you will get what you want.” The big question is what did people want? We have always felt that people wanted a few big things from their health care provider. We also felt that many people were not getting these needs met from most health care providers.
People want to feel welcomed with a friendly smile and to feel that the person at the front desk knows them by name and knows about their life. They also want providers who listen to them, who will spend the necessary time with them and work to figure out what is causing their health concern. They want to know to the providers are working to get the person better with the least amount of time and money. One of the most frustrating things in health care is not knowing how much something costs until you get a bill after the fact. Patients want to have transparency in the cost of the care provided. Above all else though, we felt that patients want to be treated as an individual and a human being. They don’t want to be treated like a number or a health condition. What did we want in return for giving patients what they wanted? To be able to meet those expectations and to honour God while providing that care.
Where are you going to get new patients?
This was a real concern. How were we going to meet new patients? I have always thought the best way to meet new patients was to build relationships. I thought a great place to start was to just go door to door in the neighborhood and meet the people in the community. I had heard of another doctor doing so and I thought it was a great idea. A few months before we opened the doors, I went and knocked on about 3000 doors and did a survey to find out what people wanted from a chiropractic office. We also had a booth at the July 3rd event in Chanhassen, had a kiosk at the Eden Prairie mall, we did talks wherever we could from people’s living rooms to community education to speaking to businesses. I got involved in our church , our kids’ sports, the local chamber and volunteering in our community. Not so that I could get new patients but to know our community better and to build relationships. All these opportunities allowed us to build many relationships which led to new patients. In fact 2 out 3 of our front desk ladies remember me knocking on their doors and ended up coming for care because of that. Our current clinic director met us at the July 3rd event in Chanhassen. It is amazing to see how the relationships that were started all those years ago have blossomed!
Isn’t there a chiropractor on every corner?
When you look around it can seem like there is a chiropractor on every corner. There are a few reasons for this. One is that there is a chiropractic school here in Bloomington and a lot of people who come here to go to school end up staying here. That is what we did! Second, chiropractors tend to work in offices with one or two chiropractors rather than a group of them partnering up like you see with medical doctors. In Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow” he explains that in order to be successful in business, you need to stand out. We wanted our office to stand out.
We felt that delivering what patients wanted was one way to stand out. I met many people who had previously had a bad experience with chiropractic. That they felt like they were being sold something just to be pushed through care quickly and didn’t feel like the doctor spent the necessary time with them. They felt like a number.
The second way we wanted to stand out was to glorify God in our office. We want our patients to know that we are serving God and letting God make the decisions in our office. Our goal was not to push our religion on people but to be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ and to show the world what it looks like to be a follower of Christ. Whether a patient knows Christ doesn’t matter. They will get treated the way Christ treated people! We have become a purple cow in doing so.
It is a privilege!
At Valeo we try to never take it for granted when people give us the opportunity to help them with their health care. We consider it a privilege. There are many choices out there for health care and yet you have chosen us to help you. Thank you for giving us that opportunity. We will continue to work hard to serve you and to help you meet your health goals. God bless.
Dr. Aaron Morland
