Dr. Kevin Christie is an entrepreneurial founder and CEO, successful author, truthful podcast host, and expert chiropractic specialist who dedicates himself to treating his patients’ symptoms and physical dysfunctions. He also serves the chiropractic profession through his company, Modern Chiropractic Mastery, where he combines coaching and custom marketing production and distribution that empowers chiropractors to run a thriving, self-managing practice.
In this of TechTalk Podcast, Brad Cost, Dr. Jay Greenstein, and Dr. Kevin Christie sit down to discuss:
Dr. Christie’s service to the chiropractic profession.
Important details on Dr. Christie’s East and West Masterminds.
Modernizing your practice, both from the front stage and backstage.
SHOW NOTES:
3:39 - Sensational entrepreneur. “I've lived two lives in the chiropractic profession. I've been practicing for 19 years, so I am in the trenches as a chiropractor. I was a sports chiropractor with a lot of great opportunities in professional sports and I did that for a long time, still do. In 2015, I realized there was a missing piece for the evidence-informed chiropractor: business and marketing. They were really dying on the vine, thinking they could just hang a shingle and their clinical chops would do the trick. Sometimes that happens, but too often it wasn't. I started a closed Facebook group around that idea in 2016 and that took off. A year after that, I started a podcast. This April will be our seven-year anniversary of Modern Chiropractic Mastery podcast. I haven't missed a week in seven years, so I’ve built an audience around that. I joined Strategic Coach, an entrepreneur coaching group, in 2013, which really gave me the mental operating system as an entrepreneur. That's where we're at now and it's been quite a ride. My ability to understand the chiropractors’ struggle by being the trenches and then apply marketing and business to that resonates with my audience. I’m still practicing chiropractor, but also helping a lot of chiropractors out.”
5:50 – Building the Mastermind. "Listening to the audience is always important. We had a CSA retreat in 2018 in Delray Beach, Florida for everybody. We had students and 30-year doctors there. We had doctors doing very well and doctors that were struggling. It really ran the gamut. One of the doctors there mentioned he really enjoyed the weekend, but suggested I think about a group that's all-higher level that have figured it out but want to keep on getting better and better. I had been in a mastermind before and there wasn't anything like that for the evidence informed crowd. It definitely was an idea I was thinking about, and he talked about it a little bit, but then obviously COVID happened, so nothing really came about it. I just sat on it for a bit. Ultimately, in the summer of 2021, I realized that maybe in 2022 in Florida, I didn't have to worry about things getting shut down and I could do a live mastermind event."
7:41 – Defining Mastermind. "I want to take a minute to define what a mastermind is because it becomes a catchall term for anything that's a gathering of people. In my opinion, something could be a mastermind or a workshop. When I go to Strategic Coach, they call it a workshop because it's about 50-60 people, we have one coach facilitating everything and we're workshopping ideas. If you go bigger, it would be more like a seminar or a conference. Those are different. With a mastermind, I wanted to keep it a smaller group and at a higher level. I didn't want to make it about me. I wanted to make it about the group like a true mastermind. Everybody in that room provides value first and receives value second. I wanted to cultivate that. I wanted it to be highly applicable to their practice, so they could see an ROI on that. I also wanted relationship building to occur as well, so these chiropractors didn't feel like they were left on an island. Fortunately, we’ve done that. We started out in 2022 with 14 members, with almost a 90% return for 2023 and we went up to 22. I capped it at 25. I don't want it being any bigger than 25 people because I want it to be a mastermind, not a workshop. We hit that this year in 2024. We're maxed out, so I made an East group, then I started a West group. That's how all that started and where we're at. We're looking to fill that West mastermind group by next year to have two groups, then I'll take it from there."
9:45 – All-inclusive subject matter. "My biggest role in the mastermind is to cultivate and curate the information in the people. There's four weekends a year, and we have a theme for each weekend. Jay came for the West for the first weekend and it was all about the chiropractic entrepreneur framework, entrepreneurship, mindset, peoples, processes, and leadership. I would say, if you had to put it in one category, we wanted to come out of the gates with leadership. For weekend two on the West, we're going to talk about patient experience. The third weekend is going to be marketing and the fourth weekend is going to be vision casting. For the East group, we have different things happening – there’s one in Nashville in April about hiring and we brought in a specialist from a company called Vision Spark that's going to dive into best hiring principles. That'll be the whole theme. It could be something about marketing, business or communication. We've had someone on about delegating properly. We've had experts on all kinds of topics, and we create a theme around that each weekend."
11:35 – Mastermind is for the top 5%. "They all have really good practices. They're all doing well. They're probably in that top 5% of chiropractors, if not more. You have to be a chiropractor to attend. We do have partnerships. In our East group, we have spousal partnerships. We also have two father-son partnerships. They're not technically partnerships yet, but they will be at some point, right? That's been interesting as well. These are leaders in the profession. Some are what you would call an industry transformer. Not only do they have their private practice, but they're also the president of MPI. We've got a lot of people doing big things, not just in the profession. I would say the context of the mastermind is for the private practice. It's not necessarily for those side hustles or other businesses. If they do have a separate business, we're not diving into that type of stuff."
12:55 – Feed your leadership. "On the East group, we have four 60+ year old members in that group with huge practices. One is husband and wife. The other two are separate practices and they get so much out of the weekends. It's pretty cool to see them. They have phenomenal practices. They don't need to be there quote unquote, and they've been doing it for 30-40 years. They still have that beginner's mindset, which is something I start each year talking about. If you've been doing this for long enough, you don't have that beginner's mindset and you get stuck in your ways. I try to have everybody check their ego and have a beginner's mindset."
16:49 – Modernizing your marketing. "I just spoke at Parker in Vegas about modernizing your marketing. I was given the go-ahead to talk about a young chiropractor that bought a practice from a seasoned veteran and got a discount on that practice. It was beat up, it had paper files and no EHR with 1980s tables. You can picture the chiropractic practice I'm talking about. Over the last year, he's given a lot of effort and money. Even though he got a discount on buying it, because it wasn't modernized, he ended up paying for it in the long run. He probably would have rather just paid more for the practice if it was up to speed when he bought it. Ultimately, he did modernize it and it's been such a big thing for his practice. I used that story at Parker to talk about an extreme case of it, but also there's a lot of in-betweens and cases like that of practices. I've been brought on by even some state associations because what we're seeing is a lot of chiropractic practices are a little antiquated. The interesting thing is, if the chiropractors that are listening to this have been practicing for 20 years and I say antiquated chiropractic practice, they probably are thinking of that 1980s style practice. That was 40 something years ago. Now antiquated might just be, you haven't updated your website in five years. You might have nice equipment, but you have no technologies in your practice other than EHR. The antiquated practice now isn't from 1990 or 1985. It can be from 2012 and 2015 because it's moving so fast."
19:42 – Front stage vs backstage. "I focus on the marketing side of modernization. One of the things I talk about, as a strategic coach concept, is front stage and backstage. The front stage is everything the patient is going to see. The backstage is all the systems that are going to support the front stage. If you were at a play, you don't see the costume designer, writer, producer, or rehearsal, but you see the play on stage. The patients are going to see the front stage, where technology is going to produce a phenomenal experience for them there. The technology is also going to be important on the backstage, right? For example, we could run a great marketing campaign and get them to your website, where you have online scheduling. What if it's not compatible with your EHR and you don’t have a system in place with your team to make that work? It's a nice front stage, but the backstage didn't support it, so we have a problem there. What if we do a really good marketing campaign, and they get to the website, but it's from 2013? That's a bad front stage. That's what we talked about as far as trying to modernize the practice and there's a handful of things of why this is so important. Depending on where you're at in your career, one is, if you're looking to sell in the near future, your valuation of your practice is going to go down if you're antiquated. Two is, if you're not looking to sell it or it's going to be a little bit down the road, your practice is going to be way more profitable if you modernized it. You're going to drive revenue, profits, efficiency, better patient experience. They're going to refer more people to your practice. You're going to attract better talent to your practice. People don't want to come work for a practice that’s 15 years behind the times, whether it's associates, CAs or front desk. Lastly, it's going to build better culture in your practice as well. That's a synopsis of why chiropractors need to really start considering modernizing their practice."
22:19 – Battling the young guns for market share. "One of the things our older doctors are seeing, generally 50 and older and in certain cities, is the young guns that are coming in town and taking a lot of the market share in their community because they are tech savvy and have a good front stage and backstage. The older doctors are losing some of the market share, which is concerning. That's not even talking about the reimbursement issue they're having a hard time keeping up with. There are technologies helping with that as well, like what you guys are experts in. I focus on the front stage more, but that's some of the concerns I've seen from that crowd."
24:10 – Who, Not How. "Let me talk about the mindset. I'm not sure if I fall as an old or young guy now. I'm 44. I have one foot on each side. The good news for the old guy is that the old guy doesn't have to do all those things. They typically can afford to outsource it to the experts around them. My second and last Strategic Coach concept I’ll mention is “Who, Not How.” It’s the concept of thinking, “who can do this for me” rather than “how do I do this.” That's the lens I use. I'll write the check because I'm busy with patients. I'm not going to be the one at 58 years old that's figuring out TikTok or online scheduling. I'm going to find a person to do it for me and I'm going to write the check. The young gun has to do it themselves because they have a hard time writing a check right now. You can compete with the younger crowd because you can write the check and find the who to do it. That's the mindset the old guy needs to figure out."
26:46 – Conceptually understanding. "There's understanding it and not having to necessarily do it. I'll give you an example. Yesterday, we had a snafu with our website, so our DNS wasn't pointing to the website. We didn't have a website until we caught it. Luckily, I have a tech person that fixed it. That was me, understanding what was going on, but I wasn't going to do it. I knew I needed to get it out, so I have that wherewithal. You have to understand conceptually what's going on and some people are going to be more tech savvy."
34:21 – Chief AI Officer. "I was fortunate enough to get a free full access to Peter Diamandis Abundance360 conference out in LA. It's once a year. It's 25,000 to go to the four or five days and it's booked up. I got free live streaming and one of the things he said, which goes with what we've been talking about today was that, was show me a company that doesn't utilize AI or doesn't have a Chief AI officer and you're going to show me a company that's not going to exist in 5-10 years. In a lot of ways, he's right. As chiropractors, we're micro small businesses a lot of times. I understand it's hard to have a Chief Technology Officer or a Chief AI Officer, but you could find people that work as needed. You need to start looking for ways to have those resources to stay up to speed and modern, whether in AI, technology, or marketing. That's what our company, Modern Chiropractic Marketing, is trying to do in our mastermind groups or our coaching/marketing programs. We're trying to keep everybody in our MCM ecosystem up with the times. If it's something that's not in our wheelhouse, we have referrals for them to do that. My financial advisor brought in a guy for $2,000 to do an AI audit of his business. That's my challenge to chiropractors out there."
37:07 – Apply to the Mastermind. "We are an evidence-informed crowd. There’s a minimum your practice has to generate for revenue. It's not out of this world, but it's definitely a minimum. You can go to our website, modernchiropracticmarketing.com. You'll see a tab on the top that says Mastermind. The East group is maxed out, but the West group has room. We usually don't do this, but we're going to let people jump in for the West group’s second weekend if they commit to weekend two, three, and four. Weekend two is going to be in Denver, and our guest presenter is Miles Bodzin who is going to talk about all things patient experience. Weekend three, I'll be leading on marketing. Weekend four will be all about vision, and we'll have a bunch of other topics as well. If you want to do that, check that out. There's a contact form on that page. You can reach out to me, and we can set up a call and see if you're in right fit."
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