Dr. Allen Miner has an entrepreneurial spirit, which has led him to successfully serve the chiropractic profession in many ways! Dr. Miner is the CEO and co-founder of Chiro Match Makers, founder of Ideal Team Consulting, and founder of Illumin8 Chiropractic. At Chiro Match Makers, Dr. Miner places hundreds of associate doctors and chiropractic assistants into chiropractic offices worldwide by using predictive and cognitive assessments to match the right person with the right opportunity. On top of being a CEO and/or founder, Dr. Miner is also a co-author to “The Chiropractic Code.”
In this of TechTalk Podcast, Brad Cost, Dr. Jay Greenstein, and Dr. Allen Miner sit down to discuss:
The story, purpose & impact behind the chiropractic staffing agency.
Using Big Data Analytics in today's chiropractic world.
Top 3 reasons chiropractors are getting it wrong!
SHOW NOTES:
3:11 – Founding THE chiropractic staffing agency. “I had great results with migraine headaches from a chiropractor, had a career in finance that I hated, and chiropractic became the purpose for my life. I made the decision to go to chiropractic school and started my own clinic after graduation. We built one of these massive mega practices in Albuquerque and it was one of the most fun times of my practice. However, we sold it and that really started my entrepreneurial bug. We started applying our mistakes and opening new clinics, and realized staffing was a big component of our success and failure. I got really interested in the metrics of measuring people, teams, cognitive and behavioral assessments. I found that was a really good predictor of which teams succeeded and which ones failed. I was doing all this work with assessments and a lot of other business owners started asking me to help them out, so I started a company called Ideal Team. Then I told my wife, Wendy, that I needed to figure out how to do staffing, so that's how the staffing company was born. We’ve been placing associate doctors, CAs and office managers for several years now.”
6:34 – Setting up entities worldwide. “There's a lot of data we sort through when we're staffing for an office, so we started using offshore teams for Chiro Match Makers out of Mexico, Honduras, and the Philippines. We were finding amazing talent. Everybody on our team is college educated. We're getting nurses, teachers, engineers, pharmacists. They make a better living working for us than they do in their chosen profession in their country, so we started hiring people out of those three countries. However, we realized they all work for somebody else, so we learned how to set up entities in the Philippines, Mexico, and Honduras. We could hire and train people directly, so they were our team members. It really helped revolutionize our business.”
7:50 - Stabilizing work for doctors. “Last year, somebody on the team mentioned having trouble with chiropractors. The rates and the cost for associates have jumped dramatically since COVID, so we wanted to know how we could help our docs immediately put more money in their pocket. Could we take our Vas, get them HIPAA certified and train them as chiropractic assistants? Could we deploy them remotely to take over the boring remedial tasks in an office? That's the thought experiment that landed us here today with you. We built SOP manuals for every task we take over. If somebody on our team doesn't work out, we can replace them in a day or two with the manuals and training. All of a sudden, a big chunk of the work done in the practice is stabilized. Anyways, it's been a blast.”
10:20 – Learning from scar tissue. “I've gotten really good at learning from my scar tissue. Early on, we had some clients that expected us to do things because we weren't clear up front. We realized we had to be really clear in onboarding on defining the tasks we do and how we do them. We were creating these beautiful standard operating procedure manuals for our team to use, and we started to give them to the office if there were no manuals for the next person to learn. We help professionalize and stabilize a clinic. All the tasks they give to us, they now have those manuals, whether they use us or not. It just helps bring these clinics up a level on professionalizing.”
16:12 – The secret sauce. “Our big secret is the MPI database. We have our recruiting teams calling doctors all day long about our jobs, so I think we have one of the best databases in chiropractic. When you're a recruiter like us, you can buy AI bots that go behind the job boards and scrub for anybody. That helped us build such an amazing VCA team because we use the cognitive ability and predictive behavioral assessments. We never thought we'd be in the offshore assistant business when we started doing assessments, but there was a natural path on it. We’re taking work off of their existing CA's, so they're happier and overworked. Between the AI, a great assistant, and a doctor with a great set of hands, the doctor can serve a lot more people and put a lot more money in their pocket. The other problem is none of us are good at everything, so we let them do what they're good at and we'll take all the monotonous repetitive stuff that nobody likes to do. That's been helpful for job satisfaction, which we never saw coming either. That's been the fun part and a reward for us.”
25:18 – Using the data for good. “I think chiropractors are blind to a lot of the different jobs in tech. Jay, you're more aware than most everybody, but there's so much data in our world now in our EHR systems. A lot of what our VA's do is pull KPIs, so doctors have the data of how many people they saw, how much they collected, who didn't show up. All of the basic stuff that really changes how you do things when you start to see some trending data for what’s succeeding and what’s failing. It's those same people that go to school to learn how to manage that data. Believe it or not, that stuff is trickling down to the chiropractic level.”
26:14 - Big Data Analytics. “I learned long ago from a mentor that a great executive assistant is really key when you're running an organization. You don't appreciate that until you really get used to having an assistant because your mind doesn't go there. You get sucked into so many remedial things, but it’s a game-changer once you get the freedom of not having to call the 10 EHR companies to shop the new one and can have somebody else do the legwork. I don't have to pull 50 research articles on a presentation I'm doing. I'll have somebody else whittle them down for me. I don't have to shop my competition. We can all spend our time on our gifts, which is something entrepreneurs miss and burn themselves out on because they're wearing so many hats. When you bring in a great assistant in AI and somebody who understands the business, it's like you have a team of 5-10 people around you, and that's where practices’ and business’ worlds are changing.”
32:13 – Three reasons chiropractors get it wrong. “Chiropractors are healers that have this huge heart and love for people. A lot of us end up in business that maybe didn't intend to be in business. Even you intended to be in business, I don't think chiropractors appreciate hiring and staffing as an entire field unto itself because we've never trained in it. You find yourself in your business and you need help. There wasn't a lot of conversation about how do you hire great? How do you build culture? How do you build a stable team? I think that's a blind spot or an afterthought. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get totally burned. Then there's an economic side of it. You know, the world has gotten more expensive. We all see it with the cost of burritos, gas, and everything else. A lot of chiropractors have not moved their rates up, but there's never been a better time to increase your rates. Everybody else has. You need to bump those up, $10, $15, $20, and you're not going to get any pushback because the world's used to it. You need to be able to pay these salaries that are able to compete. Then the art of it is back to the behavioral side of things. Once you understand, you can measure how you put a team together. The best teams are usually made up of diverse people, not only in age, gender, or background, but also in behavioral makeup. Chiropractic diversity tends to mean everybody is the same in the office - either everybody's outgoing or everybody's reserved. Both are great, but you end up with flaws. The outgoing office isn't noting, documenting, or charting properly while the technical offices struggle to bring people in. Good teams are made up of people with all kinds of different backgrounds. Those are the high-level reasons why chiropractors get it wrong and get burned.”
36:17 – Chiro Match Maker services. “Virtually, we do a lot of things chiropractors don't think of. Instagram is one of the most popular - be a good steward of your Instagram by liking and comments on your followers posts, DMing to welcome new followers to the page, or sending an invitation to come in as a patient. We started there, then we brought in a team of designers to do branding guides and posting schedules. We'll create or edit the content, design the posts, and have content managers post for you. We do a lot with insurance, like getting on the phone for insurance verifications or authorizations. We do a lot with note transcription for the doctors who don’t have the time or bandwidth. They'll send us audio recordings of patient notes on secure lines that are HIPAA certified, so we can transcribe notes and get them into their EHR system. We ask people to think of us as an agency because we bill like it's one person for 20 hours a week, but a lot of times it's two to four people on your team. We do a lot of phone work, like answering calls. We learn EHRs and coding systems, so we can help the patient schedule or move an appointment, find the office with our directions, and follow up with the doctors. We use text messages and create a secure link if people use a database system. We have people set us up as a separate admin login so everything can be tracked separately. We do a lot of KPI reporting - there's some great companies out there that pull data, like TrackStat or Blue IQ, but sometimes it doesn't work with a certain EHR or doesn't get all the data they want, so they'll have our team go in manually, pull the data, and put it into reports. We do a lot of executive assistant traveling, email management, and research.”
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