Activate Your Practice Podcast
The Activate Your Practice Podcast is hosted by the Chairman & Founder of Activator Methods, Dr. Arlan Fuhr. This podcast will cover a variety of subjects. Dr. Fuhr will interview guests from different backgrounds and professions, as well as talk about his 50+ years in chiropractic care.
Activate Your Practice Podcast
Attracting Patients through Excellent Care: Lessons from Dr. Sara Griffin
What happens when an aspiring mental health counselor discovers a new passion at the front desk of a chiropractic office? Join us for an eye-opening conversation with Dr. Sara Griffin, a seasoned chiropractor who shares her transformative journey from a mental health background to leading a successful chiropractic practice. Dr. Griffin dives deep into the importance of individualized treatment plans, comprehensive examinations, and the indispensable role of a supportive team in managing a bustling practice. If you've ever wondered how to attract new patients through exceptional care and build a strong social media presence, this episode is packed with actionable insights.
In addition to her practical strategies, Dr. Griffin gives us a sneak peek into her upcoming book idea, which captures lessons learned from individual patients' stories. Picture this: an idea born on a napkin during a casual restaurant visit, now evolving into a potential resource for both chiropractors and other medical professionals. Listen as Dr. Griffin discusses her collaborative approach to patient care, integrating a network of wellness professionals to offer a holistic treatment experience. From balancing professional and personal life to her experiences at Parker, where she was pulled from her speaking engagement to join us, this episode promises to be both inspiring and informative.
Hello, I'm Dr Arlen Foer, the chairman and co-founder of Activator Methods, and also we have a podcast today called Activate your Practice. And today we have with us Dr Sarah Griffith, and she is a 10-year veteran now and I consider that just a beginner, but she has a very nice practice and we're going to quiz her today about how did you get where you got to be? And so, sarah, welcome to the podcast and tell me, how did you get into chiropractic to start with?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for having me. So I actually was going to be a mental health counselor when I graduated from undergrad and I was looking for a job and it just so happened that a chiropractic office fit the bill. So I started working at the front desk of a chiropractic office. I was going to school at night and within about a year of being in practice an activator doctor, him and his wife said you know, you would be a really good fit as a chiropractor. And so I kind of shifted gears, went to chiropractic school, ended up graduating and starting to work for him and I was there for about a year and a half when he moved and I actually took over his chiropractic office. Where did you go to school? I went to undergrad in Grove City psychology major, and then I went to what is now the Northeast Colleges of Health Sciences, nycc, for chiropractic school. You were up in the Northeast? Yes, I was. Well, I'm from Buffalo.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're from Buffalo, okay, and how do you get new patients? That's always what every doctor asks how do you get new patients?
Speaker 2:Right. Well, I really believe in taking good care of the patient in front of you. I think the best marketing is how well you can take care of each patient that comes in the door. In my office, I would say a primary patient is a middle-aged, well-educated female, because she goes and she tells her friends about me, she goes and she tells her coworkers about me, she drags her husband in, she brings her kids and you know. So I just take really good care of the patient in front of me and they do my marketing for me. I mean, obviously you need a social media presence, but they do the heavy lifting.
Speaker 1:Well, how do you structure your self-treatment plans then?
Speaker 2:So I try to make sure that nothing is cookie cutter. So I'm not knocking the three times a week for six weeks and two times a week for six weeks, but I really believe that we believe in patient-centric communication in my office. We believe in a collaborative effort, coming up with something that fits each individual patient and I think that serves both them and practice growth well. So we sit down and we come up with something individual to the patient and then we talk about it as a care plan rather than selling a treatment plan.
Speaker 1:When you take a new patient and you don't just do an activator analysis, you do other exams correct, correct, correct.
Speaker 2:You'd be surprised at how many patients I hear that say I'm the second or third chiropractor they've seen and I'm the first one to do an exam. That kind of makes me cringe. So don't be that chiropractor. But we do full range of motion orthopedic, neurologic and then of course the activator exam, but very thorough.
Speaker 1:Now you told me before you were seeing about 350 people a week and that's a nice practice. How do you manage that by yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a lot, but I have a great team. So I think first and foremost, if you are going to have a high volume practice, you have to surround yourself with great team members, and everyone in my office has a role. They have a title and they have a role, and those roles come with unique responsibilities. There is a lot of overlap in responsibilities so that if someone is doing a lot in their particular role that day, someone else can pick up the slack in the other responsibilities. But my team is a well-oiled machine. We have a morning huddle, we have an afternoon huddle where we kind of go through our day, see where any potential pitfalls may be and how we can correct ahead of time for those pitfalls to keep things running smoothly. So they keep me on track.
Speaker 1:You sound like you have systems.
Speaker 2:Ah yes, systems. We talk a lot about systems in our office, but at this point I mean, it's just become part of the machinery and, like I said, I just really have a great team.
Speaker 1:But how do you maintain being an expert in all the different things that are going on?
Speaker 2:I really try and be an expert in the chiropractic adjustment in the activator technique and protocol and then I leave expertise in other fields to other people. So I've tried to create a network of people, both wellness practitioners and medical professionals, that I can refer my patients to. So if I'm seeing there's a patient with a ton of soft tissue issues, I have a massage therapist who works right in my office and that was a big thing I did as I transitioned. Taking over that practice is I kind of moved it from just a chiropractic office into more of a wellness center and that wellness center allowed me to bring in other experts. So I have a personal trainer who can do one-on-one training with people who need more work with movement or balance. I have a massage therapist who can do more work with people who need soft tissue work. So I try and be the expert in adjusting and then just surround myself with other great people who are experts in their field.
Speaker 1:How do you manage time like time for yourself, time for your husband, time for you? Know, how do you with a big practice?
Speaker 2:I mean, I've been there, done that and it's a job- yeah, Well, I don't I would dare say I don't always do it well. I'm pretty consumed by work I love. I love my office, I love my patients. I love my practice. I have a very understanding husband and family. I actually work with a lot of my family and that's a blessing. I love it. But I would say it's all about there is no balance. It's about intentional imbalance. I read that somewhere recently and I have been working a lot with the idea of kind of chunking my priorities. So if I want to take on a bigger priority right now which, for example, I want to do some more with speaking and writing I'm focusing that in short periods of time when I'm very high energy and I'm going to keep it very focused, and then in my downtime I don't think about it, I put it away and I can enjoy what I'm doing in front of me at that time.
Speaker 1:Why did you decide to call your clinic a wellness center?
Speaker 2:Because I believe in the chiropractic adjustment and its power. But I believe there is more to wellness than just a chiropractic adjustment. I believe nutrition comes into it, I believe movement comes into it. There's other therapies we can use to enhance the chiropractic adjustment, and I really wanted a space where patients could walk in and that was all under one roof. Um, they didn't have to, you know, go looking for someone or do the heavy lifting, the research on their own. I just wanted everything under one roof, that they could turn and have multiple modalities and practitioners at their fingertips.
Speaker 1:What would you do if you weren't a chiropractor?
Speaker 2:Well, obviously not become a mental health counselor, because I traded that one in. But when I was a kid I always thought I would be a detective. I actually had business cards made at one point and my family made up little mysteries for me to solve. But now I kind of like to think of myself as a detective of the human body. You know, when I sit down with that patient in front of me, I said we're going to figure this out together. You know, I know you've been to X, y, z, but now we're going to put all those puzzle pieces together and we're going to figure out what's going on and how we can fix it. And so you know I make it a collaborative effort, but I kind of like to think of it as being a little CSI, a little detective.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, patients like to have somebody take control of their health, and I think that's what you're doing is you're finding out the root problem and then you're taking control of it. And that's the detective part in you is you find out where the problems are, then you decide what am I going to do to fix it?
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Now activator analysis is a big part of your practice. Correct, and I've told people for 50-some years now. You have to have three things. You have to know where to adjust, when to adjust, and when to quit.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Do you find that's true?
Speaker 2:in practice I do, especially the first time If you're an activator practitioner, the first adjustment, or two if someone's coming from perhaps, a manual practitioner practice, and oftentimes they'll say, don't you want to do, you want to do a little more. And you have to know, you have to trust the technique, you have to trust the research behind the technique and your expertise in that and tell the patient this is what we're going to do today. Trust me, it's a process and we're going to take it step by step. So I think that's a wise saying. Did you hear what you said?
Speaker 1:Trust me, See practitioners. The patients that trust the practitioners are the ones that send people, and you were right when you said you get your satisfied patients. They're doing your sending. That's called cross-pollination, and that's what they do. In 10 years, you will have cross-pollination. You'll have all these different people talking to different people Once that starts. That's what makes a solid base. Yeah, so I think you're right on the track. What would you like to write a book on?
Speaker 2:Well, I have a little napkin started. I was at a restaurant once with my office manager and I said we could take some of my individual patients and the lessons I've learned from those patients, because you know, as a practitioner you learn from your patients too and you could kind of have a chapter about each patient and the lesson you've learned and that would be a book really marketed to chiropractors. But I would love to, you know, talk to other medical professionals and hear some of the lessons they've learned and kind of make it a broader scope. So it's still in the napkin phases but we're working on it.
Speaker 1:That's where it starts Exactly. There's several napkins. I didn't keep that. I wish I would have. Well, thank you for coming today and doing a podcast. We're at Parker and we had the opportunity because Dr Griffin was here speaking and so we just pulled her out of the speaking arena into the podcast arena, and so thank you very much, thank you. Thank you very much.
