EP19: 3 Things to Focus on When Tracking Data

In this episode, I dive into why tracking everything actually leads to tracking nothing. Too many business owners and chiropractors are measuring 30–40 different points, and instead of clarity, it creates confusion and chaos.

I’ll break down the 3 key things you should focus on when it comes to tracking data—the numbers that actually move the needle. We’ll talk about ownership, simplicity, and how to cut through the noise so your data works for you, not against you.

By the end of this episode, you’ll walk away with a framework to simplify your tracking, create clarity for your team, and build momentum in your business.

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Transcript

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This is the Austin Cohen Podcast where we talk real strategies for chiropractors ready to grow beyond the adjustment. If you're building a business, developing your leadership, and trying to build wealth without burning out, you are in the right place. Let's get to work What's up everybody? Welcome to episode 19. Here we are. We've made it to a place that many podcasts don't make it, and that's episode 19. It's crazy. I read all these stats about podcasts and how so many of them drop after episode three. It's 70% do we make a pass there and here we are at episode 19. Listen, I love when you guys. Send me messages on Instagram. It helps me know if we're going in the right direction, if we need to change directions, if we need more content, what content you want to hear. All that information you guys share with me and I love it. You know what I really would also love though? When you go on your Spotify or podcast and you see that up arrow and allows you to share to your stories, that would be so nice. Guys. That would be such a great gift. Just trying to get more eyes on this because chiropractors need this and we weren't taught a lot of this information in school. I've been fortunate enough to learn this through my experiences of owning over 20 chiropractic clinics in the last 16 years and starting up more than that. My recommendation for sure is please share let's get more chiropractor successful because. The more chiropractors successful, more, it helps chiropractic. And at the end of the day, that's really what this is all about. And it's just really good quality of life. In life. We all wanna be, living and getting our kids to grow up into as well. So please share. Alright. Today, oh, before we go into today, always. You know what I gotta share about. There's this event coming up. You may or may not have heard about it before, man. I may have talked about it once or 18 times before this but it's called Growth Summit. And for those of you guys that were there the last year and the year before, there is a capacity for the room. We can only hold 75 people, and I believe we're at like 58 now, or 59. So we are getting there. So my recommendation would be get your ticket, go to K one eighty.com, click a 10 growth summit. Use Code podcast. Here's also what's really cool. Once you join and get your ticket, you'll then get added to our Circle app. Why does that matter? Because in the Circle app, you will have access to me. There will be questions in there that we answer. There's a. September 30th, for example, you'll be, you'll have access to our CEO Roundtable call, which the director of Training for Roots Chris will be on. You will have access to any replays that are in there too as well. And the community is what you have access to, and that's all complimentary. For anybody who's attending, anybody who's attending Growth Summit, adventure Summit, or you're a ated client, you get access to a lot of information. But remember, use Code podcast again for$50 off. Shout out to our boy twisty. He's gonna be sponsoring the Friday night Happy hour. I'm hoping though that many of you guys will stay for Saturday night because we have a private house that we are gonna be hosting an after party in, which is gonna be really fun. So really excited for that. So yeah, hope you all can make it. It's in Serenbe, which is this amazing self-sustainable community golf cart community. For those of you guys that are there on Friday morning, I'd love to go for a run with you. Saturday morning. We're gonna go for a run as well. I just love hanging out with all of you. It's such a good community. Wow. Last year was so great and if you go to carbonated.com and you click at 10, grow something, you can see some of the pictures. But man, we are pumped. It's just crazy to me how it's what are we like five months away now? So it's almost here. I know, and some of you guys are thinking awesome. Then is crazy. How is he booking out already five months in advance and talking about these events so far in advance? Because my Q1 of 2026 is already planned that's why by October and many of you guys notice about me by October 15th, I will have. 2026 done. And I hope many of you too as well. So it gives you that November, december planning period. What I don't wanna do is finish my goals January because I finished my goals in January. Now I'm already a quarter behind and it really doesn't allow me to have that runway leading up to everything. If anything, which this isn't the topic of today's podcast, if anything, you're learning that. Planning can go very far. So anyways, if you don't have Q1 planned out, plan it out. And I really hope that you add adv growth Summit to your list and it'll be fun to hang out with all of you. So here's the message I wanna talk about today. And it's a trend I've been noticing working with a lot of congregated clients. We're seeing a lot of different, a lot of different trends in chiropractic. Why some people are successful, why some people aren't successful, why some people are struggling right now, why they've hit a plateaus in practice and a trend I'm noticing that's worth talking about. By the way, I'm gonna be sharing a ton of trends I'm seeing in practice'cause so many of you are just so close to massive success. It's unreal. You are so close. A few tweaks here and there, and you will easily double your practice. It's not about more new patients. It's keeping them, it's retaining them. It's also about some of the stuff we're gonna talk about today and the conversation we're gonna be talking about today is data. Ooh, what a fun conversation. Here, but here's what I'm noticing about it. Too many teams are tracking 30, 40, or even 50 different data points, and the result is not even clarity for them. The result is chaos. If you track everything, you track nothing. Remember that because so many of you. Have heard from your business coaches, you've maybe listened to podcasts before. You've maybe read some practice management manual from like the nineties or two thousands. It's not about tracking more, it's actually about tracking less. And the three, there's three messages I wanna get across today for everybody about. Valuable data tracking and how to really utilize this in order to create massive change. And if you stick to the end of this conversation today, I'm gonna give you what I go through my brain before we add it to our list of things we're gonna track data on. And for us, like the re, one of the reasons why we started Ated was because we were using so many different Google sheets everywhere, and that's how we tracked our data and our stats. The problem was I couldn't pull like different charts and I couldn't look at trends and I couldn't pull graphs up. That's. One of the biggest reasons why we started ate, and so many of you now are starting to move into the business dashboard on ate. You've been tracking your new patient manager, you've started now doing spinal health scores, you've now implemented the care plan calculator. You've now implemented the prescription of exercises, so you've already gotten that foundation down utilizing the software. Now you want to utilize business dashboard, which is the traction part of it. Which is cool, and my recommendation is before you take all of your data from your Google sheets and move it into Kiron 80, my recommendation is less is more. Find the 15 meaningful stats and then what you're gonna do is plug, give like a team member, three to four of those. That's their KPI. But if you're only tracking 15, that beats a laundry list though of metrics that no one no one will remember or can act on because it's too much, right? It becomes very confusing. Your team member will spend, 30 minutes just entering the data. You guys aren't analyzing it on a regular basis. Why?'cause you're just probably plugging into some Google sheet. And maybe you go back to it, maybe you don't. But it's really difficult. For me at least. It was difficult to see trends in Google Sheets. But so bring it down, right? So if you're not using coating, you're just using Google Sheets still, then just use, do 15 and then, pick a color per each team member and highlight it so that way that team member knows that's the KPI that they own. For example, if it's an office manager, they would own. Future appointments for the following week, or people that don't have their future appointments for the following week. So let's say I see 500 this week visits. She's then gonna pull up our stats on Monday. When she pulls up stats on Monday, she's gonna wanna see how many people don't have their next appointment outta that 500. That's a big number we track. And what we found was. Back in the days, it was like in the sixties, right? Like over 10% of the people left our office without their future appointment. We wanted to drive that down, that number, we wanted to get it down to 40. And so what we did was we started telling people before they left, we used our language. Now is, let me check, so lemme check. Lemme check. Hey John. Lemme check when your next appointment is. Hey Steve. Hey Jenny. Lemme check when your next appointment is. So every time a patient leaves the office, whether the employee thinks they know when their next appointment is, the conversation is always alright, Steve, lemme check when your next appointment is. It looks like Monday at 9:00 AM again, like you've been doing. Sounds great. We'll see you on Monday at 9:00 AM. Also, booking people out too as well, and mapping out their appointments. There's a strategy that's put into play there, and we use that because that's a very important number for us. One of the another important number that we would look at is black hole. For example, every month at the end of the month, we just plug in what our black hole number is into our business dashboard. So whatever our current like dashboard says our black hole is, that's the number that gets plugged into our monthly stat. Why is that important? Because if we see it dropping, what are we gonna do? We're gonna pour into that experience. So if we see, like right now ours. Is a 35 black hole number. It's 35.3, but if I see it dropping to 34 to 33 to 32, I know I need to create a better experience between 26 and 32. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna sit down as a team, we're gonna add it to our issues list, and we're gonna have a conversation now about how we can drive. Better results for that 26, let's say to 32 visit mark. So we can build that up. Guys. We're using the data to make decisions and I don't think a lot of people are doing that. Doctors for example, like ours is commit rate, but also case average. If you're using the new patient manager in there, it tells you how much each value amount was. So let's say a patient starts care in your office. The value of that plan was, let's say$5,000. You put that in there. Why does that matter? Because if you have multiple doctors, then what you can do is you can see in. The average case value per doctor. So if, Johnny signed up 20 people and Sally signed up 20 people, but Johnny did a hundred thousand dollars of revenue and Sally did$40,000 of revenue. We know Sally's got a problem of what care recommendation she's giving. Maybe not, but we need to look at that. Maybe she's a younger doc. And talking about money is very difficult for her. So maybe we need to bring her up and focus on confidence. The point is use your data to make decisions and bring it down. You don't probably need to be doing as much as you think you're doing, by the way. Okay? So that would be my first recommendation. Less is more. Number two, ownership matters when people know exact. What number they are responsible for. It sharpens their attention and it gives them a target to hit. Like I said earlier, our office manager is tracking people that don't have their next appointment. Let's say, it was. 60, but our goal is 40. She knows forty's the number. Now, some of those people just don't like to book their next appointment, but you know what, there's definitely not more than 40 in our office, and so everybody's gotta have that number. If you're a, if you're a doctor and you, your commit rate, let's say is like 72%. The goal's then to gotta get be to 80%. What are you gonna do? Maybe you're gonna start recording your report of findings. Maybe you're gonna start sending'em to friends. Maybe you're gonna build a group of people. Maybe you're gonna go to close for Cairo. Maybe you're gonna upload it. Maybe you're going to have ai, listen to some conversations that you're having. Like you'll do a practice one and then maybe you'll have AI listen to, and then you'll talk to, Hey, what did I do wrong here? What could I have done better to drive? Value for the patient. So you're utilizing ai, right? So what you're doing is you have a target, which makes it a lot easier. And that's why I said three to four because if everyone on your team has three to four KPIs that they're being tracked on, and then there's targets that they have, it makes it a lot easier. I'm telling y'all right now at Growth Summit, I think the biggest value and the most fun conversation we're gonna have is Friday at two o'clock. Why? We're gonna be talking about something I love, which is programs and processes. And that is gonna be the biggest game changer. Why? Because it's gonna create clarity for your practice. You'll have so much clarity for your practice by four o'clock on Friday at Gross Summit. And what's gonna be, and by the way, the conversations I have, and I hope you're starting to realize this, these are not conversations that most chiropractors are talking about in this profession. The business coaches, the, I don't know. It just, it's not happening. It's just different. Why, and the only reason why is, and this side is just all the conversation that I'm having and where really I'm getting a lot of my strategies from are non chiropractors. We're getting these from people who are just driving really high hospitality businesses, service based industries that are doing a really good job. Why?'cause that's what we're in. We're in the service based industry. Restaurants, coffee shops hair salons, dental op practices, spas, those are like us, right? And that's where a lot of these strategies are gonna come from. And on Friday, you will have the strategy, but what I'm gonna show you is how to create clarity. And when you create clarity for your team on the KPI that they're tracking, that helps them know too, as well where they need to go, and then they can put a roadmap together to get there. This is where, once again, less is more. Because if you guys are tracking, let's say 50 different stats and they've got 15 different stats that they've gotta focus on, no chance by the way, zero chance that's gonna happen for them. Last one is this. Confusion kills execution. Your data should bring clarity. That is the word. If y'all are thinking about a good word for your career for 2026, and you're starting to put together your goals, I'm telling you right now the word clarity. Clarity for your team on where they're going, clarity for your practice on where it's going. Clarity for your goal. Everything should drive around. Clarity. Clarity for your patients. How it's like, how do I bring more clarity to everyone's life? Around me would be the question. Listen, the more noise there is, the harder it is to see the signal. You want to really focus hard on bringing that clarity to the team, but you gotta do it in a focused way. Okay. So those are the three things. Listen, less is more ownership matters and confusion kills execution. And I'm gonna just share with you a quick story'cause it reminds me of times where like I train for races and I'm a big data guy by the way. Like I'm huge on tracking data. But if you're somebody who trains for, I'm a big endurance racer, as many of you guys know I do. I've done ultra marathons, iron Man. The Adventure Summit event this year is rim to rim. But if you track, if you're training for all these things and you're tracking, let's say heart rate, your pace, your mileage, your shoes, you're wearing calories, burned elevation, gain, cadence, hydration and all the so many different things that you could track on Strava apps, your whoop app, your Apples, your Apple watch. There's so many different things you can track. You are gonna drown in the numbers, but if you focus on just three core stats, let's say weekly, if I focus on, let's say like weekly mileage, my average pace and my recovery, that's it. I actually will know just on that if I'm gonna get faster and stronger, huh? Just those three stats right there, by the way. If I'm hitting that, like when I was doing ultra, if I was training, getting 50 to 70 miles end a week, I was getting my average pace down, let's say to like the 9, 9 30 for long runs. And of course like there would be like sprint drills along that, then I'm also tracking my recovery on my whoop. And if I just look at that, I know if I'm getting better or not. And that's it. It's the same with business. The right handful of numbers owned by the right people creates momentum. And I love that we're getting to this back half back quarter of the year. Because for so many of you guys, this is great timing for this conversation. But the, remember also the wrong pile of numbers is gonna create paralysis and that's. Not what we're trying to do. So I said at the end of this conversation, I'll give you a practical takeaway. So before you start building your dashboards, here's the questions. And we just had this for those of you guys that are in the Circle app, I, Dr. Jeff just asked this question, and here's what I. Said the three things you want to ask are this, does the number, does this number move the needle? Who owns it? And then what decision will we make if this number goes up or down? And if you can't answer those questions, you don't track it. So I'm gonna give you a quick example. We track decompression plans on how many people are on wellness decompression plans. Why? Because that is part of a program we talk about called our annual choice benefit program. So what we know is if that number starts to go down, what are we gonna do? We're gonna start doing more annual choice benefits with our clients. But we have that number in there. We have wellness plans that we're tracking to as well. And how many people are on monthly wellness plans. That's the health of our business. That's literally like the heartbeat of our business. Why We all love chiropractic in our practice, we think everyone should be adjusted for the rest of their lives. Whether it's, obviously the frequency is different on everybody, but I think everyone should just I think everyone should see a dentist the rest of their life. I think everyone should see a physical therapist the rest of their life. I know a lot of people see PTs just for injuries. Every single person listening to this right now could probably utilize, could benefit today from seeing a physical therapist, the right one to help them with mobility soft tissue. Just like a chiropractor could help all of them with a healthier, functioning nervous system. It's the same thing. I love, obviously, you can tell from this, I'm very passionate about the chiropractic profession. I really wanna help it. Please share this. Hope you guys enjoyed, got value out of this podcast. And if you did, you know where to go. My Instagram, Dr. Austin Cohen, send me a dm and once again, if you're not getting my weekly newsletter present Joys and best practices. That's another outlet you have access to me on. It goes out every Friday. You would have, if you want to get access to it, just once again, it's, if you go to my Instagram, Dr. Austin Cohen what you would do is you click on my links, it'll say Subscribe to the newsletter. It's a free weekly newsletter that goes out. And, it's really just what's the thoughts on my mind. So it's pretty fun, good conversations that we have over there. I hope you guys enjoy this conversation today, and I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to the Austin Cohen podcast. If this episode helped you grow, share it with another chiropractor who's ready to go beyond the adjustment, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. To learn more about building your business, leadership, and life on purpose, visit chiro one eighty.com or follow Austin on Instagram at Dr. Austin Cohen.