EP37: How to Finish the Year Strong

In today’s episode, I’m diving into one of the most important rhythms I’ve learned in business and in life: how you finish the year determines how you start the next one. I walk through the exact process I use every December — reviewing roles, assessing capacity for the coming year, and studying our New Patient Metrics from January until now — to get honest about where we’re aligned and where we’ve drifted.

I’ll also share what some of the great companies I study do at the end of their year. Lululemon’s vision reset… Toyota’s tune-up… Apple’s quiet sprint… Amazon’s “working backwards” approach… Ritz-Carlton’s culture reset… and Nike’s practice of closing the loop. Each one uses December as a launch pad so they enter January with momentum while the rest of the world is still warming up.

For us in chiropractic, this same rhythm matters. January isn’t just a new month — it’s the perfect moment to update Spinal Health Scores, reconnect with patient goals, tighten our frequency recommendations, and make sure our care plans are aligned with integrity.

This episode is all about finishing present, starting strong, and stepping into 2026 with clarity and congruency.

If you’re ready to build momentum now — not later — this one’s for you.

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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 is up everybody? Whew. Finishing the year strong. Hope you guys enjoyed some of these extra episodes we've been dumping in there, today's Tuesday, and you know what that means? This is when we go full, we put it out on the content. Tuesday's when we do it, that's our content day. I love it. Really excited about today's episode by the way. This is a good, a great end of year finish strong episode. I have some strategies as far as what we do at Corrective Chiropractic in order to lean in to build momentum going forward into 2026. Real quick for Growth Summit, by the way, I still have a few tickets left for our dinner on Saturday night. The dinner costs, it's$130. It's a full core it's like a four course, three course, something like that. Dinner with our celebrity speaker, Charlie Rocket. So if you want to tap into someone who's doing big things and has built a massive brand. I would recommend coming to the dinner, by the way, to have this access and be part of this experience. It's gonna be really cool. So yeah, really excited. We're not making any money on this dinner, by the way,'cause he is there to actually talk about his foundation and the work that he's done. So I think it's a really good opportunity too, as well for people to learn how serving others can be a big part of your life. So make sure you get up for that dinner and then, other than that, there's nothing else to talk about because Growth Summit sold out. So it's gonna be a great experience. But if you haven't come to dinner yet, you gotta make sure you get to the dinner for that. And if you don't know about the dinner and you're coming to Growth Summit, please email me atAustin@chiroeighty.com. Okay. So today though, what I wanna talk about is something that's been on my mind a lot lately, and you know how I roll in life like last mile, fast mile. Last ten second rule which essentially is in a workout where if you're doing a workout, it's a 20 minute workout and there's 10 seconds left, you don't just stop moving your body and stop working out. You actually continue and go harder. Those last 10 seconds, how are we finishing the year? And this is not that, cliche of, you know how you'll see motivational speakers? Oh, we finished strong. We finished strong. No, I'm talking the real work. There's that quiet, some honest conversation, some uncomfortable reviews. That's what gets the momentum going for the next 12 months, because every December I gotta slow myself down just enough to look back and ask the right questions. Are the roles clear in my company? Do I have the right people in the right seats? What does my capacity look like for 2026? And when I look at our new patient manager. What is that story telling me and who do we need to reach out to as we move into 2026 too as well? And I'm not doing this to judge myself, to judge any of the clinics. We're doing it for alignment, and I'll share what that means as we go forward. But every week, every year, I've just drifted into January and I've drifted through February too. And that is not how we are gonna lead. And that is a past pattern because what we used to do back in the days was we would essentially just shut it down the last couple weeks of the year. Not building any momentum. As we moved into the new year, we would literally go hard until December 15th to December 20th. And, that, that was really it. And we don't want that anymore, by the way. And we stopped doing that a few years ago, like when I finished the year with Clarity. The new year is already in motion. I've noticed something. Every great company that I've been studying, the ones who have been around for decades do the exact same thing. And I've got some examples I wanna share with you. And then I wanna share how in chiropractic are we doing this for our company? So like Lululemon, great example, they have something called the Vision Reset. And I remember reading how Lululemon every December what they do is they do their reset. So they'll walk through the teams through their vision and goals, not KPIs, not projections, they're talking vision. For their people and they're looking at the human behind each of these roles, so that way when January hits, people don't walk in confused. They're walking in aligned with who they are, who they need to be and what they're doing. And for us it just reminds like we update our spinal health scores on in January for every patient. And like I've said this so many times, I just wish the whole chiropractic profession would get aligned with spinal health scores. Because every single chiropractor, I'm assuming, is doing some objective testing, range of motion orthopedic tests. You've got x-ray analysis, you maybe you're doing some insight scans, like you're doing objective testing. And I have this platform where you can literally just enter everything in real quick and show the patient their spinal health score, which is how most humans can relate to things on a scoring system. And now it also gives them clarity for where they need to go as well for the future. So I just like would love for our profession to get aligned on that. There's obviously a ton of people doing it already, but I just, if my, if a patient in my office is going to another clinic, let's say in California, they could roll in with this scoring system and it would just be like continuation of care. It be so easy. But yeah, it's like before we build the plan, we need a baseline. So before Lululemon builds their year, what are they doing? They need a baseline too as well. And so it's creating that alignment. We do something called our annual choice benefit program, which is when we update everyone's spinal health scores. Because as I'm talking about here with Lululemon, it's the same thing where with this alignment issue is you may have patients on plans that don't work for them anymore and you may have patients in your office who need other services in your services. So like for example, you may have a patient that needs decompression, but they're not doing decompression'cause they haven't had an updated spinal health score or an updated exam in a while. So now what this does is this creates that alignment to then funnel them to the best protocols and best treatment that they would need. It's I've got so many people in our office who've been coming in for 10 years plus their bodies are getting older. Things are changing. They may need more treatment, they may need more services. Like of course they always need chiropractic. That's the number one thing, and we can all get behind that. But is the frequency and alignment still is there congruency in that? So I just wanna make sure that we're aligned there. So that's Lululemons. I love that. Toyota. Clear the friction. Love this. What Toyota does, and something that stuck with me is every December they treat it like a tuneup, right? So they find bottlenecks, inefficiencies, unclear roles in the company, and they tighten everything up before the year starts. So for them, they've understood the concept that like momentum does not come from adding more, but it actually comes from removing friction. It's, for example, like I want to in 2026, grow more. By removing certain things in my life. So I don't wanna add more. I actually wanna remove more to earn more. And it all comes down to removing the friction of finding what the bottlenecks are too, as well, that are holding me back in my life. And I talked about this last week where I talked about the vertical integrations that weren't serving me, but as I've focused more on vertical integrations where there's this flywheel effect now where it's like the more people that come to Growth Summit, the better Kne does, the better Kne does, the better Chiropractic does, the better Corrective Chiropractic does. The better, growth Summit does and Empire program and all of these things just continuation this flywheel. And it's the same thing that you could build out for your life too as well. But it comes down to removing the friction and clearing that up and tuning everything up for 2026. And one thing we do as well in our company is we actually review our new patient manager. And so like for all of you who have Chiro 180, you go into your new patient manager and what you would do is go back to January and look at. Who dropped off in 2025 that doesn't come in anymore, but would be a good candidate to come back in 2026. Listen, like life gets busy for all of us, and when you fall off a routine, it's definitely hard to get back on a routine, but it's about getting back on the routine to be able to be consistent with it. Like I know for me, like I get up to go to the gym at 5:00 AM if I go out town for a week or two and I'm sleeping in until let's say six 30 or seven, then. It's hard for me to get back on that routine again of getting up at five to get back to that gym for the five 30 class. Like your patients are humans too as well, and that happens. It's not that they don't want to come in, it's, they just gotta build it back into their routine again. It's who needs to be, who needs this back into the routine? Listen, obviously everybody needs it back into their routine, but what would be really interesting is going back to January, and this is something we do in our office, is we look at who are those people. So it, it's just a great place to show you like where's momentum leaking and where it can grow. Apple, they do something too as well that I love. I love, by the way, one thing I love to do is study these types of companies, right? These are the companies that are the ones that are just doing things differently. We're studying companies that are doing a hundred million billion dollars. And why I wanna study that is because they've got systems like really good systems and structure and scale. Those are the places that like I love to study and incorporate those models back into corrective chiropractic and every December, what do you notice about Apple is? Listen, they go quiet. You don't hear a lot about them. There's no big releases. There's no noise. It's quiet. But internally, they're sprinting. They're looking at their product roadmap, they're getting the teams aligned. They're tightening up the screws on everything that matters. Like when the world is getting tired going into January, apple is actually already at full stride. I've always loved this idea like you're starting the year like a rocket because the launchpad was built in December. Like behind the scenes right now, I don't know if I've ever worked this much and I'm doing this because once again, like actually what I'm doing right now is removing a lot of friction. I'm adding in more vertical integration. We're adding some team players into defining roles for clarity as I move into 2026 to start delegating better. But it also creates opportunity for them to, as well, to grow into a bigger role. And so that, but that's been something that I wanted to make sure I was clear on back in June, July of what those roles look like, who they're for everything defined, what does winning look like in that role? And then have the tool the toolboxes built to as well. And that way when we start 2026, we're not just going into it slow, we're. January two, when we open back up, it's like we're going hard, like we already know actually what we're doing. The plan's already built. We're ready to launch. Same thing as it is, same thing what all these other companies are doing right now. Amazon, Jeff Bezo has this concept. He calls it working backwards and at the end of the year, Amazon imagines, they're already at December for next year. And I ask this question all the time too, but they write their press release as if the big win already happened. Then what they'll do is they'll reverse engineer their steps needed to make it real. So think about how powerful that is, right? It's the same thing you know you could do with patient goals. We do with employee goals, but what we end up doing is I would wanna ask a team member, it's hey, if it was December 31st, 2026, what needs to happen for you to say it was a winning year? And then what you do is you build backwards. For example, one of our vision for corrective chiropractic for our 2030 vision is every single clinic in the company will be at 75% capacity by 2030. So let's say a clinic's at 40%, where do they need to be by the end of next year in order to be on track for 75%? It's working backwards, and that is a great thing to start doing right now as we look at December Ritz Carlton, one of my favorite companies to study, they do something called Culture First. So they start their end of your process with one question, where did our culture drift? Because what they know is that if culture is aligned. The service, the experience, the retention, all of it follows. And for me, listen, that is personal because in chiropractic, our culture is everything. Like in your team experience, in your patient experience. Like patients can feel the congruency, just like they can feel the drift. And when there's momentum in the practice, the patients know that. And whether it's. Lack of momentum and lack of present time, consciousness in the practice, they can feel that as well. And one of the last ones company I'll share, because like I can do this all day, but like another last company I'll share is Nike. They do something very simple. They review their goals at the years end and they desi decide what stays, what goes, what matters now, and then what doesn't. So they don't drag unfinished projects into January just because they're unfinished. They just choose what deserves their energy. So like essentially it'd be like going through your issues list. And if something's been on there for a long time and it doesn't serve you anymore and it doesn't matter now, then just get rid of it and that's something I've had to learn in my own life too as well. Not everything deserves to come with you into next year. Want me to repeat that again? Not everything deserves to come with you into next year, and that's what I'm talking about. What I'm doing right now is like contracting to expand. Maybe it's not about having so many clinics and carrying the ones that aren't doing as well. Maybe it's about contracting clinics and then expanding, maybe it's about contracting clinics we accept into CHI 180, but then expanding as we develop and build more systems and there two as well. So just thinking about, those four questions that Nike asked, right? It's what stays, what goes. What matters now and what doesn't matter now, great questions to ask as you move into the new year. Connecting all these stories, right? Lulu, Toyota, apple, Amazon, Ritz, Nike. You hear a theme, don't you? And the theme is that great companies build momentum before the rest of the world starts waking up and the rest of the world. IE businesses, by the way. And that's why it's always good. It's who are you surrounding yourself with? Who are the people that you're collaborating with? Because you could be around people right now that are saying, oh yeah, December is when we shut it down, and then we will start the year strong. No, they're actually not starting the year strong, by the way. They're actually starting the year very weak, and the momentum really won't start for them start picking up until mid-January to late January, so they're almost missing an entire month. Why? Because they're not building momentum right now. Great companies create momentum and that is something we're doing right now inside of our clinics. Like I have a meeting today with my team, and what we're gonna be doing is looking at all the roles as we move into 2026 of our company and who's assigned to what, who has what KPIs assigned to them, what does winning look like in that role? Then we're looking at our capacity. Where are we and where do we want to be by the end of 2026, like right now, we're at 61% for one of our clinics. By the end of next year, I actually wanna be at 75% and I have a roadmap for how we're gonna get there. We're studying our new patient manager today. We're going back to January one and our new patient manager that's in CHI 80 of every single patient. And we're looking at who hasn't been in a while and how do we get'em back in. We're also gonna be going through and looking at our value by referral source for the year. That report I put, we put in there and looking and seeing where do we need to invest more time and where do we take away time from. And then it'll also allow us to review the influencers that come into our practice as well, about who do we need to keep accepting into our practice and who needs to go for our practice. What this is doing for us is it's allowing us to maintain integrity for the practice of keeping us congruent. It's really all it's doing. January becomes momentum, not a restart. Most people will ease into the year. We're going into the 2026 with clarity. Alignment, congruency, and really a renewed sense of purpose if you actually think about it. So I shared this from the beginning of this podcast episode. Every single one person should look at their life. It's like, how are you finishing projects? How are you finishing a workout? How are you finishing? If you're running five miles, how are you finishing the last mile? When I ran the 5K over Thanksgiving and I did the Turkey trot with my family, my son and I ran it together. We ran like an 11 minute mile for the first mile, and then it was like a 10 minute mile. Mile too mile three was an 8 26 minute mile pace. The last mile was the best mile, and then we finished the 0.1 at a 6 23 minute mile pace. It was awesome. Most people will slow down right now, but the ones who grow, the ones who find something deeper, what they're gonna do is they're gonna lean in and they're gonna pour into this how you finish the year. Determines how you start the year and how you start will determine the story the 12 months from now. So here's gonna my challenge for you. All of you do not coast into January. Finish this year with clarity review team roles. Look at your new patient manager in January 2nd, we start our annual choice benefit program where we'll be updating everybody's spinal health scores for the next six weeks. It's already planned. It's already ready to go. The graphics are ready to go. The newsletter's ready to go. The poster for the front is ready to go. The flyers are ready to go. We're here now. What I will say is take a breath in the holidays, relax a little bit. Yes. Right now we're going hard behind the scenes. However, I'm gone the 19th through the 26th of the December, and when I'm gone this year, like I'm gone. I'm not checking Slack. I'm probably not gonna be checking email. I'm done. And I get back on the 26th. And 28th or the 29th is a workday for me because I wanted I like to have a couple workdays before the new year starts to start getting that engine going again. And I'm already in motion for 2026. Listen, momentum is built by choice and the year you want has got to start now. The circle you're around right now is either telling you to chill out the rest of the year, or they're telling you to build momentum for the rest of, for next year. I would recommend look at the people for whose shoes you may want to be in and start taking some of that advice. But I am telling you, if I am one of those people, I am telling you to shut it down and be present where you are. When you do shut it down, don't even think about work. You're probably gonna take five days off between now and the end of the year. Shut it down. Do not think about anything and go into 2026 really strong and make next year the best year you've ever had in practice. I'm pumped to be part of your journey. I appreciate you and your trust listening to these podcasts. I hope I get to meet you at some point next year, whether that's a Growth Summit, whether you're an Adventure Summit person, whether you're a Chiro 180 person, and you join us on all of our growth calls that we have monthly, which are essentially our coaching calls that we do, or you're my Empire program. But there's a lot of cool things that are coming next year from myself and Kyron, ADI, and so I really hope you stay connected and part of that, everyone have a great day and we'll talk again this 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.