EP45: Build Freedom First, Then Build More

A lot of chiropractors feel called to build something bigger. A second brand. A program. A new offer. Another stream of income.

But expansion without freedom usually just creates a more complicated version of the same problem.

In this episode, I break down why I believe freedom has to come first and how living at least 80 percent of your ideal schedule is the real prerequisite for building anything new. I share the honest story behind how Adventure Summit, Growth Summit, Chiro180, Empire, and Freedom Accelerator were created, not as money grabs, but as responses to real needs inside my clinics, my life, and our profession.

We talk about the difference between creation and distraction, why adding more too early can quietly steal your time, and how clarity, margin, and alignment create the foundation for sustainable growth.

If you’re feeling the pull toward “what’s next” but haven’t fully built freedom where you are, this episode will help you slow down, get honest, and refocus on what actually compounds.

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Transcript

0:00

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 back to the Austin Cone Podcast. I'm coming to you live from Maui, Hawaii. What a beautiful place. I'm over here visiting Dr. Katie Gron, who will be at Growth Summit. She's one of my Empire clients and she's just built such an amazing practice here and I'm over here helping with just some frameworks and some systems and processes and procedures and all the stuff it takes to really get to the next level and things that I work with my clinic CEOs on at Corrective Chiropractic. Really excited to dive into that with her. And what's interesting is I've been sharing on Instagram about. My Empire program and coming to these on sites and growth summit's coming up very soon and they know Adventure Summit. I'll start talking about that pretty soon. And Cone 80 and the Freedom Accelerator program that starts today. It's interesting and I wanna say this upfront is like there's no ideal model for this all, like these processes and things that are going on right now in my life. There's no order on how it, all this was built and there was no shortcuts. And this was built to as well, by the way, there is a pattern that I am noticing and it's one I see chiropractors fall in all the time. So I wanna talk about that today. By the way, and this is really important that all of you listen to this today, by the way,'cause this is gonna be a very important topic. I've been in this profession for 16, 17 years as a chiropractor and I was in it for four years before that, obviously through chiropractic school. So there are many observations that I've been make making on the sidelines, and I really want to help a lot of you. Avoid some of these traps and a lot of people ask these questions about all those different programs, all these different things that I'm doing yet, the one thing you haven't done yet is build freedom in your own clinic. You're asking about Empire and maybe you wanna get into coaching and the Freedom Accelerator program, an adventure summit and grow. You gotta get back to your program. Or sorry, you gotta get back to your clinic. There's. You gotta have, the schedule's gotta be built in your life. There's gotta be margin in your life. There's gotta be space in your life. There's gotta be breathing room in your life. But to you, the distraction of something else sounds really good. And whether that's starting a program and chiropractic creating a brand. An idea you have an offer. You have and like I get it so much. I actually really do get it because I've been there before where I know for me early on I tried building a program for chiropractors.'cause we got into CrossFit. We were really big into getting into CrossFit gyms and I taught chiropractors how to get into CrossFit. That was such a distraction for me and my clinic because I didn't have any of that freedom yet. I didn't have the schedule yet. I didn't have a ton of margin yet. I didn't have breathing room yet. I wasn't ready for that. And. When things in your life feel tight, expansion, moving to the next thing feels like it'll be relief. And here's a filter that I've used that I say this all the time until you're living at around 80% of your ideal schedule, now's not, probably not the time to add something new. And when I say that first question I ask, and this is the first thing I do with all my empire clients, was the one thing they all wanted was freedom. And I said to'em, I said, what does freedom look like to you? And most people couldn't define it. Like they weren't clear on that. And I feel like everyone defaults to the answer like I wouldn't be in my clinic. Really? Like, why you don't love being in your clinic? Like to me, that's actually freedom in my clinic, one to two days a week, I still am. I love being in my clinic Mondays and Saturdays, like my favorite days of the week sometimes because of the adjusting and the patient facing I get to do. And until you're at that level though, of that 80%. It's probably not time to be adding something new. And I don't need 80% perfect. 80% aligned with your life, your time, your energy, your calendar, your life. Everything is aligned. And what ends up happening, by the way, is if you don't have that, the new thing that you're thinking about actually isn't even creation. It's purely escape from your reality. And here's the part that people don't always see, nothing that I've built. Was built because I wanted something to sell. They were built because of a real need. And I wanna walk you through that, by the way.'cause this is a very important topic. I know you get the same Facebook ads I get, you get the same Instagram ads I get, you get all the same content that's being pushed to you as being pushed to me. But I'd love for you to have a filter because sometimes that stuff looks sexy about oh, I wanna create that. I wanna create that. Sometimes if you peel back by the way, the onions and you looked at these people's lives, you may not. What's being on the surface level may not be actually exactly what you want. Now I'm not gonna talk about anybody else. I'm just gonna talk about per what I've done and share from my own experience. But let me walk you through it. So Chiro 180, for example. I built Kron 86 years ago and we needed it because we needed to run our clinics better. We wanted the spinal health scores. We want to be send patients customized exercises. We wanted to be able to build care plans. We wanted our new patient manager there to be able to track tons of data like we needed in our clinics period. And only after it worked for us for many years did I decide to make sense for me to share it with the profession Adventure Summit. Easy one. Many of you know I've done tons of different hard things. I've swam Alcatraz, the a hundred mile run, many of you have heard about before the Navy SEAL training. And every year I do something that's really difficult because whenever I do that, what ends up happening is right, leading up to that. And right after that, my life becomes record and personal life record professional. Everything just starts showing up at the highest level. And last year I decided it was time for me to bring 16 other guys with me. That's it. There was no funnel, there was no upsell, like just all, it was a shared sufferer fest of growth and perspective, and it was like a onetime thing we did together. But now we're doing it again this year in August, and it's I've had people, when I share with people, I'm like, oh my God. It's like a huge suffer fest, but we grow from it. People be like, oh, that's not a good way to sell it. Actually, to me that's a great way to sell it. If you're sitting there thinking everything in your life is comfortable and you're not willing to train for four months to hike 40 miles over about 18 to 20 hours I think for me, that may show me expose something about their life and like some limiting factors maybe about where they are personally, professionally. So for those that do wanna get to that next level, yeah. On the other side of that does come some hard things. And I'm not gonna sugarcoat that, the more hard things you do and the more hard things you can put in that cookie jar that David Goggins always talk about, the easier life can become. It's like, how can I manage all of these things? I don't have a team by the way, that manages any of this for me. There's no like major operation that we have going on. Yeah, I have a couple people that do help out with certain things, but at the end of the day, and it all runs very fluid and pretty easy actually. It's like not that hard. Growth Summit, seminars to me in this profession, they started to frustrate me a lot. They started to be run by chiropractors to me who weren't, first off a lot of'em weren't practicing anymore. Which is fine by the way. I'm not saying like that's a bad thing or a good thing, but to me, like I always wanted to associate myself around chiropractors that were still in it. They're still doing day ones. They're still doing day twos. Everything's always changing. Like I understand some of the business principles do, cha don't change. And so a lot of the communication doesn't change. But there are things that we do now that we never would've done two years ago, four years ago. But because I'm in the game still, I'm able to test a bunch of different things and all these speakers, I just felt like I couldn't align with that. And every time I'd go to these events, like every speaker had something to sell, the next speaker was a person who was selling some program and everything was an upsell. To me, it felt completely transactional and not transformational. And gross Summit, to me is transformational, not transactional. Everybody who's coming to Growth Summit already knows I have a software they already know about Adventure Summit and whether or not they wanna do those things completely fine. I it, there's, it's all good. I don't offer, I can't have offer our coaching because my coaching program's already sold out. So Growth Summit is a transformational event that I wanted to do because of the lack of what I saw in this profession of what was going on. So I built the experience that I wish existed and a lot of the chiropractors as well, I felt like that were speaking. In my head, I was thinking, how can this person it was very hard for me to connect the people that were on stage. They just didn't have the life that I looked up to live and that it came down from family life. It also came down to professional life, the Freedom Accelerator program that I built and that teaches people how to build recurring revenue. As I started acquiring clinics, I noticed something that was alarming to me. The first question I always ask is, how much recurring revenue do you have? And almost nobody had it. They were all paper visits. And that was a huge gap for me and pretty scary to me when I asked that question to them. But what they would say to me was, yeah, but we have 10,000 patient files. Okay? Those people don't even come here anymore, and who knows how many are still alive. I could go through the yellow book and get a million files. It's irrelevant. What matters is in that moment of time, I used to run a five minute mile. Can't do it now, but it doesn't matter. But I used to be able to run a five minute mile like you're investing in me and my health because I used to be able to run a five minute mile. You should put me on your team. No, that's, people are living in the past. This program with the Freedom Accelerator program was built because we've built amazing recurring revenue practice where our overhead is over a hundred percent covered. And most of our practice is by recurring. And that's something that I wanna teach chiropractors. And today we start our eight week program for that. And Empire program came from me wanting to do coaching differently. I see how coaching is done. Once again, I felt like a lot of people were joining some of these coaching programs to feel part of something, whether maybe they were part of a fraternity and a sorority back in the days. They wanted to be part of this like culture, which is great to me. I started it because like that's great and I understand people want a community, but I also wanna create impact. And at the end of the day, that's the most important thing to me. I already told my, I already told my Empire clients like, I'm not here to tell you how great you are. You already know that you hired me to show me your exposure, weaknesses, and bottlenecks, and I'm gonna do that. And if you can handle it, we're gonna be a really good fit and you're gonna grow and create impact. If not, and you want me to keep telling you how great you are, probably not the best fit. And what I found was a lot of these coaches, like to me, I wanted to do a program. It wasn't about numbers, it was more about the quality rather than the quantity. So I took on seven clients. That was it. I do on-sites with them, like doing an onsite. I can talk to somebody as much as I want, but to do an onsite and be in somebody's practice, I can give'em basically a one year plan of where to focus, what to fix, and we can have our weekly calls. Then I can create experiences for them when we do our live events, this year is gonna be a transformational year for them. And the calls are such a, they're a great thing for us to be able to do together, but it's such an in-between of our experience together. But I did empire because we used to do licensing and we were eventually gonna go down the franchise route. But you know what, this model works so much better. They still own their own clinics, but it's definitely a. It's definitely more of a what, like what they're paying to be a part of. This is a high ticket by the way, and that's why to me, I act essentially as a fractional team member inside their business that they get to work with somebody on to help transform it. It's a huge ROI for them because they're getting somebody at fractional of a cost. That existed because of what I learned in this profession. So all of those programs, all of those other things that I'm doing that you're seeing me post about online, they were built on needs and none of that was about money. Money came as the brought byproduct for all of those things. But it was never the driver. Every single thing was built to fill a void in my life, in our clinics and in this profession, and that's the part I want people to hear. If you're not living your ideal schedule yet, if your clinic still runs you, your systems aren't stable, and your calendar is chaos, the answer probably is not Another thing. It is tightening the one thing you actually already have. And here's the, here's what the model is. What you, I want you to say to yourself is freedom first, then creation. Identify what freedom looks like for you, and then you can start building towards that. If you don't know what you're going after, then how are you gonna create that? And when you do build something new, do it because you want to, it light it. It like lightens you up and it serves a real need. You know what's interesting is. All of those things I shared that I'm doing now actually help with the flywheel at Corrective Chiropractic. I am a better leader because of all these other things that I'm doing. I'm learning so much too as well about all the things in our profession about what's growing, what's not growing that I can now bring to my company and everything. And it creates leadership opportunities now too, as well for my team, my clinic CEOs. And it's just, once I say again, it's like everything becomes a flywheel. And the one question and as I love questions and there is a question that I jotted down that I wanna leave you with is and by the way, I'm not here to discourage anybody about creating something, but if your clinic isn't where you want it to be at, if you're doing 25 to$35,000 a month in revenue and your overheads, let's say 15 to 20, I don't know if you're ready for a program, by the way. I just don't think you're there yet. Now, you may disagree with me, which is fine, but I'm looking for freedom first and then moving down into the creation. And the question is, and maybe this is a self-reflecting question for you, is the thing you're thinking about building right now and expression of freedom, or is it a distraction from the lack of it? And until you know what freedom looks like for you, it's gonna be very hard to build towards that because clarity compounds, but so does distraction. And if you're distracted thinking that you need to build the next program, the next offer, the next this, the next that. I don't know if you're working towards freedom, so I'm gonna leave you with that. A little bit of a heady, different type of episode, but it's something I've been seeing in this profession where I really want you to focus on the main thing and keeping the main thing, and then move into filling some of the voids to create more freedom for your life. Hope you all have a great day. I'm gonna go enjoy my time in Maui, and I'll leave you with this. Aloha. 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.