EP46: Two, Not Three: Why Fewer Options Create Better Decisions in Business and Chiropractic

Most businesses don’t struggle because they lack options.
 They struggle because they offer too many.

In this episode, I share a simple principle from a 1950s shoe salesman that has shaped how I think about pricing, care plans, leadership, and even how I schedule meetings with my team: two options, not three.

We talk about why too much choice creates hesitation, how complex pricing slows patient decisions, and why clarity is one of the most underutilized leadership tools in chiropractic. This applies to patient conversations, care plan design, team communication, and business growth.

If you’ve ever felt like people “just need more time to think,” this episode will challenge that assumption and help you design decisions that create movement instead of delay.

Sometimes the fastest way forward isn’t adding more.
 It’s simplifying what’s already there.

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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. Austin Coen podcast. Oh man, I hope everyone's staying warm out there. We're in Atlanta, so man, we, one of my staff members said it to me yesterday. She goes that storm was a dud. And she nailed it. Yeah, there was not a whole lot that happened here in Atlanta, but I know a lot of you got it. A pretty bad so hopefully you guys are doing all right. Everyone got power back in, but have no fear because. In less than two weeks at the epicenter of Business Development and Business Masterminds, growth Summit will be here at a whopping 52 degrees. So give you guys all something to look forward to because it is going to be, gosh, it's gonna be so good. It's gonna be so good. I think what also is gonna good is the people. Got some great people coming here. So excited to be with everybody. Excited for you all to meet my friend Charlie. Charlie's the best, nicest guy. He has such a great story, such a great journey that he is been on to get to where he is gotten to. So I'm super pumped for all of you to get a chance to meet him and learn some of the strategies he implemented to create a really good personal brand. And he's gonna share that with all of you on. Saturday afternoon is our keynote, and then on Saturday, many of you're coming to the dinner, which is gonna be great because at the dinners where he's gonna be going through with you really how he's gotten involved in charitable contribution and serving humanity at a really high level right now, which is pretty powerful. So excited for all of you for that. Other than that, man, I, oh, one other thing, announcement. Cohort one. Shout out to all of you. Many of you guys know I'm running this program right now teaching chiropractors how to establish recurring revenue. I only took on 10 people to start with because what I wanted to do was make sure that this thing is gonna go over really well, and it's gonna help chiropractors understand the model of building a freedom practice. And I have different levels like one through five on what that looks like with percentages. If you're coming to Growth Summit, you are gonna get some fundamentals of this. Not the whole like eight week course of 90 minute sessions with me, but you'll at least get the opportunity to learn for about an hour. Now, this group, the questions you guys are asking, whoa, let's freaking go. What a great way to start up your year. For those of you guys that are curious about it, maybe send me a message on Instagram or we can talk more at Growth Summit. Cohort two is going to be starting February 27th. And we're gonna be taking more than 10 people for that one. We're gonna double it to 20. Cohort one has been going really well. I did a hand raise last year with my team of chiropractors on who wanted to become, who wanted to help me out, by the way, in 2026 with some coaching and working with other chiropractors. And I had a good group of team members that reached out to me that wanted to support that. And so they're actually in cohort one as well. And they're gonna help guide with me cohort two. So we just have such a great group of people going through this, and what you're learning through this process though, is you're learning how to build an offer. You're learning how to build chiropractic offers. You're learning how to build. Let's say you use soft wave or shockwave or stem wave, you're learning how to develop those offers or decompression offers or laser offers, like you're understanding the game for labeling, branding, the marketing, the pricing, the finances. But before we do that, I teach you some numbers that it's really important that you understand before you get to the next layer. So that will be coming up cohort two, but ple, if you, if it's something you're interested in, let me know. So you can get in on that now. Other than that, I don't have any other announcements except for my other announcement is who's coming running with me at Growth Summit. I love to get a good long run in on Saturday morning, maybe hit up a good five, six miles. So for those that want to join me, would love for you to join for those that are gonna be there on Thursday night.'cause you're coming to the Chiro in 80 private event Friday morning. Let's go for a run. Really excited about that. But, today, what are we gonna talk about today? The topic of today's podcast I call is two, not three. And it's all about how in chiropractic, in any true business, the fewer options we create for the client, the better the decision making process. And this is gonna be a podcast episode you are gonna want to share with your team. One thing I love is there is actually a team based out in Texas and what you guys do in a shout out to you guys,'cause you guys are kicking butt right now. You guys do your L 10 meeting and then you spend 20 to 30 minutes listening to the podcast as a team. I love that you guys are rock stars, man, and it's cool to see how many of you are taking the content from this, but you're being a good leader like you are sharing this with your team. This is a good one for with your team to do. I wanna share a story that, to start this off, in the 1950s, many of you may have heard this before, but there was a shoe salesman named Ben Prober. And when a customer asked to see shoes, Ben would bring out two pairs. He wasn't bringing out three pairs, he wasn't bringing out five. He only brought out two pairs of shoes. And if the customer said to him, can I see another pair? His response was One simple question. Sure. Which of the first two should I take away? Without trying to, he figured something that was really powerful, and it's that people don't struggle to choose between two options. They struggle when you give them too many. And if you run a business, especially a chiropractic business. This shows up everywhere. Your pricing, your care plans, your scheduling, the decisions your team makes. Ask, talking to your staff or your team for meeting times. And what Ben figured out is something we see every single day in practice is too many options do not create freedom. They create delay. And what Ben could have done, by the way, is when somebody's, when somebody said, can I see another pair? He could have brought another pair. Now giving them three options. But he didn't. He took one away and left it down to the two options. When someone has three or more choices, their brain doesn't say, which one do I want? It says one thing, and many of you deal with this as well. Maybe I should think about this. If there were three or four different pairs of shoes out there, it's not an easy decision to make. Lemme take some pictures of these and see which one I like better. Lemme think about this. Lemme talk to my friends. When it comes down to two, it becomes easier to decision making process. And what we're trying to do as chiropractors, as healthcare providers, and I don't care what business you're in,'cause this applies to every business. We're trying to remove friction. We're trying to make the decision-making process for them easy and thinking about it when taking it home, what ends up happening? Momentum will die. Many of you have heard that before. Time kills deals. It's analysis paralysis where they're overthinking. It's one of the quiet killers of conversion, creating clarity and leadership in your business. So let's talk about chiropractic. And by the way, you could apply this to any business too, as well. I've been to chiropractic offices where I see pricing sheets all the time that look really nice on paper, by the way. But what they're doing in real life for you is actually crushing the decision making process. And I'll see things like. You're whipping out three care different care plans to show to the patient. Sometimes I've seen four care plans to show to a patient and you're letting them choose, here's better. Here's good, better, best is what you say, or I'll see multiple payment structures that are set up for each plan. You can pay monthly, you can do quarterly, you can do prepay, you can do financing. You can do P-P-P-P-V. I've seen add-ons stacked on top of add-ons too as well. Would you like this service? That service we have chiropractic, shockwave, decompression, laser cold thing. I don't even know. But y what ends up happening in that is the conversation is now shifting from how do we solve this problem to the patient, starting to now think, what can I remove to make this cheaper? When everything is an option in your practice, nothing stands out. When you hear the word Chick-fil-A, what stands out? Chicken. In and out. Burger burgers, you've all probably heard this analogy before. Instead of guiding the patient, what we're doing is we're handing them a menu and we're asking them to now be the expert. That is not leadership, that is outsourcing your decision making process to them. You are their provider. You are the leader of the healthcare movement, and you are trying to guide them to make the right decision for their health, not by giving'em all these different options. Here's what I've learned over time is this. The job isn't to show patients every single thing that's possible. It's to design a decision that makes it easy to make two options. Do that. Option A, this fully solves the problem. Option B, this maintains or slowest progression. If that's a route you want to go option A, you can prepay option B. You can go monthly option a Wednesday, option B, Thursday option a mornings option B afternoons. Patient isn't overwhelmed and they're not really comparing a bunch of different things to each other. The comparison creates clarity. When you have it down to this science, which of these two feel right for you? That's the question that moves everything forward. Sally, we have two options. You can either prepay or you can go monthly. Which of these feels right for you? Alright, Sally, do mornings or afternoons work better for you? Great. We have 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM Which works best for you. Great. We'll see you at 10:00 AM That is the question that moves people forward. Hey team, I wanna make sure we have a staff meeting next week. What works better for you guys? Tuesday or Wednesday? Great. Wednesday we can do 12 or one. Got it. Let's do it before work or after work Before shift. After shift. Narrowing it down to move the everything forward. Okay. This principle though, does not stop at your patients. And this is where that team aspect I'm coming into play is if you just say to your team, for example, Hey, when can you meet? What do you want to do? What works best for you? Rather than what we're doing is we think we're being flexible in that time, but we're essentially handing'em a blank page. And like I shared earlier, it's, Hey John I'd love to get together with you. What works best for you Tuesday, Thursday. Thursday before work or after work. Great, let's do that. It's the same freedom, but less friction in there because clarity now becomes a form of respect for them, and it allows us to be a great leader to, as well for our team. A few patterns I've been noticing, and it's been interesting, like working with this cohort of 10, working with my seven Empire clients, working with, a hundred of you Kyron, 80 clients. I'm seeing a lot of different patterns over and over and over again. And what's, what I'm seeing is the tier pricing structure where you're making it very confusing for the patient. You're adding on all these different services, so now they start negotiating instead of committing to you. And like we used to do the same thing. What we used to do was we used to say our adjustment price is 75. Our exercise and traction, our exercises are$10, the traction is$15, and we had all these different things, and what we did is we made it about the whole experience. So now it's$95, but that's the whole experience. That's the exercise. Adjust traction. The EAT, that's our model. We exer, they exercise in our prehab area. First we adjust them and then do traction. Third, that is$95, where before we had different add-ons that were on there. Your adjustment is this price, the exercise is this price, the traction is this price. And it created, like I said earlier, it created something to go, ah, don't, we don't wanna do the exercises. We'll just, we just wanna do the adjustment only. I don't wanna do the traction, I just wanna do the adjustments. Sales conversations that become this like line item math. What ends up at, what ends up hurting is it hurts the outcomes and we don't want that. We want momentum to build and. Many of us know this, pricing is truly not about value, but it's about the de design. The design and the decision making, right? Like good structure creates good contrast between the two. It's reducing noise that they're talking in their brain of all the different options that they could have. But what it does is it also builds confidence to me. It feels confident as well for the doctor and the patient as well. You're more confident what? It's a two de decision making process. When you have all these different options for them in your brain, you're almost defaulting and thinking in your brain. It's a limiting mindset and that's why you're showing them these cheaper options.'cause in your brain, you don't want them to think that, oh, I don't want them to think I'm overselling them. I don't want them to think it's expensive.'cause to me it's expensive and I wouldn't even do this. Then you've got other problems. The real problem is in your price. The real problem is you don't believe in your product and you will never be able to convert if you don't believe in your product. And. Like I said, this more in B2B in healthcare, because in healthcare, the stakes are higher. Like confusion in healthcare does not just cost you a sale. It costs progress and it costs them their health. And if they're not converting in your office, then what's gonna end up happening is we all know that the longer this problem stays, eventually it leads to drugs and surgery. That's a very easy decision for them to make when they go to the doctor and the doctor says, looks like we need to get a cortisone shot. Okay. There's no usually not a lot of pricing decisions because insurance pays for it. Great. And then what ends up happening is that lasts, let's say six to 12 months, then they go back for another cortisone shot that lasts another six to 12 months, and then they gotta get surgery all because you made it confusing for the patient. You create a lot of friction. This is supposed to be easy. Here's the takeaway I wanna leave you guys with. Is this if things feel stuck in your practice, patient's delaying team members are unsure. Decisions are dragging out it. It's not a motivation problem. It may actually be an options problem, and the fastest way forward is not adding more. It's taking something away. You go to two, not three. Two, not four. Always options. If you have CHI 180 and you have the treatment plan builder under the care plan section, you can build care plans in there that are included and you can build as many care plans as you want and you'll look at it. There's just two options. We make it very simple and hopefully you heard me earlier say where I've said some of you guys are making it so confusing, like just add, like for example. If you charge$80 for a dental roll add, and let's say you're putting 40 visits together for your care plan, okay? So you charge$80 for a dental roll and it's 40 treatments in your care plan. Why would you just raise your price by$2 per visit? That's 80 bucks right there. And then give them the dinner roll for free. That way. They don't say when they show, when you show them a care plan, actually I don't want that pillow. I can just go on Amazon and get my own. They don't know. You're removing friction and if this is something that's resonating with you, by the way, first off, if this whole podcast has been resonating with you and you're listen to all 40, 50 episodes, can you leave me five stars on Spotify or podcast or Apple, wherever you listen to, please? Let's help the profession. If you're thinking today about one thing you could do to serve others, listen, the more chiropractors that listen to this, the better the profession grows. But I'd love to hear from you where you're seeing too many options right now in your business. Send me a message on Instagram Hey, you send me a message on Instagram. I respond. I wanna hear, I wanna learn whether it's in your pricing, your offers, your systems. That awareness alone is what will create the next breakthrough for you. I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast. I'm so excited to see so many of you next week. If you're coming on Thursday night to the Carbonated Private event, I think that event alone is probably worth your entire membership for a year. Whether you never run a spinal health score, build care plans. Look at all the valuable data that's in there. Like that night alone is gonna be epic. So I'm excited to see all of you for that. And if I don't see you on Thursday night, I'll see you Friday at one o'clock when we get kickstarted with understanding the bottlenecks you have in your practice. And then I'm gonna take you through the six growth engines that are gonna help you break through the bottleneck that is in your practice. And we're gonna have a fun night after that, have roasting some s'mores together by the fire. Hope you all have a great day and I'll talk to you soon. 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.