EP52: Everything Is Your Fault (And That's the Good News)

Your clinic's culture is off. Revenue is down. Your team is making excuses. So whose fault is it?

In this episode, Austin gets raw about the one trait he's seen separate the clinics that grow from the ones that stay stuck: extreme ownership. He shares three real stories from building over 20 chiropractic clinics, including the toxic hire he should have caught, the location he almost gave up on, and the leader he failed to lead.

Plus, Austin challenges you to run "The Circle Test" on the five people closest to you professionally. Are they pushing your growth or protecting your comfort?

If you're a chiropractor who's tired of theory and ready for real talk from someone still in the trenches, this one's for you.

📩 Join the newsletter for weekly business & leadership insights:
http://eepurl.com/jghu5I

📸 Follow Austin on Instagram:
 @draustincohen

🌐 Explore events + resources:
 www.austincohen.com

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 is up everybody? Welcome back. Austin Cohen podcast and man, what a, we are finishing up Q1 Strong and man, I'm loving all of you right now who are just sharing such great testimonials about the Freedom Accelerator Program, cohort one, you're on week seven, cohort two, you're on week two and literally a lot of the results you guys are getting gosh, man, like this is awesome. This is awesome. You guys are building businesses now that happen to be chiropractic clinics. Completely different framework than chiropractic clinics that just happen to be businesses and like these are lead doctors, owners, clinic CEOs, clinic directors, like it. Back in the days that it was like, I felt like it was always just like you had to own your own clinic back in the days. But what's cool is like in today's world now. You're having these great positions. People are taking care of their people. I freaking love it. So shout out to everyone here. Other thing is this. I have two slots left for Adventure Summit. I said this on our opening call the other night. I have two slots left and there's only a couple weeks left before you can actually join us. This event, I'm saying this right now, is always a Hallmark event. You can sit in my seminars, you can come to my conferences, you can be on conference calls with me through whether my Freedom Accelerator or my growth calls. I don't care, but none of that can replace being on the mountain. When you're at mile 25, your legs are tired and you've gotta figure out how to push through to the 40 mile mark. It's hiking. You're doing two to three miles an hour, so it's not like a strain, like running wise. There's so many limiting beliefs that people are playing in their brain about why they can't do it, but every single person can do it. It's just a matter of just fricking signing up and doing it. It is an all-inclusive, encompassing event. Everything is included except for your incidentals your hotel, your food, the hike, the whitewater rafting experience. I mean everything. So show up. But go to ated.com and click attend Adventure Summit. So let's get those last two slots full. Man, I got some work we wanna talk about today, y'all. But here's the question I want you to sit with today. When something goes wrong in your business, in your relationships, your life, whatever it is, like where do you look first? This to me, is a tall tale sign of the kind of business leader you are. Do you look outward for where there's a problem or do you look in the mirror? Because I'm gonna tell you right now, after studying clinic, after clinic. The hundreds of clinics that I've had the opportunity to work with since January one this year, and this is clinics at all stages of the games. And by the way, myself included, I've opened up over 20 clinics myself. But the answer to that question tells you more about someone's future than any metric at all, any revenue number, any profit margin, any business plan. It tells me the potential growth of that clinic. And if the answers are always outward to me, there's very low potential in the growth of that clinic. If the answers are always inward mirroring, then I know we're gonna have really good clinic. Okay, so today's podcast some of it's gonna follow up on some of the newsletter. We're just gonna get, we're gonna go deep and I wanna go deeper because I think this is the most important thing I could almost ever share with you. The clinics I've had the opportunity to work with the big ones, the small ones, the new startups. Like we have a guy in one of our programs right now who's opening up in April. What I've noticed is the differentiator is not the system, it's not the EHR, it's not the location or the marketing budgets. The differentiator is ownership. And I don't mean ownership as in you own the LLC. That to me, doesn't matter. Ownership, like when things break, you are the one who broke them. When revenue goes down, you are the reason when culture gets toxic in your practice. You let that happen. That is the ownership I'm talking about. And you can be defensive all you want when people bring things up to you, and you can be reactive. Reactive, but that's what you're tolerating. And I know right now that there's probably 10 different people listening to this thinking that I'm talking about them. I'm not. I ain't talking directly to one person right now. I am talking to us as a collective profession and a collective group. That is the ownership I'm talking about the doctors who grow the fastest, who build the strongest teams, who create the most impact in their communities. They share one trait. They refuse to point the finger. Anywhere but at themselves. And listen, this isn't some like motivational poster that, huh? We're reading off of a wall today. Okay. This is something that I've had to learn the hard way multiple times, and I wanna tell you a few of these stories because hopefully some of these may resonate with a lot of you. Early on when I was building corrective chiropractic, I made a hire that I knew and my gut was not right. Deep down, I knew it. But the resume was great. Good interview, but something was off and it was like an energy about this person, which I completely ignored because I needed the position filled and I justified why I felt like they were good, because I needed to fill the position. Within a few months, that person had completely poisoned the culture of that clinic, and even some of the company as a whole team members in that clinic always felt like they had to walk on eggshells with this person. Patience felt the tension and the numbers reflected it. Here's where most people go wrong.'cause most people in that situation would say, I had a bad employee. Yeah, that's technically true, but that's the easy answer. The real answer was, I failed. I failed in the interview process. I didn't ask the right questions. I didn't trust my gut. And when the red flag started showing up in week two, three. I didn't act fast enough, I let it linger. Why? Because I didn't wanna deal with the discomfort of having a hard conversation or going through another hiring cycle. So the clinic's problems weren't because of a toxic employee. They were because of a leader, me who didn't lead. And that was the biggest issue. And here's the actionable piece, like if your clinic owner listening to this. You're a clinic, CEO, or a lead doctor. Think about your onboarding process right now, not your training manual, the filter, the filtration process. How are you screening for culture fit before someone ever touches a patient? Do you have a system for that, for example, like letting them shadow, getting to talk to other team members, or are you just hoping that, hey, hopefully it works out because hope, as I've said many times, is not a strategy. Build a 90 day evaluation window into every single hire and set clear expectations from day one. And if there isn't, and if the fit is not there by day 30, you've gotta have the courage to make the call. Do not wait until they've cost you the culture. The culture is always building, by the way. There's another time I had a clinic that was bleeding money. And I'm not talking about a slow leak, by the way. I'm talking about like real losses month after month. And when I sat down with the team, here are the answers. I got the area's tough. This zip code doesn't want what we offer. There's too many chiropractors. People around here just don't value chiropractic care. And you know what? Part of me wanted to believe that because. If the problem was the market, then it wasn't my fault. If it was just bad luck, bad geography, maybe something outta my control, okay? But here's the thing I've learned about myself. The moment I start looking for reasons outside of my control, I've already lost. I can't fix what I won't own. So I stopped asking. Why is this market tough? And I started asking, what have I not figured out yet? Different question, completely different energy. But a question, one question, like the first one they were saying makes victim right. The other one makes me a problem solver. And when I sat with the second question long enough, the answer started showing up. I hadn't solved the marketing in that specific market. I was running the same playbook I used in a completely different demographic and expecting it to work, and we just didn't invest enough yet in community relationships. Like I haven't empowered the team to own their neighborhood. So the market wasn't the problem. It was my approach to the market was the problem. And let's, if you've got a clinic or a location or a department that's underperforming, I'd say stop asking what's wrong out there. Start asking what haven't I solved yet? Because every time you ask it, you take your power back and I'll, listen I'll share another one. This one is maybe the hardest. I had a clinic leader, someone who I trusted to run one of my locations, constantly blaming external factors for the results, the economy, seasonality. We don't take insurance. You name it, it was the reason. And for a while, let it slide. I'd listen. I'd be like, yeah. Okay. I could hear that. And I would try to problem solve with them, but what I wasn't doing was the most important thing. I just wasn't looking at myself because, you know whose fault, you know whose fault it really was that the leader in that clinic wasn't performing? It was mine. I didn't set clear enough expectations. I talked about expectations of Growth Summit, like I didn't build the accountability structure that they needed in order to succeed in that location. Hey, just go do these screenings. Go do these events. No, I need the accountability. And to even train them what does successful screenings even look like? I hadn't let'em to the point where they understood that excuses and results cannot co-exist. You just can't have both. You can make excuses and you're gonna have lackluster results, or you can have no excuses and have great results. That was the hard pill to swallow because it's easy to look at someone else and say, nah, they're not getting it. It's a whole different thing to look at yourself and say, I haven't taught them how to get it. Low close rate. Yeah, maybe I gave'em a, maybe I gave'em the scripts, but did I actually sit down with'em and say, Hey Johnny, can you record your next day too? Let me listen to that. And spending the time to actually listen to that. Listening to re-exam reports, sitting in on progress exams. Actually taking the time to go through that process and be more and train them on the actual right way to do that. Because if you're leading a team right now, you've gotta ask yourself this. Have I clearly defined what winning looks like for each person on my team? Not generally, not vaguely, like specifically winning, because if your team doesn't know what the target is, they can't hit it. And if they can't hit it, that's not their failure. That's yours now. Here's why I wanna shift this conversation now, because Extreme ownership, Jocko Willing's book, great book, is not just about how you own your problems, it's also about who you surround yourself with, which is some of the concept I've talked about before. And I want you to think about the five people you spend the most time with professionally, your inner circle, your advisors, your coaches, your colleagues, whoever they are, and ask yourself this one question, are they in your corner to support your growth? Or are they there to keep you comfortable? Because it'd be very easy to co, to collude with them to make you feel good, but feeling good is just gonna keep you comfortable. It's gonna keep you stale and stagnant. Now, if they're there to challenge you and challenge your growth, that's the kind of people you need in your corner. Those are the winners. Two different things. Growth should be very uncomfortable. Which I love. Adventure Summit. You wanna get uncomfortable come this and I can't train you, like I said, in seminars to get uncomfortable. And for those of you guys that aren't coming to Grow Summit, what could you do this year to get you uncomfortable, by the way? Endurance race. I don't know. What is it? What's something you think that may make you want to quit that you could do to challenge you? I think it really does require being around people who are gonna challenge your excuses instead of validating them. And I've had to evaluate my circle many times that I can count. And every single time I did, guess what happened to my life? It got better. Not because the people I removed were bad people, but because they weren't the right people for where I was going. And this is honestly why hearing so many Chi 80 clients talk about our community the way they do means the world to me, because that is exactly why it was built. I wanted to create a space where the people around you are not your cheerleaders, they're your challengers, and they push you. They hold you accountable, and they refuse to let you settle. That's why we do growth calls. That's why you have that circle community as a client of eighties and all these questions you all are posting are amazing, and I love seeing the results that are happening in there. The action step I would ask you to do is writing down the names of the five people who influence you the most professionally. And next to each name, write down the word growth or comfort, G or C, and be honest, because who you surround yourself with, it's a choice. And that choice is shaping your future. Whether you realize it or not, I'll leave you at this. I've done over 20 clinics launched in my career, as I said earlier, and I've built a company that's been on the Inc 5,000 list three times. And I'm not saying that's to bad brag. I promise you that I say that because everything I'm sharing with you is zero theory. This is not something I pulled from a textbook of what I'm sharing with you today. It's what I'm looking, it's what I'm living inside my company is like right now, today, even today, I'm still working on these things. I'm still building this. I still look in the mirror every single day and ask, what do I need to fix? There's no fluff. No sleazy sales tactics. There's no fear-based model. It's literally heart mission and my word for 2026 impact, that is the standard and it all starts with the person in the mirror. You guys have a great week, and I am so excited to share something upcoming. For those of you that have ever considered consulting with me or coaching with me, we have something coming up. That will be beginning in April for early adopters. And I get people every single week who ask me, how do I work with you? You will have an amazing opportunity to work with me. And once again, like I said earlier, you'll very soon have businesses that happen to be chiropractic clinics rather than having chiropractic clinics that happen to be businesses. Have a great week and stay tuned for something special coming. By the way, send me a DM if you heard that last comment by the way. About, I have something special coming because I'll add you to my wait list. Have a great day. 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.