EP55: Your Core Values Are Decoration

Most chiropractors write their core values at a weekend seminar and never think about them again. I did the same thing. Then I walked into one of my 13 clinics and realized nobody on the team could name a single one.

So I started over. I looked at every person I'd fired in the last three years and found the pattern. The people who didn't work out weren't bad people. They just didn't fit the values we actually operated by. We just hadn't named them yet.

In this episode I break down how I reverse-engineered our core values from real data, how they changed hiring, firing, and accountability across all 13 locations, and why this is exactly where we're starting in Month 1 of The Ascent.

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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 Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode What's up everybody man. Happy Q2, April one. Here we go. Hey, I got no no April Fool's stuff today. Although it was pretty funny. My daughter last night, my daughter goes, dad, do not wake me up in the morning. I'm gonna get up at 6:00 AM and do not wake me up or do not get me up. I was like, okay. That's fine. And so I get up at I don't know, six also with her. I go downstairs, start making breakfast. She comes downstairs six 10. I'm thinking in my head, she never gets down here at six 10 in the morning. This is amazing. Usually she's in her iPad. Usually she's in her bed playing on her iPad a little bit before she comes down for breakfast. Usually likes to wake up a little early and get a little chill time. Then before she has breakfast and she comes down at six 10 and goes, dad. Let's prank mom set her phone to eight 30 in the morning and wake her up telling her we're late for school. We're late for school since she goes upstairs to try to reset my wife's phone. So it's a different time to eight 30 in the morning. Unfortunately for my daughter, way too late already. My wife was already up and completely failed. But we were able to if you guys remember the character from Ring I believe was the name where the girl has like black hair and it covers her face and she comes outta the screen. That girl, we do have a doll of hers, and we did decide to put that in the backseat to scare my son when he jumped in the car this morning and freak him out. So she was able to get him, but it was really cute man. Many of you guys know my daughter. If you've been to Growth Summit before or just, throughout, she's been on the podcast before and it was funny, even after that, she goes if we, if she's already on her phone and we can't do that, then why don't we do this? Why don't we get a bunch of Saran wrap, put it in the bathroom? So she walks right into it. I'm like, Harlow, she's already up. There's no chance we're gonna be able to get around this and like actually do that. Although then I had the idea, I said what if we put Saran Wrap? On the toilet. So when she goes to the bathroom, it doesn't go in the toilet. And my daughter did not think that was funny, so I thought that would've been hilarious. Probably would've gotten yelled at. So glad that actually ended up not working out for the sake of my life. But happy April one. Man I gotta say Q1. I am so fricking proud of every single person who I've been working with so far this year. I am so freaking proud. Our team at Corrective Chiropractic, you guys are absolutely crushing it. You are absolutely crushing it. You've been putting in the work and now the results are showing up. It is awesome to watch. How many of you are absolutely annihilating it right now? But what's interesting is you're less busy, but you're making more. And that to me is the concept that I really wanna start getting everybody dialing into. A couple people in our, there was three people that, I'm just gonna pull their emails. Three people I'm pulling from that are in the C Circle community that are in, that are doing the recurring revenue program. And the, these are people that are moving into my new Ascent program. I'll share more about that today. But dude, one doc put somebody in, he calls us his Aligned Life program. It's his maintenance program and. Absolutely crushing it there. Another doc missed two 50 for the quarter by 526 bucks, but he's got a million dollar run rate right now, which is awesome for the year. Another doc just post, literally just posted this about 30 minutes ago. He hit his highest revenue month ever while putting people on new chiropractic plans. Not a fluke. That's what happened. When the systems are running 100%. Shout out to all of you. You're freaking killing it. Share this stuff like, man, hopefully you guys crushed it. Don't just share it with me in circle, like share it on social media, mean. Dude, the profession has gotta see and get outta these limiting belief systems about what is happening. There is a shift happening right now where we're taking these chiropractic clinics that are now operating as businesses where in the past it was people who were businesses that, or they were businesses, they're now businesses that happen to be chiropractic clinics, wherein the before people are just operating chiropractic clinics, which is fine. You gotta have that service mind. You gotta have that service heart. You gotta be great providers, you gotta be great clinicians, and you gotta really get great results. But it's also a business and you can do both, and you can be successful in all areas of your life. There is an infinite possibilities for what you can do. Chiropractors read the chiropractic principles. There is an abundance of what you can do. There's no scarcity mindset. You can have a hundred percent of everything. Shout out to everyone in Q1, and I love sharing those results. But here's what we gotta talk about today. Here's what we gotta talk about today. Oh, man. Actually the other thing before I go into is congratulations to Dr. Rachel. Today is the launch of our 13th location at Corrective Chiropractic in Waynesboro, Georgia. Ladies and gentlemen, and a shout out to the two family. Unbelievable family, great chiropractors, and we're really excited to take on the legacy that Dr. Don built in Waynesboro, Georgia, and really take that legacy and e even take it a little further. Man, just shout out to them for doing such a great job in that community. And, we're excited to carry the torch. But something today that I want to hit that most practice people in practice, it's something they think they've handled, but if I go deep down into it, what I'm learning is they haven't even touched it. And it's gonna sound silly and you may want to skip it after I say this'cause you don't think it's gonna be important, but you gotta follow me on this one is core values, not the poster. Not the mission statement. You wrote during a weekend seminar five years ago, and I'm talking about this is the operating system that runs your practice when you are not in the room. Here's what I see happen all the time, and this is the problem. A doc opens a practice, things are going well. Then they hire a few people, maybe they then go to a leadership event, they come to Growth Summit or some, something along those lines. And then someone tells them they need core values. So they sit down one night, they write out five things that sound good. Maybe they print them out and they move on. And here are the words, integrity, excellence, compassion. Patient-centered teamwork. Do those sound familiar to any of you? Yeah, because that's everybody's list. Dentist lists, law firm's lists. If your core values could belong to any business in any industry, they're literally not core values. They are decoration for your office. And the real test is this, can your front desk use your core values to make a decision when you are not there? What about other doctors on your team? Can they use them to handle a difficult patient interaction without calling you? Can your office manager use them to decide who to hire? And if the answer is no, you don't have core values, you just have wall art. There are words that are maybe on your walls. There are words that are in your handbooks. When I rebuilt our core values across all of my locations, I started from scratch and I didn't ask what sounded good. I asked what actually matters when things get hard, and I looked at every firing that I've done in the last three years or people I even self-selected out every single one of'em. And there was a pattern I found. The people who didn't work out were not bad people. They just didn't fit the values and they didn't fit the values that we operated by. The key was, I hadn't named those yet. So what I did was I decided to reverse engineer it. And what I decided to do is think about what did every great team member have in common? What did every bad hire lack? And that's where the core values truly came from. From that reverse engineering concept, not a brainstorm, not a retreat that we did from the evidence of who thrives and who does not in your practice, and once we had them clearly defined, every single thing changed for the practice, hiring got completely easier. Why? We had a filter. It firing got a lot easier because we had a language for now what wasn't working and the team started holding each other accountable without me having to be the one saying something. And what ends up happening there, team members start self-selecting out'cause they don't align with the core values, which is completely fine. That to me is the unlock The core values are not for your patients, they're for your team. They're the language your people use to run your business. When you. Are not watching. And in our practice, when we were at Growth Summit, I shared and I went around the room'cause my team was there and I said, Hey Andrew, what is your favorite core value? And he's Fofo, great. Jenna, what's your favorite core value? And she said, one Cherise, what's your favorite core value? She said another one. And what was cool was being in this room of 85 chiropractors where they got to hear from practice. This isn't something me teaching core values that we don't do. I don't teach things. I don't do, and many of you guys know I'm still in practice a day, a week. I'm still learning it. I'm still out there testing things. I'm still building I'm doing day ones. I'm doing day one, day twos. I'm still putting people on programs. I'm still developing programs in our office. Like I'm dialed in, baby. Like I, I'm still there with all of you. I'm not somebody who just says, oh, here's my coaching business now lemme get outta practice. No, I'm still in it. It's actually my favorite part of the week. And. Our core values in our company are, one is Fofo, fortify ourselves, fortify others, the other one and by the way, how does that live? We really work with our team to get them to belong to gyms within a three mile radius, and a lot of times we'll cover the membership for them because we want them taking care of themselves so they can take care of others. But the behavior is. The gym membership. The next one is BT Better. Together, we have regional days, twice a year. We have a company retreat once a year. We have doctor calls every two weeks. We have office manager calls every single week on Wednesdays from one 15 to one 30. There's a lot that we do together. Yesterday, my team at Buckhead, we went to this place called Rest Fuel, which is a recovery place where we did red light therapy, cryotherapy, halo therapy, oxygen therapy, and we just did as a team. Supports a small business that's a business partner. But what it also does is it gets our team together and it supports better together. It also supports fofo. The next one is PPI, purpose Powered Impact. We talk about in our office, and this is where patient experience comes in and why it's important to build a really good patient experience. Because for us, why we do what we do is to serve a purpose and to create impact. And then the last one is accept the challenge. Set the standard. We know that things aren't always gonna be easy for us at corrective chiropractic. We know it's gonna get difficult at times, but with that, we also know that on the other side of that, there's a next level of success. So when things do get difficult, we don't complain or talk about it being difficult. We talk about the opportunity in that, and maybe for us, we could, that's something and something we could throw in our weaknesses, maybe something we could throw in our opportunities, maybe something that goes in our threats, but it's something we can work on to drive and grow from. This is what we're starting with in the Ascent program, which is month one. The Ascent program is my new coaching program that will start, many of you guys know I have the Empire Program, which is like site visits. Live events that's different than this. This is our weekly group calls. They're Tuesdays at 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM They are an architected structure. So many of you guys are wrapping up right now. My the Freedom Accelerator one, which is the recurring revenue piece. So you're actually already two months through the 12 months curriculum as far as what it would take to get through Ascent and then eventually get yourself into what I'm gonna be calling the Summit Program, which is gonna be year two. And this is for people that really wanna learn. To create businesses. This is, and you, in month one, you will be starting on May 5th, and this is core values from the ground up. This is not a worksheet, it's a four week program. There's no template for you to fill in and forget. We are building the operating system of your practice so that every decision, every hire, every patient interaction runs through a filter that you built on purpose. And then in June we're going straight into retention for eight weeks. And how do I take somebody from what I, we call the assess phase before they even start just looking at the description to the initial interview. That's only a five minute thing. That's really not even an interview. We just call it our get to know you. Then they come into the shadow, then they go into the interview, and then the hiring and then the onboard everything to the point where they can get to a point where we call the acknowledge where they're actually referring their friends and family to come work at our company. Then we're gonna do another four week drip, and what I'm learning is that meetings for the chiropractors are not the meetings that they're hoping to have. I've had a lot of people listen to my morning huddles. I've had a lot of people listen to my L 10 meetings. I've had a lot of people listen to my quarterly financial meetings, and it's different. There's a lot of intention and they're agenda driven. Then we go into that next for another four weeks. Then we go into patient experience for another eight weeks. So what it is it's a whole 52 week architected program where you'll walk away. With a built out operating system for your business. There's only 20 people in cohort one. If you're thinking about it, I've shared this in my newsletter, which is gonna be going out today. I shared it. For those that are already in the first two cohorts, I'm assuming this will probably fill up by the end of the week. The program is 1295 a month. You pay your deposit and then your first monthly payment is not due until June 1st. So the deposit will cover your first month of May, and then it won't start till June one. And it is just every week architected programs. It will be transformational. There'll be hot seats in there. We'll have our circle community again, like many of you guys have been doing for these cohorts. But you guys, rather than being only together for eight weeks now, you're gonna get to be together for 52 weeks and beyond as we go into summit, which is gonna be like, essentially like a master's program. But that's it, man, for today. Go look at your core values suite, and if they belong to any business in any industry, you start over. And if you want help doing it, you know where to find me. Be one of those testimonials that I shared earlier. Change the story and the trajectory of your practice. Let's fricking do this thing together. We can go far by ourselves, but we can go further together. Look forward to seeing many of you in the Ascent program for cohort one. Let's freaking go. I. 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.