I had a mentor long ago tell me something that I never forgot. He said:
“You can't sell a plane ticket
after the plane has taken off.”
That's because one of the downsides of chiropractic is cancellations or no-shows in your schedule. The issue with chiropractic is if you sell your 10:45 AM slot to somebody and they don't show up, once 10:46 rolls around, there's no way to sell that time slot again to somebody.
So you lose that ability to make money during that time slot.
And that happens a few times a week in normal practice for some reason.
And for me, there's nothing worse than when you get back from your lunch break, look at the afternoon schedule, and let's say you got 16 people. It's full for four straight hours, and you think
“I'm gonna make a bunch of money. I'm gonna be super efficient. A bunch of people are coming in. It's gonna be a great day.”
And then by the end of the day, four or five of those people have either rescheduled or canceled or no-showed, and here you have a bunch of gaps.
- You didn't make any profit.
- You barely covered your cost of doing business that day.
- It wasn't that busy.
- You weren't super efficient.
- You could've slammed all those people into two and a half hours and just gone home early, but instead they were spread out over four hours.
It's just this big wear on the system.
But if you're able to maintain good communication and check in with people at the beginning of the day and ask them,
“Are you still coming in at 2:45?”
And if they say, “Oh, I forgot. I have to take my son to the dentist,” then you can open that spot back up and find a way to sell it to somebody else.
Even better would be if we could just automatically send all those people a text message – it would probably take five seconds if you had it all automated.
Yet, it would either
- make us more money
- allow us to sell those spots again
- or, on some days, allow us to go home early, which isn't bad either.
But if you passively wait for people to reach out to you, you're definitely going to end up losing those spots.
And let me tell you, Clinic Gym Connect has this functionality in place and it's super powerful.
If you want that ability to save your time and money and get a great communication system in place, check it out!