I am going to show you how to drastically reduce cancellations and no shows at your practice and how to retain 90+% of your clients until they reach their goals so you can celebrate with them the clinical outcome and the completion of their recommendation in full.

My name’s Corey Rickit. I am a clinic owner and I have gone from zero to 17 successful team members, and now, I have a Million dollar practice, all within under three years. 

Along with running my practice I also help practice owners to grow, scale, and automate their way to a packed-out practice. 

The first thing I’m gonna talk about is how to reduce cancellations and no shows to your practice. The biggest challenge that I see in private practice is around this little thing called cancellations. Cancellations are when people get started with you and then, they end up canceling. 

You either don’t hear from them again or you hear from them months later or they just drop off. As you know or can imagine, high numbers in this area can reflect poorly on the results your team gets for your clients and also costs the practice a tonne of lost revenue.

The next thing is do not attend or (DNA) for short. DNA’s are when people just don’t show up on you or your team and it makes it really, really hard to help people and put the care into healthcare when people aren’t making great decisions when it comes to their health and high amounts of these can cost your business thousands in lost revenue

It’s our role as health practitioners to help people to make the best decision possible when it comes to their health so they can get the result that they’re looking for and you’re looking for for them and your practice’s purpose really is to help people get back to doing the things that they love to do. 

A lot of us get into it to help people in the beginning, but I hope now you can see that the silent killer in private practice is cancellations & no-shows. Of course there are a number of things you can do instantly to reduce the number of these and we are going to cover these things in this video.

The next element to your practice to look into is this thing called patient visit average or PVA for short, and it’s a little thing we use to monitor and measure the amount of sessions that we, on average, see our clients before we’re able to do what’s called discharging on goals or complete their case recommendation. Discharging on goals or case completion is when we actually get the result for the client, we’re standing on the top of the mountain, and we’re celebrating the success of reaching the goals for your client. It can be simple. It can be returning back to the gym, full capacity, back to surfing, playing tennis, doing gardening without being in pain again, walking to the shops, doing the housework, etc etc. 

So the biggest thing that we need to identify to retain our clients is to provide a leadership approach to what we do because when people are coming to you they are looking for advice around their health, they’re looking for the solution to their problems. And you as a health practitioner, we need to be the leader because, look, people are looking to be led toward what’s right for them in regards to their health. 

Most people know deep down what they want and what they want is based around the benefit they can see in their future by taking on your advice, they just don’t know what they need to do to get that result and that’s where we come in. 

So to reduce cancellations & retain our clients starts right in the beginning of their journey with you and that’s getting clear focus on what their goals are, to help them to see a brighter future because they take on your recommendation and advice vs not taking it on. You get that right. You can lead anyone on a journey toward their goals without objection.

 We can’t move forward unless we have cemented in exactly where we’re going. What’s the target? if we’re going toward a goal and we don’t know what that goal is, then how can we hit it? If we’re at the golf course and there’s no green, no hole and no flag, then where are we hitting the ball? So it’s the same when it comes to healthcare. 

We have to know where we’re going right at the start, and there’s a couple of ways. A lot of the time, practitioners will talk about goal setting and sometimes people might not know what their goals are and what they’re wanting to get back to. 

Sometimes, it’s just I wanna be pain-free. Even though that may be a legitimate goal, we really need to break it down a bit more and focus on finding out what their actually emotional goals are, and we do that by asking quality questions, to get an emotional response. 

Once we find out exactly what they want you can get into your clinical observation to diagnose the problem and once you’re 100% clear then we can get into our recommendation. We need to provide our best recommendation and then, if anything deviates from your best recommendation, if there’s anything like, “I can’t make it ‘because I have work” or, “I’m not gonna be able to commit to that,” you only make alterations to your best recommendation after that. 

Once you have your plan booked in there is a small but powerful strategy you can use to drastically increase the compliance and reduce cancellations and now shows. I want to share that with you now. After that first appointment, your practitioners need to give the client a call the next day to make sure they got everything and to answer any questions they may have and also it’s another opportunity to build excitement for the next session. Keep in mind that 80 to 90% of everything that you say in the initial consultation is forgotten the minute that your client walks out the door. It’s simple as that, so give them a call the next day and say, hey, it’s [Prac Name] name from [Business Name], I wanted to call you personally to check in with you from yesterday’s session, do you have any questions at all? I’m really looking forward to seeing you at the next appointment. And this is what we’re gonna be doing from here. This is what’s going to be happening from here. This is what we’re gonna be working on. I’m really excited to see you and we are going to be progressing XYZ and aim to get you ‘which is what their goal is’ as fast as possible. We are always going toward what their goal is or the future benefit they are going to get from seeing you. So you give people more and more reason to keep moving toward what they want, opposed to continuing to look at what they need to do because we often know what we need to do, but if it doesn’t link into what we want as an outcome, then we’re just not gonna take the necessary action. 

So, when our goal is to hit a clinical outcome we need time to progress through the phases of treatment this gives you that time.. The longer we space visits out, the longer it takes to see our clients in between, the longer it’s going to take to progress exercises, and the longer it’s gonna take for them to get the results. 

So you might be thinking, I don’t want to come across like I am seeing them too regularly,  I don’t want to over-service? Have they got the money? When these come to mind, remember it’s normal, but it’s just a mindset issue.

You’ve got to ignore that. It’s not about that. It’s not about the money. It’s about working with your client to get the best result possible for them in the fastest way. 

The key to retaining your clients and discharging your clients on goals it’s being able to provide the best level of care possible in the necessary time it takes to happen. 

You do this by earning that time, earning that time by getting clear on the actual benefit people are going to get from following your advice and recommendation and then booking in the complete recommendation.

If you want help in implementing any of these systems into your business then book a discovery call with me today and I will help you identify the 3 changes you can make in your business today to take control back and grow the practice of your dreams.