Ever since my collaboration with best-selling author Michael E. Gerber on our book, The E-Myth Nutritionist, with Michael E. Gerber, I have been providing chiropractors with "the E-Myth perspective" inspired by Gerber's work.
The Concept
What if you set up your chiropractic nutrition practice as if it were meant to be a prototype for 5,000 more just like it? Not almost like it, but just like it, perfect replicas or clones. In other words, you pretend you are setting up your chiropractic nutrition practice with the intent to franchise it. It doesn't matter that you have no plans in the slightest to franchise it. The point is that you set up your practice as if you were going to do so. Why? Because the advantages are so enormous and the risk of failure is so vastly reduced that it would be foolish not to embrace a winning model. Retail nutrition sales are in excess of $20 billion a year in the U.S., and if you are following a franchise prototype model that offers turn-key nutrition to your chiropractic patients; you now have an existing formula for success.
The Franchise Prototype is the working model of your ideal chiropractic nutrition practice. The Prototype is the medium through which assumptions are tested, through which the best creative thoughts are refined and put into the mix and through which ideas are sorted out. The Prototype acts as a buffer between hypothesis and action. Every method that is tried in the Prototype is used for one reason only; to answer the only question that ultimately counts in your practice.
Does it work?
At the end of testing a variety of methods and ideas in the real world, you will be left only with the methods that work. These might include several methods of operation servicing different aspects of the practice but, more importantly, your testing program will have taken these methods out of the isolation of their individuality and blended them together in a manner which will allow the various aspects of your practice to freely interact together and so produce maximum efficiency. The finished product will serve as the model for your chiropractic nutrition practice. In a name, you have created The Franchise Prototype; which, in essence, can be defined as the system that runs the chiropractic nutrition practice.
The Franchise Prototype System
There is nothing more important in your chiropractic nutrition practice than creating a system that works and then sticking to that system. The system runs the practice. Staff are secondary. They run the system. The system is clear-cut and clearly defined. The system takes all discretion, all opinion and all argument out of the mix and therefore no decision can be made on a whim or made by somebody whose judgment is affected by a particular mood at the time. The system has been put in place because it works and therefore it only needs to be followed by the people who run the system for your practice to work. And you don't even have to be at the front desk to watch staff do it! You are no longer your practice and it will not disappear if you are not doing everything yourself. In fact, the system can be, and should be, operated by staff with the lowest level of skill, otherwise how could you have another 5,000 businesses like it. Staff only have to follow procedures to achieve the consistent, predictable results which are beneficial to all patients. The system is the solution to the problems that have beset all chiropractic nutrition practices since time immemorial!
Rules to Follow
Your chiropractic nutrition practice must be set up to follow certain rules in order to take advantage of the Franchise Prototype Model concept. First, it must provide consistent value to patients beyond what they expect.