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Issue 15 - December 2003
Turning goals into growth
Dr. Tami Hartman takes family to heart
By Todd Stumpf
Dr. Tami Hartman confesses that when she graduated from Life University in 1996 she thought she knew everything about being a chiropractor. She was partially right. She knew a lot about practicing chiropractic, but she knew practically nothing about running a practice. All well and good, except that it was her goal to have a practice, not just to practice.
Seven years later, and five years into her own practice — Family Chiropractic Center of Lake Hopatcong, N.J. — Hartman still doesn’t know everything about running a practice, but she makes sure she’s surrounded by people who do. That has translated into a practice that did better than a half million dollars in billings in 2003 and has seen 10- to 20-percent growth annually.
“When I first graduated from chiropractic college I had absolutely no business sense,” Hartman recalls. “I thought all you had to do was give love and serve out of your abundance and the practice would take care of itself.”
That has meant learning to appreciate number crunching. She has done that with the help of a team of advisors, including accountants, attorneys and financial planners. She meets with each of them quarterly, discussing goals and plans, and makes sure they all know and understand their roll with her practice.
Using her advisors as more than just frames of reference, Hartman breaks financial planning into two basic avenues: mental planning and physical planning. The physical planning is certainly the more tangible of the two and the one about which Hartman extolled at great length.
Professional services
While a chiropractor or any businessperson could certainly manage his or her own business agenda, Hartman believes in leaving it to the experts. A chiropractor could certainly do his or her own investing, handle real estate transactions and manage every last dime, but why do that when there are trained professionals to help you? Hartman asks rhetorically. “What also goes into your financial planning is saving, investing — I allow my financial planner to guide me to what he thinks is best,” Hartman says. “As far as saving goes, I have a tax account, I have a wealth account, where I save 10 percent of my net income. And you never ever touch that. I have a 401(k). I offer that to my staff, too.”
Much of the physical side of financial planning deals with cold, hard numbers. They’re the means by which a practice’s success — or lack thereof — can be traced without question. It’s more than just the obvious ones. Anybody can keep tabs on patient numbers and track advertising dollars. It’s being able to sort through the minutiae that separates typical planning from outstanding planning.
Hartman, who checks her statistics daily, says daily logging and reviewing of stats is imperative and has a strong influence on another major aspect of financial planning: goal-setting.
“The statistics help me determine what our strengths and weaknesses are in the practice,” she says. “One thing I’ve learned tremendously … is we grow the most by developing our weaknesses.
“If, for example, my PVA [patient visit average] dropped, that would indicate a weakness in my patient education system. I would want to go over that and possibly revamp it if was no longer working — see where the weaknesses are in that respect.”
Visualizing the future
Hartman believes that having what you want starts with having what you want in mind. In other words — to have a means to an end, you first need an end defined. For her, one of those goals is to make her brother, Bret Hartman, a partner. She hired him a year ago fresh out of chiropractic college as an associate.
“There are two parts to having what you want: There’s the being part and the doing part,” Hartman explains. “The being part is who you are inside your skin. That’s working on yourself personally. It’s being conscious of your head space (consciousness).
“The doing part includes things like creating my team of experts, creating a powerful yearly marketing plan, and networking with other practitioners. The being part is having an attitude of gratitude. This is actually the most important part of financial planning. It’s having an abundant consciousness. It’s knowing you’re deserving of success … Failure is not an option for me. I know that has been a huge part in how successful I am today.”
Speaking about the mental side of planning, Hartman says it’s a matter of taking the physical aspects and inserting them into your general consciousness. It is about not just setting goals, but making sure they’re followed, keeping them in mind by keeping them in sight, literally.
“There is the physical nature of actually writing your goals, but the mental component is looking at them daily,” she says. “It’s focusing on them so you become disciplined. It’s visualizing yourself, seeing yourself in that outcome, whatever that may be. I have them in my bathroom, I have them on my nightstands, in my car and in my daily planner.”
Hartman says that allowing herself to grow as an individual has allowed her practice to grow. This means enhancing strengths and minimizing weaknesses, both of which can be spotted, defined and refined using statistical analysis. She also believes keeping one’s self in the best shape, mentally and physically, will translate into success professionally.
“I’ve noticed times when I’ve seen a dip in the practice, and I’ve noticed it was simultaneous with times I’ve slacked off on myself,” she says.
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Dedicated to moms and kids
It’s a well known slogan that can be applied to any walk of life: Children are our future. Dr. Tami Hartman believes it; preaches it — and practices it. Children aren’t just Hartman’s future, they are a big part of her present.
She estimates that as much as 50 percent of her practice is dedicated to children in some way. This includes infants and toddlers, along with expectant mothers, each of whom is carrying around a potential patient.
But when Hartman chants the “children are our future” mantra, the “our” means chiropractic’s future. “I firmly believe that if we’re going to change healthcare on this planet, it’s going to start with the kids,” says Hartman, who made it a goal to focus on this market.
“When you start children [in chiropractic] from birth, this is all they know. They live a chiropractic lifestyle. You’re teaching kids from the get-go that health is their divine right, that health is their responsibility. I think that’s really important.”
She believes in this so much that she aims her marketing at that audience. She doesn’t advertise on Nickelodeon; she gets the kids by getting to the moms. That means giving talks in Lamaze and Bradley classes. It means having workshops specifically with pregnant women in mind, speaking to moms’ groups and networking with OB/GYNs, midwives and pediatricans.
Educating pregnant women is Hartman’s method of operation. If there is a single group who has been negatively influenced by the medical community, it may be pregnant women.
“Every single time an adult walks into my office, I’m trying to shift their paradigm from back pain to wellness care,” she says. “As soon as I start to explain it to them, I go right into children. I explain to them that subluxation begins at birth. The way I see the future with kids who get adjusted, more than likely they’re going to carry that lifestyle over into adulthood. And then when they have kids, the cycle will continue.”
Hartman, who says most mothers-to-be are very receptive to what she has to say, stresses that she never tells patients or prospective patients to stop seeing their OB/GYNs. Quite the opposite; she knows the necessity of those practitioners. But she believes few women understand the advantage of chiropractic — or even consider it — when it comes to their health and their babies’ health, during pregnancy.
“The biggest way is explaining to them that nature knows best, that birth is not a disease,” she says. “I give them problems and solutions. I give them problems in the medical birth setting and then I show them the beauty of a natural birth setting. I just help them to understand that with chiropractic care, statistically, they have shorter labor time and their child is safer and healthier in utero if their structure is in alignment and that if the mother is healthy from chiropractic care, the child will be.”
Once a pregnant mother is a patient, her child will typically become one — and stay one. Hartman says about 95 percent of her infant patients (including those who are patients pre-birth) will remain her patients as they grow. This, of course, begs the question: Since birth is the beginning of life, and getting patients as infants can start a never-ending cycle of chiropractic patients, why don’t all chiropractors do this?
“Every doctor has preferences,” Hartman says. “Some doctors don’t want children running around. There’s a lot to it. But I think it’s the greatest, most fulfilling way to have a practice.”
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Setting goals —
and reaching them
Hartman is a firm believer in the power of positive thinking and says that getting what you want can be a byproduct of simply knowing what you want. She recounts a time in her last quarter of college when a teacher had students write down their goals for where they would like to be and what they would like to be doing five years from that point. The teacher then took the goals, along with a self-addressed envelope from each student and mailed them five years later.
Upon receiving her “letter” about two years into her current practice, Hartman was pleased to learn she was exactly where she thought and hoped she would be. Well, almost.
“I opened this letter and that’s exactly what it said I wanted,” she says. “The only difference in my goals was that I said my building was going to be white and it’s brown.”
Nothing a can of paint can’t fix. But her practice, which has moved into a shiny new build-to-suit office space, has become her ideal in a short amount of time. Her practice will soon share a building with a women’s fitness facility and a daycare center. So, coming through the same doors will be a flock of people whom Hartman sees as her ideal patients.
Coincidence? Completely. She had no idea those businesses would be moving there, and they’re not coming to the building because she’s there. But Hartman believes there is more to it than that.
“I was in there before the daycare center and the fitness center,” she says. “But that’s the impact of what goals and clarity and persistence will do.”
Todd Stumpf is a freelance writer from Akron, Ohio. He has written professionally for 14 years. He has been with Chiropractic Economics as a contributing editor for three years. He can be reached at TStumpf22@yahoo.com.
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Goal management: key to goal achievement
The key to her practice, and to any successful practice, according to Hartman, is setting, charting and accomplishing goals. Long-term or short-term, individual or team-oriented, Hartman’s practice has more goals than a soccer complex.
There’s more to setting goals than writing them down and putting them on your visor in your car, on your bedroom mirror, or in your daily planner (all of which Hartman does). It’s a matter of keeping close track of the progression being made toward those goals.
“Number one, it’s reviewing them daily,” Hartman says. “Number two, it’s checking yourself. If you’re going to have a goal, you need to have a system that you’re checking to make sure you’re on target for those goals.”
That means keeping and checking statistics daily, tracking the important aspects of a practice. Are patient numbers where they need to be? If not, why? Are ancillary products moving off the shelves? Are referrals where they need to be? Hartman believes there is a way to find answers to these questions.
“It’s having weekly staff meetings and making sure every member of my team is aligned in the same purpose and vision,” Hartman says. “At every staff meeting the team is also creating goals.”
The answers, or where to find them, may not always be obvious. And the solutions may more often be simple rather than dramatic. A football coach will tell you if you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves. The same could apply to a chiropractic practice. Hartman makes sure the little things are addressed.
“The way we work on that is we regroup and we discuss what we need to do to get from Point A to Point B,” she says. “Sometimes that means changing the energy of the office. That may mean something as simple as doing a different office event. It could be something as simple as changing the music we play in the office to something upbeat, or as simple as re-arranging the pictures on the wall. Even something like that can start to change our focus. Most of the time I find if we’re not reaching our goals, it’s because our focus is off.”
A meditation devotee, Hartman believes in keeping positive “head space.” It’s a term for consciousness and positive head space is nothing more than thinking positively. The power of positive thinking, where Hartman is concerned, is one of the greatest forces in the universe.
“Are you thinking negatively, or are you thinking positively?” she queries. “Are you living in a state of abundance, or are you living in lack? If on the appointment books there were 100 people for the day and you saw 80, are you grateful for the 80 people you got to see that day, or are you focusing on the people that didn’t show up?”
All rhetorical questions, but all clearly making her point. Goal setting is easy, but goal management is the trick. Trouble spotting and troubleshooting are as important as goal setting and may hold the key to goal meeting.
“If we’re not getting what we want, more often than not, it’s something on the ‘Be’ level that’s off,” Hartman says. “We then have to refocus our purpose. Most chiropractors look at the ‘Do’ and say ‘What am I doing, what am I not doing?’ It’s not that simple.”
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Success keys
Corporate Attorney
Vikki Ziegler
Roseland, N.J.
973-992-9093
Real estate attorney
Rick Kesselman
Succasunna, N.J.
973-598-1680
CPA/financial planner
Christopher Drager
Pomptom Plains, N.J.
973-943-7094,
Seminars attended
Master’s Circle, four times yearly
The Winner’s Circle
(a group within the
Master’s Circle), for personal development, four times yearly
ChiroPediatric University,
with Drs. Stu and Terri Warner, once annually
Pediatric Cranial-sacral Techniques with
Dr. Carol Phillips, twice yearly
Total Solutions,
Dr. Patrick Gentempo
The Gathering with
Dr. Jim Sigafoose, twice yearly
ChiroAcademy Courses with
Dr. Mike Gandolphi, two to
three times yearly
Success influencers
Dr. Larry Markson
Dr. Dennis Perman
Dr. Bob Hoffman
Dr. Bobbie Braile
Dr. Patrick Gentempo
Dr. Mike Gandolphi
Dr. Reggie Gold
Technology
Dell Computers with chiropractic management software system from InPhase Technologies Group.
Five terminals.
Equipment
Bilateral weight scales,
one subluxation station and neuropatholator
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Vital Statistics
Family Chiropractic Center
21 Bowling Green Pkwy.
Lake Hopatcong, N.J.
Phone: 973-663-5633
Fax: 973-663-5762
Website: www.hartmanchiropractic.com
Email: chirotami@aol.com
TEAM PLAYERS
Tami Hartman, DC
Owner 5.5 years
Kimberly Mah, DC
18 months
Bret Hartman, DC
1 year
Carrie Scholte
Office manager, 5 years
Staff training and supervision, billing and collections, patient laison
Rose Palos
1 year, new patient advocate
Rosemary Kraitz, CA
4 years
Debbie Hanley, CA
1 year
OFFICE HOURS
Monday, Wednesday, Friday
9 a.m. to Noon, 3 to 7 p.m.
Tuesday, Thursday
3 to 7 p.m.
Saturday
10 a.m. to Noon
Practice revenue
by payment type:
Insurance, 47% (no HMO’s accepted)
Medicare, 3%
Cash, 50%
Billing Collections
2003 $520,000* $510,000*
2002 $395,000 $380,000
2001 $330,000 $351,000
2000 $300,000 $290,000
(*Projected)
MARKETING BUDGET
Patient appreciation parties
4-5 parties each year — $300 - $500 each
Internal dinners
2 each year, $2,000 — $3,000 each
‘Killer’ ads
2 each year — $1,000 each
Outside lectures
6-10 each year — no cost
Health talks
Weekly — no cost
Spinal screenings
6-10 times each year — $0 - $300 each
Patient Visits/Week: 350-400
New Patients /Month: 15-20
Patient Visit Average: 130
BRINING IN NEW PATIENTS
80 percent referrals
20 percent from walk-ins, screenings, lectures and advertisements.
All figures are provided to Chiropractic Economics by the profiled doctor.
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