Issue 9 - July2004

These DCs collaborate while competing
Chiropractic co-opetition
By Todd Stumpf • Photos by Terry D. Broussard

Five years ago, David Darby and wife Cari, and Richard Sylvester were associates. They worked for the same chiropractor, under the same roof. Fast forward to today and you’ll find the three still working together.

Only now, they are no longer associates; 20 miles separate their offices and the Darbys and Sylvester each are doing their own thing. Yet somehow they are closer than ever.

The resulting Darby Chiropractic and Sylvester Chiropractic are two entirely different, yet exactly alike, practices in southern Louisiana. The three DCs exist in a state of co-opetition — half cooperation, half competition. OK, maybe more like 90-10.

“He’s about 20 miles from us,” David Darby says of Sylvester, whose office is in Lafayette, La. There are people that go to him from our town [New Iberia]. There are people that maybe live in his town that work in our area. We don’t think of each other as competition. We’ll refer someone to him and he’ll refer someone to us if we think it’s easier geographically for that person to get to one or the other. We’re not legally bound together, but it’s almost as if we’re in practice together.”

UNITED THEY STAND
Under a sort of “united they stand” premise (the three-word phrase headlines a four-page history of the two practices, penned by David Darby), the two, in fact, do just about everything but practice together. They make decisions together, consult each other on nearly every move, shop for office equipment together and essentially do anything and everything associates might do, except actually be business partners.

The relationship, which began when the three worked for that other DC back in the ’90s, began to foster in 2000, when Sylvester found himself knocking on the Darbys’ door, looking for help. Sylvester still worked at the practice where the trio met and wasn’t overwhelmingly happy about his future.

“He came into our office and he was pretty despondent,” Darby recalls. “He didn’t know what his future was going to hold. He started telling me his situation monetarily was tough on him. He was starting a family. We sat down and found a link there and told him whatever he needed we’d help him get started.

“We really spent a lot of time together helping him start his own practice. We gave him an idea on how to start a business. It was just that one day he came in [in Oct. 2000] that he felt like he was at the end of his rope.”

It was then that the Darbys implored Sylvester to follow their path and advice: Do not work for someone else.

“You may learn from working for someone, but if you can find friends in chiropractic who don’t have ulterior motives, you can work together — but separately — to grow each other’s practice,” David Darby says. “Go out on your own and make a good life for yourself. Don’t measure yourself up to someone else, because most people inflate how well they are actually doing. All that matters is that you do the right things for your patients, you provide the best services and that you live a good life. It doesn’t matter how much money you make as long as you can go to bed at night and feel that you have given your all to your family and your patients.”

SUCCESS RUBS OFF
With that in mind, Sylvester opened up shop a few miles down the road and with the Darbys’ help his practice has flourished. The Darbys, suddenly with a mutual sounding board of their own for issues from insurance companies, to lawyers, to coding questions, have exploded as well. Combined, the two practices billed nearly $800,000 in 2003.

“Dave Darby said, ‘You have to go on your own,’” Sylvester recalls of what prompted him to leave his less-than-desirable associate situation. “Eventually I went out on my own. Dave Darby and Cari Darby helped. It’s been wonderful to partner up with these guys like that. We talk daily. We help each other out.”

Given that the two offices offer nearly the same treatment menu, an element of competition rises up between the two. The 20 or so miles that separate the two on the map hardly represent a huge gap and the people in the middle of the two have to go somewhere.

Like Darby, though, Sylvester flatly denies the two compete in any way.“I wouldn’t say so,” he says. “You could look at it as competition, but we help each other out so much. We kind of help each other through tough times.”

Tough times these days refer mostly to non-financial matters. With the two practices combining to see about 200 patients a week and cultivating 50 new ones per month, things of the monetary nature aren’t of overwhelming concern. Those types of numbers mean that even if the competition exists, nobody’s going hungry.

What Sylvester is referring to deals more along the lines of dealing with patient problems, questions in courses of treatment or possibly a court case.

“Whatever needs to be done,” he says. “We ask each other for advice on how to handle it.”

SHARED ADVERTISING
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the “co-opetition” between the two practices than the fact they share advertising. Sylvester spends more on marketing than the Darbys (the two practices combined spend about $2,500 per month on advertising on the likes of billboards, Yellow Pages ads, patient newsletters and business networking seminars) overall, but part of both practices’ ad budgets go to the same ads, both print and electronic.

The two were co-sponsors of the Mardi Gras parade on television. They have run ads in local newspapers featuring both practices. Mostly, though, they stick to advertising the individual practices in their respective locales.

“We’ll have both clinics mentioned and we just split the cost right down the middle,” Darby says. “It’s helped. The biggest thing is the energy we all get by being together. It’s helped having all of us together. It’s helped us do some things and afford some things that maybe other people can’t do.”

Sylvester and David Darby also have worked together on such projects as a local TV show and a community program called Ask the Doctor. Being able to work so closely with one another, without actually working with one another, is a product of maintaining very similar ideals. Both are subscribers to the same philosophies and the Darbys and Sylvester apply most of the same techniques, hands-on and hands-off, when it comes to dealing with patients.

“I think that’s helped both our clinics,” Dave Darby says. “We’ve all adjusted each other. We know how each other adjusts. We do pretty much the same chiropractic techniques. If he buys a new piece of equipment and tells us about it, we buy it. Our practices are mirror images.

“Everything we do, he does. We don’t share any profits. He does his thing; we do our own thing. We run things pretty much the same way. If someone needs a closer place to go, they go to him. If something would work better technique-wise, we might refer them to him. We’ll watch each other’s practice if we’re out of town.”

So what is there to distinguish one practice from another? To hear Darby tell it, nothing, other than the doctors and a zip code. The practices are set up to be exactly the same in function and form. While there are differences, they are minute.

“They’re identical,” Darby says. “The only difference is that last year Dr. Sylvester purchased a machine for disk decompression therapy. We use more of the flexion-distraction tables. That’s one thing that we don’t have. If a person would need something like that, we would tell them to go to him for that.”

You could say the lengths to which the two go to be similar are nearly comical, except that there’s no nearly about it.

“You might think this is funny, but we bought a new office set for our personal office,” Darby recounts. “We told [Sylvester] about it and he came out to look at it and two days later he bought the same thing. Last year we each got a new car for our birthdays. We each bought an SUV and he bought a Navigator. There’s no competition in it. It’s just one friend wanting another friend to get ahead. It’s really like mirror images.”

Todd Stumpf is a freelance writer from Akron, Ohio. He can be reached at TStumpf22@yahoo.com.